Are you constantly battling the concept of how you can generate more applications for your employers?

As a job board, you understand quality applications is the most important criteria for an employer to renew your job board services.

Certainly, leveraging job aggregators; Zip Recruiter, Indeed, TopUSAJobs, Jobs2Careers, is a typically avenue.

But, as a business owner, you are probably looking for ways to keep costs down and keep the work in-house.

If you are asking yourself this question, then your answer is Targeted Email Campaigns.

We recently completed a case study with MotorCoachJobs.com to evaluate the most effective email marketing strategy to boost applications. As a result, job applications increased by 14.5% with a few simple changes in strategy.

Before we get started, let’s cover a key topic; The difference between job alerts and targeted email campaign.

Majority of job boards offer job alerts as an effective tool to notify jobseekers of new opportunities they may be interested in. Unfortunately, not every jobseeker signs up for job alerts and if they do, may only fill in basic criteria, like Full Time positions.

Whereas, Targeted Email Campaigns utilize the data the candidate entered on the job board to send a personalized email based to match their profile. In this example, utilizing the candidate zip code, license information, resume data, work history, etc to identify the ideal positions.

Strategy #1 – Email By State

Summary: Send newly registered candidates an email based on their location. The email would include all available jobs within the state they are located in.

Example

Results

Open Rate: 28.17%

Click Through Rate: 53.85%

Application Rate: 18.37%

Strategy #2 – Email Available Jobs Within 50 Mile Radius Of Candidate Location

Summary: Zip Code is one of the required fields during the jobseeker registration process, and as such, this information is utilized to allow the job board to identify candidates within a 50 mile radius of a job posting and send a personalized email with the recommendation to view the job.

For Strategy #2, a number of simple changes were made;

1). Refined the search to send any candidate an email with any job postings available within 50 miles of their location.

2). Modified the subject line to include City, State

3). Added personalization with first name and City, State in the content of the email

4). Added button instead of hyperlinked text

Example

Results

Open Rate: 59.03%

Click Through Rate: 44.71%

Application Rate: 21.05%

What We Learned

1). Be specific with your subject line increases open rates

With the subject line of ‘Open Motor Coach Driver Jobs In California’ the open rate = 28.17%

Which any of us would be super happy with. But, by customizing the subject line to include the city and state, the open rate jumped to 59.03%.

2). Add personalization the email content

3). Add Reply-To Email Address

We noted a few instances in which the jobseeker replied to the email communication with questions or direct interest in the position. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn more about what your candidates are looking for.

4). Schedule the emails to be sent at 8 pm local time

We found the most active jobseekers were at night. I guess jobseekers are looking and applying for jobs at night.

5). Ensure all logos, buttons and hyperlinks are clickable

6). Schedule emails to be sent within 24 hours of the candidate registering

This is an important strategy to add to your daily calendar. Respond quickly to newly registered candidates with positions in the area. You will be surprised the impact this will have.

Conclusion

Targeted Email Campaigns are highly effective to boost quality job applications on your site. We recommend you test various approaches to determine how your audience responds.

And, as a bonus, once you begin to experience success and monitor the results, you can offer this service to your employers. From our prior research, approximately less than 10% of job boards offer a service like Targeted Email Campaigns.

And, the price can be significant. One sport industry job board charges $6,000 per email campaign.

If your job board is interested to learn more about how to implement this type of strategy, feel free to contact us.