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How can you improve the response to your email marketing campaign?

Improve Email Marketing Response | Staffing Podcasts
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The following transcript was taken from InSights, a staffing and recruiting podcast from Haley Marketing Group dedicated to providing quick-hitting takeaways on Social Recruiting, Content Marketing and Employer Branding. To listen to the episode, click play on the player above or visit the episode page [InSights] Measuring the Response from Your Marketing

 

Brad Bialy: At this time, we’d like to welcome on Mackenzie Froese, Marketing Advisor with Haley Marketing Group. Mackenzie, welcome to InSights.

Mackenzie Froese: Thanks so much for having me.

Brad Bialy: Mackenzie, why don’t you walk us through how you assist our clients on a day to day basis?

Mackenzie Froese: Sure thing. So I actually have a lot of different hats that I wear. I help out the social media department. I help out just about every single department, but my specialty and where I spend most of my day is really devoted to content and email marketing. So that’s where my expertise lies.

Brad Bialy: Love the fact that you’re really invested in to many areas here because you can bring a lot of different insights to this conversation. For sake of right now, I’d love to chat about email marketing and what you’re seeing going on in staffing specifically. I know it’s a question that I get asked frequently and I’m sure you get it even more, but

How Can You Get More Applicants to Open Your Email Newsletter?

Mackenzie Froese: Yeah, so there’s a lot of things you can do to get your email newsletter open more. If you have a firstborn, you can try sacrificing them. That’s always the first step. From there, I would really say the best thing you can do is test. So your candidate audience might be more active at 11:00 AM on a Tuesday. They might be more active at 7:00 PM on a Sunday. You’re really not going to know that until you start sending them emails. There’s a lot of statistics that say this is the best time to send. That’s the best time. Never send this time. I read a quote recently that said, “There’s no more online or offline. It’s online or asleep.” So if you’re sending emails at any time of the day, there’s a chance your audience is going to see them or get to them. So biggest suggestion there is just to start sending, start tracking, see where your opens are, see where your clicks are, and when you see those peaks and those good opens, start to narrow in on those times and circle around those areas.

Brad Bialy: I saw a great stat from Rand Fishkin over at SparkToro the other day that said mobile didn’t kill desktop. Mobile just kill our free time.

Mackenzie Froese: Yeah, absolutely.

Brad Bialy: People are no longer focused between mobile or desktop. It’s just if you have five minutes to kill, it’s that modern smoke break. It’s okay, I’m going to check out Facebook or I’m going to check my email but I completely agree. From opening email newsletter, should we be looking at mobile versus desktop? Should we be looking at candidates in a different way in that regard?

Mackenzie Froese: I think that you should always make sure that your emails are optimized for any type of delivery service, whether it’s desktop, mobile, tablet, anything like that. If you’re not optimizing your email for all types of platforms, then you’re really missing out on a huge chunk of audience.

Brad Bialy: Which really brings us to the next point of actually driving a response. So if you have an email newsletter where you have to pinch and zoom to get to one corner of the newsletter, zoom back out, zoom back in, you’re not going to get the same response as if you had a very mobile-friendly version of that newsletter. So let’s talk about driving response once actually somebody opens that email newsletter.

How to Drive a Response from Your Email Marketing

Mackenzie Froese: Yeah. So honestly getting people to open the email newsletters, the first difficult part where you really have to have an engaging subject line. You have to be answering a question that they have without really bordering crossing over the line into clickbait. So you don’t want to send an email saying, “Open this job or you’re never going to get hired again.” That’s not how you’re going to get a response. Getting a response is targeting into something that they’re not sure about that they have a question about, that you know a lot of candidates are bringing to you, answering that question and then sending them more content then they need our open jobs that you have available.

But once they’re actually in your email, you need to be doing those same things. You need to be answering their questions. You need to be giving them the information that they need before they bring it to you.

