8 Email Marketing Campaign Tips for Staffing Firms

Email is not dead! Email marketing campaigns are proven to increase revenue directly. Sending effective emails that do what is intended is tricky, but most of the time you are overthinking it. Communicating to your audience through email gives opportunities to get personal and reach them directly.

Check out these eight essential email marketing tips to create effective and engaging emails for your audience.

Email marketing campaign Segmentation

Before writing your email, you need to decide who your target audience is. What is segmentation? It is the process of grouping your audience by similarities or common attributes. You can segment a list by titles, industries, age, location, etc. Segmenting your list allows you to:

• Create journeys unique to your candidates, therefore increasing the efficiency of the email.
• Write personalized content to persuade your candidates to follow your call to action.
• Reduce the number of unsubscribes.

Cleaning up your list ensures that you are only sending it to possible leads. This helps reduce the number of unsubscribes. Most of the people that unsubscribe feel as though the content they have been sent does not pertain to them. Remember: unsubscribes are not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you have properly segmented your list. Unsubscribes help you further clean up your list to narrow down your target audience.

Write a gripping subject line

The subject line is one of the most important pieces of writing a successful email campaign. It is the first thing your reader notices. It determines whether they open the email or delete it. When you are creating the subject line think: “If I received this email, would I open it?”.

Candidates open your emails if they feel it benefits them, they might miss out on something, or have an incentive to open. Psychology plays a big role in whether people open an email or not. “FOMO” or fear of missing out controls some of our decision-making, so creating a compelling subject line increases your open rates.

Make sure your preview text is interesting

The subject isn’t the only thing your audience looks at when deciding whether to open your email, they also read the pretext generated. The pretext is the small amount of copy seen on the dashboard of your email. It is usually the first sentence.

This little bit of text gives the audience a better understanding of what the email includes. Make sure your opening statement grabs your reader and makes them want to continue along the journey.

Personalization is EVERYTHING

Starting your emails by addressing your audience by their first name gives it a personal touch. Your reader is more likely to keep reading if they are addressed by name. It makes your content feel like it was written with intent and less salesy. Most modern email tools provide shortcodes to make this possible.

1. Mix and match your email content by location.
2. Customize subject lines.
3. Segment your list by behavior to readers feel understood.

Write valuable content for email marketing

Only create an email campaign when you feel like you have something important to tell your audience. Boring, run-of-the-mill emails either increase unsubscribes or your audience eventually tunes you out. Offer value to your reader’s life with your emails. Is there a job posting that furthers their career? Do you have insight on something valuable in the job market they need to know? Do you offer expertise on a relevant subject matter?

If you are creating content for the sake of creating content, do not press send. Your emails will do more harm than good. Your content should reflect your knowledge of the industry and become a source of information for your clients and candidates.

In addition, make sure you choose the right words. Your audience is busy and catching up on their emails which means they are making quick, instinctual decisions. They decided to click on yours without deleting it because the subject line piqued their interest, but now it is time to move them along to the next step. Your goal when writing emails is to get them to click your call-to-action. Keep emails short and to the point. Readers make quick decisions based on skimming through your copy and deciding whether they want to click through. Long-winded email copy causes your reader to click out and delete it. It even leads them to unsubscribe.

Tips for writing valuable email content:

• Include keywords that stick out to your audience.
• Create bullet points or numbered lists for optimal skimming.
• Keep paragraphs minimal.
• Don’t use a ton of images around your copy. Some images are blocked.
• Make sure to proofread all copy before sending them.

Also, make sure you are leveraging the copy you just wrote by integrating your emails into other channels. Your campaigns need to mean something outside of just your emails.

Gripping call-to-action (CTA)

The point of an email marketing campaign is to drive traffic to your landing page. Your call-to-action should be turning your leads into candidates or clients.

Create a singular CTA that is clear and concise. What is it that you want your audience to do? If the goal is for them to search your “jobs page” it should convey that. Having multiple CTAs distracts your readers and causes them to click out. Guide your reader to take the call to action and ease them on the benefits they get by visiting the landing page. As long as you have one CTA, you can put it in multiple locations on the email. Link your CTA’s in the copy of your email or create buttons, or do both!

Preview and send test emails

Make sure to review ALL email marketing campaigns before sending them to leads. Your emails should look aesthetically pleasing and work properly.

Send tests to yourself to make sure:

• The images populate
• The copy is clean, precise and proofread
• Your buttons/links work
• The subject line appears correctly
• The email is being sent from the right email address
• Your personalization short-code works and your name appears

Once you have tested your emails and had a second set of eyes review them, it is time to send!

Track your data

It is important to keep track of your data. How many emails were undelivered? How many people didn’t even open your email? This data is important to better understand your audience and weed through bad leads. In addition to weeding out the bad, the data tells you a lot about the performance of your campaign.

Using Google Analytics makes your data even more powerful. Tag your emails with custom campaign tracking to see if your CTA’s are driving traffic to your landing pages, and visitors’ behavior after clicking through.

Here are some metrics you want to keep track of:

• Open rate – What percentage of people opened the email
• Clickthrough rate –What percentage of people clicked a link in your email.
• Unsubscribe rate – The percentage of people that unsubscribed from your list.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of your total emails sent that could not be successfully delivered.
• Time of day your emails are opened – The most popular time your emails were opened.

About S.J.Hemley

S.J.Hemley Marketing is a marketing and sales consulting firm focused on driving tangible results for professional services firms. Brand matters, but not without ROI. With over 20 years of sales and marketing experience within staffing and recruiting, we have helped to drive successful branding, sales training, lead generation activities as well as defining marketing strategy for top organizations. www.sjhemleymarketing.com