Email marketing is a strategy that is used across a huge variety of industries, and recruitment is no different. It’s low-cost, simple to automate and provides a simple solution to communicating with a large quantity of your audience whilst building individual relationships with your recipients.
We’re not here to explain how to set up your first campaign or try and sell the benefits of this marketing strategy (we’ve already written plenty of content about both of those things!). Instead, this article covers how recruitment agencies can use email marketing to specifically attract candidates and increase their following to ultimately grow their candidate database.
Email Marketing – A Quick Recap
Email marketing is a marketing strategy that involves communicating and sharing content with an interested audience by sending it directly to their inbox. The format and frequency of email marketing content varies, but it’s all used as a way of building a strong and trusting relationship with your mailing list and boosting your reputation by sharing insightful, valuable and unique content.
In recruitment, email marketing can be used as a way to keep in touch with current candidates and clients, nurture potential leads and move your subscribers further down the buyer funnel. It’s a great way of letting potential prospects indicate their interest in your services without having to make a decision when they first discover your agency, helping you to convert more leads in the long term and build up a larger following.
How Email Marketing Can Help Candidate Attraction
Email marketing has a range of impressive benefits for businesses, such as the fact that for every $1 spent, you can expect a $36 ROI, but it’s also a really useful method of candidate attraction.
The main reason for this is that good email content creates a positive reputation and can gain you a significant following, particularly when you advertise your newsletter and share snippets from it on your social media channels. This positive publicity around your recruitment agency means that more potential candidates will become familiar with your brand and recognise that you’re a reliable source of recruitment information, growing your following and increasing the interest your service gets.
Building a leading reputation with your email marketing campaigns is also good for candidate attraction because it means that your agency will be one of the first that appears or is recommended when potential candidates start searching for agencies or recruitment resources. A popular email newsletter can help you to stand out over your competitors, especially if you’re a recruitment agency that specialises in a particular industry or sector.
Finally, email marketing can be a great method of candidate attraction in the long term, as it is accessible and valuable to people who may not be at the point of needing or wanting to work with a recruitment agency. Keeping up a steady stream of communication with individuals that have an interest in your content helps to establish a relationship which means that, if they come to the point of wanting to work with a recruiter, you’ll be ready and waiting.
6 Ways to Improve Candidate Attraction with Recruitment Email Marketing
Promote Your Email Content
This might seem like an obvious suggestion. But you’re not going to be able to boost candidate attraction with your emails if you’re doing anything to spread the word about them in the first place.
First of all, make sure that you’re advertising your email content/newsletter in multiple places on your website with pop-ups and sections at the bottom or side of the page that gives the reader the option to share their email address. Use a persuasive call to action that concisely sums up the value that your email content will provide, or include a snippet of the kind of things you share in your newsletter.
You can directly promote your email content on platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter by condensing the information you’re sharing into posts or threads and sharing this with a link to your email sign-up at the end. The idea here is to get the reader interested in what you have to say and demonstrate to them that your content is valuable, encouraging them to subscribe so that they have access to more of it.
If you regularly share content that includes a call to action to follow your agency on other platforms, it’s definitely worth promoting your email newsletter here as well.
If you have connections in your industry, another great way of promoting your email content is to ask colleagues and other people that you know to recommend it to others, especially if they have a larger following than you or have a reputation that carries weight. You can always offer to promote something of theirs or introduce them to a useful connection in exchange.
You can also use paid social media advertising to promote your email content, which will help with candidate attraction as you can tailor the kind of users you want to target with these ads. Again, make sure that you’re illustrating the kind of content and value you’re providing in your emails in these ads so that you catch the attention of interested potential candidates.
Offer an Exclusive Lead Magnet
Lead magnets are an important part of an email marketing strategy and can be used as an effective candidate attraction method if they’re tailored toward the right audience.
A lead magnet is usually a gated piece of content that an individual gains access to in exchange for their contact information, usually an email address. This then allows you to target them with email content, with the added bonus that you already know the kind of content they are interested in depending on the topic of your lead magnet.
Instead of just encouraging potential candidates to sign up for your emails, offering a lead magnet gives them more of an incentive to do so and also gives you something specific to advertise when promoting your emails in your marketing content. This can help with candidate attraction because you can specifically target potential candidates by making your lead magnet relevant to one of their pain points.
eBooks, guides and whitepapers are pretty common formats for lead magnets, but you can also offer video content, access to an exclusive webinar or even entry into a draw to win free or reduced recruitment services. Make sure that you do some research into your target candidate audience beforehand so that you’re delivering content that you know they are going to find valuable and want to share their email address to be able to access.