Brad Bialy: Yeah, and Matt, we’ve talked about calls to action before on InSights and the importance of making sure that button is very specific, very direct. Anything you want to share, just thinking about the call to action and in the prompt for that click?

Related Episode: [InSIghts] Optimizing Your Career Site

Matt Lozar: I think we need to be strong with it. The point we’ve talked about throughout past episodes of InSights, it’s find your next job, hate your job, look for something better paying, and just what can you do in that subject line but also in that quick, whatever you can get at that probably as high up as possible in the email. But that can lead to clicks and then ultimately we want conversions because we either want list growth. You already have the list, but also maybe a talent network growth or application growth or anything that can get conversions to show that they’re interested instead of just getting your email once a week, once every couple of days and deleting it and staying top of mind. You want to know, “Hey, Matt’s interested in looking for a new job. Now my recruiters can go to work and try to place him with that new position.”.

Brad Bialy: I have a a case study here, an example that I ran for a client last month. The subject line was an emoji clock and then from there it said, “Only a few hours left. We’re reviewing applications now.” What I saw when I looked at the data through Haley Mail, our proprietary mailing software, was a 122% increase in clicks once the mailing was actually opened, and that resulted in a 12% increase in job views.

So Mackenzie, exactly what you’re saying, speaking to emotion, speaking to being very direct, but walking that line of clickbait, walking the line of here’s why you should click but not really threatening people, right?

Mackenzie Froese:  Yeah, exactly.

Brad Bialy: We’re not Buzzfeed.

Mackenzie Froese: And we don’t want to be. But one thing I will say about email marketing for staffing firms is people often get discouraged if they send out an email and 20 candidates don’t pick up the phone and say, “”I want to get hired right now.” That’s not really how email works. If I get an email from Lord and Taylor showing me 20 pairs of shoes that I really like, I don’t pick up the phone and call Lord and Taylor and say, “Great job on that email. I’ll take each pair.” But what I do know is the next time I’m looking for a pair of shoes, I might remember that email or I might pull it back up. Or I might look at Lord and Taylor and see if they have a sale.

So what we’re really doing there is staying top of mind, getting in front of those candidates before they need a job, and really targeting in on the passive candidates who they might already have a job, they might be employed, they might be on a break at a job where they’re just having a really bad day. And then an email from you pops up showing them 10 jobs that might interest them. Well, they’re going to click on that, they’re going to open that. And then you have warm leads right there. You know those candidates are interested. So it’s a good payoff.

Brad Bialy: Tons of great tips, ton of great takeaways here, Mackenzie. I’d love for you actually just to summarize this. I know you just put together a great resource for the staffing stream titled, How to Ensure Your Prospecting Emails Get Opened – And Drive Response, but if you’re really had to get this done here, what are your biggest takeaways for driving response from email?

Mackenzie Froese: My biggest takeaways are making sure that your emails are answering the questions that candidates have, providing them with the content that they need before they even know they need it, and not being discouraged. Just continuing to send emails and try new things and try new times and don’t be afraid to send something different.

Brad Bialy: I actually got one more question for you.

Mackenzie Froese:  Okay.

Brad Bialy: We had Todd Lewandowski, Director of Content Marketing on a few episodes ago, and we asked him this question. I’m going to ask you right now, is email marketing dead?

Related Episode: [InSights] How to Increase Applications by 250%

Mackenzie Froese: No, I don’t think so at all. I know a lot of people like to think email is dead or they like to think you know it’s just going to go in somebody’s junk mail. The truth is if your email is getting flagged as spam or if you’re not getting a response, it’s not email’s fault.

Brad Bialy: Sure.

Mackenzie: Yeah. I would just look at the tactics you’re using and how you’re using email and maybe switch those.

Brad Bialy: Mackenzie, thanks so much for coming on this episode of InSights. You’re always welcome back on to share your take on email marketing and what you’re seeing in both the email marketing and content marketing space. Thank you very much.

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