Email marketers in the job placement industry are some of our favorite clients. They are sophisticated, they easily understand metrics and optimization, and they readily adopt innovations that can help them get better results quicker or less expensively (or both!). They manage larger data sets, more lists, and greater frequency than most of our clients. And they do it professionally and proficiently.
“But . . . career portal email marketers have a problem.”
An optimized email marketing operation is complicated, time-consuming, and expensive. HR industry companies report sending millions of emails per day, often segmenting them to send different job posts for every group, sometimes adding follow-up SMS text messages as a means of reaching the member in creative ways. Such an operation is resource-intensive, expensive, and complex.
Or, perhaps I should say: such an operation used to be resource-intensive, expensive, and complex.
Some career portals have seamless, successful email operations that beg to be replicated. Have they uncovered a magical email template? Did they unearth emailing wisdom that is unavailable to their competitors?
No and no.
I can tell you with certainty that they put in the work, tested their hypotheses, and are keeping these four secrets about their email operation.
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“The secrets, revealed.”
1. Understanding user motivation
While many email marketers focus on open rates and CTRs, successful career portals track those numbers as the means to an end, not as their goal. They have a loftier vision: they relish the details as much as the next guy, but they never lose track of the big picture.
While the percentage of unsubscribes is interesting to successful HR industry email marketers, the percentage of increased sales is fascinating.
The CTR of a given message helps them understand the success of the campaign, but the increase in site traffic helps them understand the motivation of the subscriber base.
And that is the crux: understanding subscriber’s motivation helps them craft actionable messages.
2. One central platform empowers success
Successful career portals have discovered that disjointed operations are an Achilles’ heel.
Integrating the many facets of their operation, they achieve a synergy in which the whole email operation is far more effective than the sum of its parts.
By harnessing the power of one central platform, career portals can:
• Easily manage the entire email marketing operation
• Merge email data with other business systems
• Automate integration with third party vendors (like Indeed and Raisr)
• Be mobile and quickly change the service provider mix
• Analyze all data in one place
• Test and optimize deliverability results
• Reduce overall email marketing costs by splitting traffic based on engagement, cost, and deliverability
3. Reducing cost and increasing revenue is the Holy Grail
It’s not only about always seek more opens, more clicks, more conversions, and more sales. Have we been wrong all along? Controversial, right?
Partially. Increased revenue is great . . . with a caveat: it must increase profits.
And if increased profits is the be-all, end-all, then increased revenue is just half of the equation.
Successful job boards understand that reducing costs is also a critical factor.
Successful career portal email marketers know that when they combine increased revenue and lower cost, they are holding the holy grail of email marketing.
4. Manual scaling is not scaling at all
No email marketer in their right mind would attempt to email manually. But many of our email marketing practices rely heavily on manual processes.
For example, one well-known job board company (that shall remain nameless) I met at a conference recently proudly accounted their operation: they used separate email service providers for separate email marketing tasks. Their marketing messages were sent by three different email vendors; they chose the right vendor for each audience segment. An additional vendor was used for text messaging. This way they managed to increase delivery rate, open rates and ROI.
While this is a setup that is far more advanced than many of their competitors’, I asked them a question that made them stop in their tracks:
“How do you get reports on the entire email marketing operation?”
They were stumped.
They ended up trying Ongage. With it, they automatically, in real time, got all statistics for all vendors in one place. They were able to truly automate their entire operation and to gain valuable insights about each element in the process.
The secrets solve the problem
Career portals can be (and have been!) incredibly successful at email marketing without creating a resource-intensive, expensive, and complex operation. By following these four secrets, companies can easily optimize their emailing operation and create results that will amaze themselves.
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