In developing your overall recruiting email campaign strategy, remember to address the following questions:
- What do you want to say?
- Who do you want to say it to?
- How often do you want to say it?
Taking those same questions and viewing them from the email recipient's perspective, you must ask the following questions:
- What can I say that someone would care to read?
- Who cares to read it?
- When would they want to read it?
To keep things simple, we will focus on three areas that help address these questions, while providing actionable tactics. These are not all-encompassing but will offer you a foundation in evaluating your strategy:
- Opt-in/Opt-out. Before you sign someone up for a newsletter or continuously send them job openings, do you ask whether they want to receive such emails? Do you "opt-in" and ask whether you can sign them up for regular email communication or do you just assume you can, with an option for future removal from the list? The debate about which way is best has been going on since email was available to the masses. Studies show that when you ask before you send email, people are more likely to open the email, but at the same time you will have fewer email addresses to send, therefore reducing the reach of your message. You have to decide what fits best in your culture and your process.
- Regular communications. Are you providing candidates you are courting a way to remain engaged with your company? Have you created a value-adding publication or newsletter that candidates would read and subscribe to? Are you providing them relevant industry news, association news, events they might be interested in, as well as salary and employment trends? Exposure is fundamental to relationship-building; if you create something of value targeted toward your candidates they will remember you and will appreciate the information. Likewise, if you bore them with junk that does not relate to their profession or industry they will think you don't respect or understand them.
- Automated email agents. People are most open to consider a career change on their birthday or as part of a New Year's resolution. Using basic emailing programs, you can create an automated emailing agent that automatically sends a birthday card or a "Happy New Year" card to potential candidates.. Come January 2, when they are nursing their heads thinking how miserable their job is making them feel or how they can't stand their boss, they get a nice email from you and are reminded that they have a choice! You can use this same principle in many creative ways.
If you use email wisely, by respecting and understanding your target audience, you will reap the rewards. Abuse it and you will alienate the same potential candidates you are trying to reach.
