We’re all guilty of being demanding and savvy consumers in this digitally noisy world. There has never been more competition for our clients and candidates eyes and ears. This article from Hubspot Specialist Catch The Cat Marketing points out that blanket messages are a thing of the past and how targeted, personalised emails are designed to exceed the expectations of your clients and candidates.
Instead of receiving a campaign with generic, one-size-fits-all offers and messaging, your subscribers will receive an email that is targeted directly to them, including their name, roles that are relevant to their industry and content developed around their stage in the recruitment journey.
Many businesses have been incredibly slow to take up personalisation. In fact “it has been reported that only 5% of companies personalize extensively.” – Econsultancy.
This is a shockingly low figure.
When it comes to personalising your email marketing, you don’t have to struggle. There are relatively simple, yet sophisticated, ways to use personalisation in your emails that go beyond just using a name.
What we’re going to cover in this article:
– Build Buyer Personas
– Ask the right questions at the right time
– Location/Timezone
– Your business persona
– Match your email content with your landing page content!
Build Buyer Personas
Besides segmenting your database (which every recruitment agency should do) you can create even more specific segments of your audience through buyer personas.
Buyer personas are fictional, generalised representations of your ideal clients and candidates. Having a deep understanding of your buyer persona(s) is critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow up, and really anything that relates to acquisition and retention.
This enables you to target or personalise your marketing for different segments of your audience. Put it this way, you wouldn’t send an email to a recently placed candidate with tips on how to create a winning CV.
Look through your contacts database to uncover trends on how certain leads find and consume your content. When you’re creating forms to use on your website, use form fields that capture important persona information.
If you need help in creating your buyer personas, HubSpot have a awesome guide.
Ask the right questions at the right time
A straightforward and effective way to segment your audience for personalisation, is to simply ask the right questions.
Asking clients/candidates their reasons for visiting your website, becoming a user, or subscribing to your email can be remarkably easy, but invaluable. It can give you insightful data that can lead to your business sending incredibly targeted emails.
For example ask your leads to fill out a form disclosing whether that lead is a candidate looking to be placed or a client looking to hire.
Asking the right question at the right time is just as important as asking the question itself.
Your clients and candidates will be going through a journey on your website, your job is to know at which stage in the recruitment process they are so you can ask relevant questions tailored to their experience.
Using the inbound methodology will allow you to push your leads through the marketing funnel in a helpful and inbound approach.
Want to learn more about the inbound methodology?
You can see in the image below how the inbound methodology can be related directly to inbound recruitment and the process you go through to turn strangers into leads, candidates/clients and ultimately promoters.
Utilise Location & Time Zones
We all know that certain times and days are better for posting content than others. Why? We can’t give you a definitive answer.
We are sure you have A/B tested this and found the optimum time to send your emails- if not, what are you waiting for?!
It’s more than likely that not all your clients/candidates are in one location or respond to emails at the same time. They may be all around the world, scattered across different time zones, and possibly receiving your emails at non-optimal times.
To fix this, why not use the data you have to personalise your emails to be sent at the best times.
It’s easy to forget the small things that could be making a significant difference to your open and click through rates.
Your Business Persona
Personalisation shouldn’t just be limited to using your clients/candidates data. You also can personalise your brand. Personalisation can soften the edges of big business and add a level of human connection between you and your
Your clients and candidates want to feel valued by you, but they also want to feel connected with you and your brand.
Having a brand persona can be just as important as personalising. Don’t be a stranger, we were always warned by our mothers to not talk to them.
Be a friendly, informative and helpful solution for your candidates and clients to feel nurtured, because that’s exactly what you’re doing. Nurturing your leads.
Match your email content with your landing page content
Although personalising your emails is a valuable step toward targeting your clients and candidates more effectively, there is more that your business can do. You can pair personalised emails and landing pages to push your success rate further.
Give your email and landing pages a consistent style and copy, they should both have the same personalised call to action. Creating a unified experience, making conversion rates higher driven by personalised content based on data.
Send an email to active candidates with a call to action that takes them to a landing page where they can download an ebook on tips for writing a failsafe covering letter. Use the same call to action button in the email as you do on the landing page to create a seamless transition.
These tips will get you well on the way to understanding your clients and candidates so that you can resonate with them on a deeper level.
However, don’t threat. If you’re still in need of a helping hand or some expert advice on how to personalise, Catch The Cat Marketing specialise in Inbound Recruitment to help you place more candidates, more frequently to more clients.
