Just browse through the twitter feeds and Facebook comment threads and you’ll see mountains of conversation around email marketing within Recruitment.  Both sides of the coin are covered rather extensive but I often find that the conversations are being had by those not intimately involved in marketing or any form of legitimate campaigning process.

Over the past few years, research has continued to prove the benefits of e-mail marketing for business: low costs, high conversion rates and detailed tracking. I’ll make this point very clear. I am a marketer. We run a lot of campaigns, internally to our community and externally for our clients. Our campaigns are not “email blasts”.

[quote]Email blasts = SPAM[/quote]

Every campaign we sponsor is based on actions that entail triggers and recipient responses. We segment our readership heavily based on every last open, view, click, time spent, content clicked, content read, the list goes on for days. This allows us to control the great content our readers love to see.

5 Email Marketing statistics you did not know from 2014

  1. 48% of consumers say that they prefer to communicate with brands via email. (Direct Marketing News)
  2. Email conversion rates are three times higher than social media, with a 17% higher value in the conversion.(McKinsey & Company)
  3. 72% of consumers sign up for emails because they want to get discounts, but only 8.2% sign up because they love the brand.
  4. On a daily basis, US consumers interact with about 11 brands through email, compared to ~9 brands via Facebook, and ~8 brands via Twitter.(emailstatcenter.com)
  5. 48% of emails are opened on a mobile device.(Litmus)

[Tweet “5 #EmailMarketing Stats for #Recruiters”]

Effective email marketing campaigns can produce nine times the revenues and 18 times the profits of broadcast mailings or “Email Blasts”. This is not an easy task to achieve. Crafting an effective recruitment email is both an art and a science.

Here is a list of factors, potential problems and effective solutions to keep in mind:

  1. Spam! Spam! Spam! I don’t need any Viagra!

The average consumer receives more than 300 emails a week, 62% of which are spam. No wonder there’s such hostility towards the industry. But spam filters, bulk folders and “report spam” features are helping consumers become more at ease about the perils of spam.

As a Recruiter:

As a Recruiter looking to leverage email marketing, what can you do?  One tip is to is to remind your jobseekers / talent community members to add you to their “safe senders” list. The second, and most important, tactic is to make sure your email marketing service provider has a good relationship with ISPs.This will ensure that your email marketing campaigns go into your subscribers’ inboxes, not their junk mail folders.

When choosing email marketing software, make sure the company has strict anti-spam policies and complies with the guidelines of Can-Spam.  *Note: There is a significant difference between email tools, crm tools and marketing automation tools. I’d recommend researching this before investing.

  1. Images and formatting: Why do my emails look broken?

Broken email campaigns are an increasing concern among email marketers, especially since several companies and web-based email providers now block graphics as a measure to combat spam. In fact, according to ClickZ, 40% of email marketing messages delivered to inboxes are “broken.”

As a recruiter:

I’d recommend publishing every single email marketing campaign to a secure location on the web (a location only original recipients of the email can access, ie your domain. This will llow you to control your authority in most web based email system like Gmail. The added tracking benefits are a plus as well.

  1. Personalization and relevant content: In a Recruitment e-mail, one size does not fit all.

72% of email recipients are more likely to respond to a business e-mail if its content was based on the interests they had specified. This shows the value of giving your talent subscriber / applicants the opportunity to select their own area of interest when receiving career updates.

As a Recruiter:

Your job description as awesome as it is, will not do the trick. Your company brand and the cool factor for work at said company is no good unless the user opens the email.  You need to be specific. Do you open emails from the 50 blogs you get content form daily? What makes you open and the ones that you do? Apply this same principal to your marketing efforts.

Don’t worry about being slick and pretty. You’re a recruiter not a wordsmith. Just be direct and sincere.

  1. Click-through and conversion: Show me the leads!

Recruitment emails are no different than consumer marketing emails. I hear it all the time, “It’s just SPAM”, “I delete that before it hits the inbox”. Maybe that is true for you, but did you know that in 2014 23.63% of all consumer emails were opened within 1 hour of being received?

Now lets look at this in terms of Recruitment.

In 2014, 55% of companies that actively market to their consumer via email campaigns generated more than 10% of total sales via email.

As a Recruiter:

If you optimize your marketing efforts to reach 55% conversion rates you would see an active interest level of 55 leads per 100 contacts you market to.  Are these realistic? They are. We reach these numbers daily and we see the engagement that takes place in each one. Keep in mind this again is not an email blast. These are legitimate 6 touch marketing efforts with a potential 6 touch points (until the goal set it completed) that can run for 6 weeks at a time.

  1. Stats tracking: who are my real consumers?

E-mail marketing is an increasingly popular tool in effective CRM, and it’s about time more Recruitment efforts recognize that. Metric tracking is almost as important as you brushing your teeth before heading out to the office each day.

As a Recruiter:

I am not too concerned with my open rates or even clicks for that matter. I am concerned with tracking that allows me to see each activity that is taking place, when it is taking place, if the recipient has competed the funnel goal and if they have not yet completed the goal, where are they in the campaign?

Most importantly, I need the be certain that my marketing automation tool has the ability to trigger next steps or an action specific to the user once that particular user has completed the goal.

Real-time tracking is now an industry standard and it’s highly valuable, as it allows you to see the exact moment a user opens your campaign, clicks on your link and makes that purchase. Studying your users can help you improve your communications efforts, so each campaign performs better than the last (several email service providers also let you compare the performance of your campaigns).

In email marketing for Recruitment, flying blind won’t take you very far. But if you aim properly by following these essential rules of play, you should soon be reaping some serious conversions.

Recruiting Tools
How-To Video
By Ryan Leary

Ryan Leary helps create the processes, ideas and innovation that drives RecruitingDaily. He’s our in-house expert for anything related to sourcing, tools or technology. A lead generation and brand buzz building machine, he has built superior funnel systems for some of the industries top HR Tech and Recruitment brands. He is a veteran to the online community and a partner here at RecruitingDaily.