Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to market your recruitment agency. You can communicate “one-to-many” at the push of a button, making email marketing a highly leveraged and cost-effective marketing activity.
I’m not talking about the unsolicited bulk emails that are sent out by some companies that end up in your spam folder. I’m talking about permission based email campaigns sent to a highly targeted audience of clients and/or candidates.
Your aim should be to continually grow your “opt-in” email list and nurture those prospects by staying in regular contact with them and sending them valuable content. That’s how you build a marketing funnel that generates a constant flow of warm, inbound leads on autopilot. I make a very good living from my opt-in email list, and you can too. The first step towards this is to choose the right email marketing platform for your business.
What is an email marketing platform?
An email marketing platform is basically a “Software as a Service” (SaaS) subscription that enables you to send marketing emails. Basic functionalities may include:
● Create email templates as well as offer a range of pre-made templates
● Maintain a subscriber list and handle opt-ins and opt-outs
● Send personalised email broadcasts to hundreds or even thousands of contacts
● Send sequential autoresponder (follow-up) campaigns
● See in-depth statistics about your email campaigns including open-rates to enable you to evaluate your email marketing activity
You may ask why you actually need an email marketing platform, after all, you can send emails from your own email account. However, I wouldn’t recommend sending bulk email broadcasts from your own server or ATS/recruitment software. It’s fine for sending in small batches – e.g. if you want to email a hot candidate profile to a selection of targeted clients on your database. However, for larger campaigns I’d strongly recommend you use a service designed especially for that purpose.
Considerations when choosing an email marketing platform
Whilst most email marketing platform providers will have similar core functionalities, they will often have a range of different features. That means you need to make some careful considerations when choosing which platform to use. These include:
- Deliverability- How do they ensure that your email is delivered and avoid the spam filters, junk folders, blacklists?
- Functionality – Do they have the features that you need?
- Cost – Does the cost fit within your budget?
- Regulatory – Are they compliant with relevant legislation including GDPR and ePrivacy?
Which provider should you choose?
When choosing an email marketing platform, you will find that there are lots of different providers all offering a host of different options with a wide range of features and options. It’s a case of finding the one that sits neatly with your aims and objectives. Popular providers include:
● Active Campaign
● Hubspot
● Aweber
● iContact
● Campaign Monitor
● Infusionsoft
● Constant Contact
● Mailchimp
● Drip
● Streamsend
● Getresponse
Which one of these providers is right for your business will depend upon your own particular needs and objectives, so choose carefully. Cheapest is not necessarily best, and neither is the most expensive. Also, don’t forget that once you start building your list on one platform, it’s difficult to migrate the data later.
A lot of recruiters use Mailchimp, which is relatively inexpensive and user friendly. At the other end of the spectrum, Hubspot is a full featured, enterprise level marketing automation tool. (I personally use Infusionsoft, but it’s more geared for eCommerce, so I honestly don’t recommend it for most recruiters.)
Which email marketing platform do you use and why? I’d love to hear your experience – please comment below!