Tailor your Content
Leading on from that last point, the best way to ensure you’re going to attract candidates with your recruitment email marketing is to create content that is relevant and valuable to them. Whilst you’ll likely want to target potential clients with your email marketing content as well, you can use email automation software to tailor the content that recipients receive to ensure they always receive information and advice that is relevant.
Segmenting your mailing list is a classic email marketing technique, using the information you have about your recipients’ occupation, interests, and pain points to personalise what you send to them and improve their experience of your emails. You can gather this information by asking a couple of questions when recipients initially sign up and also collecting data on what kind of content they interact within your emails so that you can keep sending them more of what they enjoy.
Tailoring the content of your emails to help with candidate attraction also feeds into promoting your content, as you can advertise your email marketing service as something particularly relevant and valuable to the kind of people that may want to work with a recruitment agency.
Make Your Subject Lines Intriguing
This piece of advice is only really relevant once you’ve got potential candidates to sign up to your mailing list, but it’s a key way of changing candidate attraction into candidate conversion and ensuring that your email content has a high open rate.
Subject lines may be the shortest part of the email content you’re going to write, but they’re potentially the section of the content that has the biggest impact. A good subject line can be the difference between a recipient opening an email and sending it straight to the bin, so it’s important to get this right from your very first message so that you keep your mailing list’s attention and continue to see good engagement with each of your emails.
A great piece of advice for engaging subject lines is to use the recipient’s name so that the email looks as though it’s coming from a known contact and will catch their attention more if it appears in a list of other unread messages. You can use email automation software to personalise each of your emails with individual names and should see that this makes an immediate difference to how many are opened.
This is a particularly good tactic in a welcome email, as it immediately makes the recipient feel closer to you and more affiliated with your brand.
You don’t want to use this tactic every time however, so you’ll also need to craft subject lines that catch attention using other methods.
If your newsletter contains information on lots of different topics, try and condense these down into as few words as possible and then write a headline-style sentence that sells the key features of your email. If you’re only focusing on one topic, pick out the key takeaway and summarise this in a way that makes the reader want more information.
Other approaches include asking a question in your subject line, using a humorous or controversial statement to catch the reader’s attention, or using a technique like rhyme or alliteration so that the phrase sticks in the reader’s head.
Keep it Concise
A key part of using recruitment email marketing for candidate attraction is producing such good content that your newsletter attracts potential candidates with its reputation. There are plenty of different things that feed into doing this, but a simple and actionable piece of advice is to ensure you keep your emails concise.
Today’s digital audience has a relatively short attention span, so very long emails that are oversaturated with different stories and sections just won’t be read as much as shorter ones. Keeping your content concise can be challenging from a writer’s point of view, but it will increase engagement significantly which in turn will hopefully lead to your email content gaining a greater following.
Writing shorter emails also means that you can hopefully produce more of them, as you can split what would have been one, very long piece of content into several shorter messages. Whilst bombarding an inbox with daily messages is a quick way to lose your following, sending two or three a week will keep your mailing list engaged without getting irritating.
Engage the Reader with Emotive Content
Finally, another method of improving candidate attraction with email marketing is to ensure you’re writing emotive content. This not only works by improving your newsletter’s reputation with high-quality writing, but also gives you more engaging content to share and attract potential candidates.
Writing emotive content might seem difficult when you’re talking about topics related to recruitment, but it’s not necessarily all about using flowery language and going heavy on the descriptive sentence. In fact, one of the best ways to engage a reader through their emotions is to avoid all of this fluff and get straight into what they’re going to respond to; telling a story.
If you can frame the advice or information you’re sharing in a way that uses storytelling techniques, you’re going to catch the reader’s attention and ensure that they remember your content long after they initially read it. You can do this by finding a personal angle with what you’re writing about and presenting the idea or message you’re sharing in a way that feels more ‘human’.
If you’re sharing advice, one of the best ways to utilise storytelling is to frame the lesson with an anecdote that illustrates how or when you came to learn it. If your content is less actionable and more informative, think about ways you include a personal angle to have more of an emotional impact.
Summary
Email marketing can be one of the most successful strands in a recruitment marketing strategy when done correctly, having a significant impact on your success with candidate attraction. Building a positive reputation for your email content is at the heart of this, but you can also use an email newsletter as a tool to catch the interest of potential prospects and help to grow your audience.
If you’re looking for more advice on email marketing for recruitment, or want to work with an agency you can help you develop an email marketing campaign that makes a real impact, get in touch and chat with our team about the services we offer.
