Top tips to engage your talent pool via email marketing

You need to keep your talent pool fresh and engaged, and email marketing can be super effective at doing this – when done right. So, before you craft your next campaign consider these tips to create content that gets your emails opened, read and clicked, separating the pros from the amateurs.

Most people now have an overflowing inbox with a constant flow of email. So, having got past the first hurdle of getting those in your talent pool to give their explicit, affirmative consent to receiving emails from you, you know they are positively confirming their interest in you as a potential employer. All you need to do now is continue to engage and nurture. Ready?

The Purpose & Structure

1.Define the purpose of your email and stick to it. What do you want to achieve as this will dictate the content and tone? Make the content relevant and don’t use 100 words to say what you could in 10. Content that is consistently valuable will build an engaged community who are only too happy to receive your emails, clicking through the links to your careers site and ultimately giving you the opportunity to convert them. 

Killer Subject Lines

2. Email subject lines need to appeal. Having that killer subject line can determine whether you have engaged with your reader to open the email or if it’s gone straight to ‘trash’ with nothing more than a cursory glance. Think being a trusted source, does it convey what’s in it for the reader, be clear and concise to grab attention. Avoid at all costs subject lines such as ‘This Week’s Newsletter from X’ and remember those viewing on mobile devices will see far fewer characters of a subject line than on a desktop.

Segmentation & Personalisation

3. Stop thinking about your talent pool as a whole and think about the segments within it.  Know your personas/target audience and write your email accordingly, making the content relevant and personalised where possible. Read your email through the eyes of the recipient – are you using the right tone and style?

Call to Action

4. What’s the call to action triggers? Yes to get them to your website/careers site but then what? The email should be sharing new content or channelling the recipient through a specific route to build value or prompt an action.

Track & Measure

5. Track and measure results on opens and clicks. Follow up with individuals that have engaged. Be honest about what worked and what didn’t and then for your next campaign rinse and repeat steps 1-5 above using your new found knowledge.

The Importance of the Sender Name

6. Little touches can make a whole lot of difference and this applies to who an email is sent from. A named sender or brand name is likely to get a better open rate than generic mailboxes such as info@xcompany, noreply@xcompany etc. This is increasingly important to mobile users where the senders name is typically emboldened on the first line and can mean a deciding factor in whether to open a message or not.

Mobile Friendly Emails

7. The explosion of mobile devices used to view emails mean mobile friendly emails are imperative, so your email needs to look great regardless of what device is used to view it. We’ve already mentioned subject lines in point 2, but when writing mobile friendly copy short paragraphs in a single column template work best. Some users may view without images so bear this in mind and balance out text and images. It is also worth spreading out any links so it is easy for recipients to act on them.

Testing

8. It should go without saying, before you press send – test, test and test again. Does the email arrive in your inbox rather than junk (and test this with a sample of email addresses – hotmail, outlook, google etc.), is it personalised and relevant to ‘me’, what time works best for sending, plain text or HTM, what links and landing pages work best? Consider split testing with varying headlines to a small sample to see what gets the best response. The options are vast, but it is important you continually test to find the ultimate formula. Good Luck.

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