When the world is extremely busy online, ensuring that a carefully crafted piece of email content doesn’t end up straight in a candidate’s ‘delete’ folder, should be a high priority for a recruitment agency’s marketing department.
But when over 300 billion business emails are sent globally every day, it can often seem an uphill struggle when trying to cut through a vast amount of digital noise. However, industry professionals can give themselves a competitive advantage and ensure they’re speaking to the right people about the right jobs opportunities when they plug in intuitive marketing automation.
That’s because it’s designed to not only make life simpler but, in this instance, liberate marketing campaigns for recruiters who want to create and send humanized content that engages recipients with content they want to read via their preferred channels.
Here are some of the reasons why more recruitment agencies and their marketing teams should be turning to automation if they want to interact with candidates on a more granular level and improve their overall conversion rate…
1. Every piece of digital comms can be hyper-personalized
With savvy technology at their fingertips, marketers can analyze millions of pieces of critical data that tell them all about a candidate’s of-the-moment job interests and needs. From this insight, they can then begin to build up a more complete picture about their recipient and know the type of ultra-personalized content they will interact with.
When an enigmatic and energetic recruitment agency is keen to engage with a jobseeker about a relevant role, the last thing they want to do is be seen as another cold caller who sends the same tired – and often irrelevant – message to hundreds of other candidates that are ultimately received loosely by all. Not only is that a waste of time but can damage brand reputation immeasurably because those candidates will soon go to a competitor who understands their specific career requirements.
2. Have a problem with email deliverability? Not any more…
The latest news bulletin full of job roles has gone out but it’s received little to no engagement or had a vastly low engagement rate. If a marketing team experiences these problems, there could be an issue with deliverability.
Utilizing automation, marketers can begin to draw out the data that links to why engagement is low – for example, it could be that bot traffic is to blame or the bounce rate is high because the recruitment agency’s CRM isn’t automatically updating ‘dead’ email addresses when people leave their jobs and move on. Being equipped with this information, and acting on it, should help recruiter brands to stop these recurring issues at the earliest opportunity and ensure they’re sending emails to the right candidates.
3. Jobseekers feel they’re being supported throughout
A cold email sent without thought is likely to either be deleted straight away or ignored altogether by the recipient because a recruiter isn’t taking the time to get to know them – and it shows.
It’s important to help candidates throughout their next career move – and marketing teams can assist that nurturing process from start to finish. Not only will it build trust, but it’s an additional level of support that will endorse positive word-of-mouth and build brand loyalty.
A great way to foster a relationship with a jobhunter is via a five-step marketing automation email sequence, which is:
- The ‘introduction’: explaining who the recruiter is and why they’re getting in touch
- Next is ‘gain’: underlining what the candidate will achieve by taking up the recruiter’s services
- Then there’s the ‘fear’ of missing out: designed to detail what would happen if the recipient did not act on the advice of this particular recruiter
- The fourth stage is ‘social proof’: evidencing other candidates’ experiences through testimonials and case studies
- And finally, ‘urgency’: requesting readers to act now before the opportunity goes to someone else.
By following this framework, recruiters and their marketing departments should begin to build up a bank of highly nurtured candidates who are receiving relevant roles for them.
It’s important to stress that automation shouldn’t do all of the work when it comes to the relationship between a recruitment brand and a job seeker. There have to be lots of human interaction throughout – after all it takes six touchpoints before someone is truly engaged. However, this technology should enable a deeper understanding of what every candidate is interested in at that specific moment in time while saving marketers several hours each week because they’re creating emails in seconds to strengthen their overall digital comms delivery.
By Adam Oldfield, CEO of marketing automation platform Force24.
