A recent industry benchmarking survey conducted by Talent Nexus discovered that agencies’ top priorities included reducing costs, filling existing vacancies and surviving the impact of the pandemic.
It’s hardly a shock to learn, then, that email marketing activity has plummeted over the past four months in the severely hit travel, leisure, automotive, and manufacturing industries, but surged in not-for-profit organisations (who can no longer operate face to face) and the online education sector.
We teamed up with Andrew Nicholson, Founder and email marketing evangelist at Kulea.ma, to share his top tips for getting email communications right during these challenging times.
You can watch the full webinar on demand and here are the key takeaways:
Should you put your marketing on hold?
The last thing any business should do is put their communications on hold. It may be not the time to sell, but it’s certainly a time to build and engage relationships in readiness for recovery.
It’s moved from a hard sell market to more of a helper’s market. This is the time to offer support and advice – to understand what’s changed for your customers and how you can respond to their needs. Consider:
- Revising your plans and strategy
- Being flexible
- Acting quickly - now is the time to work agilely and at speed
- Talking to your customers
- Looking at what your peers are doing
- Researching the market
- Who are you right now – do you need to update your value proposition?
- Who needs your help, and how you can support them?
Why email?
Email marketing is still strong and remains one of the best possible strategies for your business. It’s an evergreen channel which is effective in many sectors and is usually one of the top 3 most effective channels driving website visits and leads.
Email can benefit recruitment businesses as
- You don’t need a marketing department
- It gives the highest ROI
- It’s targeted and efficient
- You can quickly adapt, iterate and experiment
- Data analytics can determine email campaign success
- It can go viral
- It can create one to one relationships
- Email automation can save you valuable time
9 Top tips for getting it right
- Keep it simple
- Make it personalised – add their name
- Make the email from a person, not a company
- Using HTML rather than plain text can decrease open rates by 25%
- Adding image/s can reduce your click through rate
- Acknowledge the current situation, showing how you can help
- Be inspiring in your language - thought leadership adds value
- Always remember - what’s in it for them
- Add urgency and scarcity - for example, ‘last few places available’ - or make them feel special with ‘exclusivity’
See power words from Street Agency. Don’t necessarily add in the subject line (as they may be considered spam) but in the body text.
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free |
Sizable |
Revisited |
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Focus |
New |
Delivered |
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Remarkable |
Absolutely lowest |
Guaranteed |
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Confidential |
Surging |
Challenge |
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Sale |
Wonderful |
Unique |
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Wanted |
Professional |
Secrets |
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Obsession |
Interesting |
Special |
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Lifetime |
Bargain |
Scarce |
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Tested |
Highest |
Hurry |
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Alert famous |
Improved |
Expert |
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Daring |
Strong |
Immediately |
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Advice |
Pioneering |
Unusual |
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Limited |
The truth about |
Destiny |
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Outstanding |
Simplistic |
Compare |
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Unsurpassed |
Energy |
Powerful |
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Colourful |
Genuine |
Instructive |
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Superior |
Affordable |
Informative |
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Liberal |
Popular |
Ultimate |
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Mainstream |
Rare |
Exclusive |
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Willpower |
Complete |
Edge |
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Valuable |
Attractive |
Last chance |
Adding value to your communication
Inbound Marketing
Add value through creating gated content that brings the leads to you. Consider providing guides, white papers, toolkits, best practice tips, case studies and thought leadership. All the content that you develop links back to your website and to similar themed content.
Use signposts to promote the content, for example social media, email, PPC etc.
Remember it’s a value exchange not a gift - receiving content in return for the individual’s contact information.
Producing content doesn’t need to be expensive. You could start off by interviewing willing customers on their current challenges, or trends in the market. Here’s a great blog to read to help you in your journey.
Top Tools to help with email marketing
Have you tried Crystal Knows? It’s a powerful plugin that sits in LinkedIn to enable you to research and understand how best to approach an individual.
Use data extraction tools such as Hunter, Get Prospect, or Prospect.io to pull lists of leads for targeting.
Now that you have the data, use a migration company such as Zapier to add into your email marketing software such as Kulea.ma.
Automated email marketing
Automated email removes a huge amount of hard work for recruiters and marketeers. It will track each lead’s interaction with the agency’s content, scoring leads and, when a certain interest level is reached, forwarding the lead to business development or sales to make the call and hopefully convert a sale.
- Businesses that implement marketing automation experience an average of a 451% increase in qualified leads
- BD automation improves business productivity and efficiency by an average of 20%
- 74% of users state that the biggest benefit of BD and marketing automation is saving time
Read more with Kulea’s Marketing Automation Guide.
Discover our upcoming partner webinars here, and feel free to download our free technology partner ebook on how our partners can help your recruitment business further.
Thanks to Andrew Nicholson from Kulea.ma. Kulea.ma is a powerful yet easy to use marketing automation and personalisation platform that dynamically delivers customer intimacy at scale.
