Other industries might be seeing a slowdown in job growth, but in healthcare, recruitment is still a fast-paced race to reach and lock in the best candidates—and every move you make counts if you want to secure top talent.
In this hyper-competitive environment, email marketing promised to be one of the most powerful tools you have in your arsenal. Yet despite its vital role, many healthcare recruitment professionals find that their email campaigns fail to generate expected responses and engage candidates effectively. Why is that?
The quick answer is that very few people are true email experts and the audience base sees email marketing as just more white noise. We have put together a short list of why your email marketing campaigns are not living up to expectations.
Mistake #1: Working with Poor Infrastructure
With an email campaign, you need to have good deliverability, open and conversion rates. If you do not have the best technology and strategy infrastructure, you are going to fail the first test by having bad deliverability with your email messages or even having them to directly to the spam folder. Once you head down this path, your domain can become blacklisted by email service providers and automatically flagged as spam.
Mistake #2: You Are Not An Email Expert
If you are not an email expert, you can be great on 2 or 3 things and then fail a fourth and all of your efforts will go for nothing. For example, if you write the best email copy, but your subject lines are weak, your entire campaign will be a failure. The purpose of the subject lines is to grab attention to the recipient and get them to open the email. Then the potential candidate will open the email and learn about the relevant career opportunity.
People tend to write either boring subject lines or vague or spam like lines. These subject lines will invariably lead to people to either delete the email or report it as spam
- Check out this amazing job opportunity
- Hello!
- We’re hiring!
Another mistake made by email marketers is to not optimize the right call to action. They tend to either forget it or use a weak, vague, or uninspiring one. By not driving the potential applicant to take the desired call to action, you kill the effectiveness of the campaign.
Healthcare workers tend to have limited time and desire to think about looking for a job. If you do not make it easy for them, then you are making your job harder. The goal is not to make the potential applicant think about what to do but to leverage their emotion and desire to drive them to take the action that you intend.
Another aspect of email marketing is analyzing the data to optimize its effectiveness. If you fail to adapt your communication, the email will become stale and fail to meet their targets. The biggest mistake in email is the concept of set it and forget it. The real pros test everything in an email down to the font and colors to ensure the best performance. You need to use all the data available to increase opens, click-thru rates and, ultimately, conversions. If you are not an email expert, it is a monumental task reviewing and revising campaign creative on an hourly basis.
Mistake #3: Not Telling a Story
With an email campaign, you have the option to use it for whatever you want. Most people just rely on direct response in their campaign and forget about the concept and benefit of branding. In effect, with branding, you can answer the question on what makes your organization a great place to work? You do this by telling a compelling story that goes beyond just a job description and list of qualifications.
By weaving storytelling into your recruitment efforts, you can create a compelling narrative that resonates on a deeper level and gives candidates a glimpse of the meaningful work and opportunities that await them if they come to work with you. Remember that looking for a job is based upon an emotion that you need to leverage.
Mistake #4: Not Combining Email with Other Channels
While email may be an essential tactic for recruitment, it should be just one of the many channels you use to reach prospective applicants. Successful healthcare recruiters combine email marketing with other channels to reach a wider talent pool, including passive candidates who may not open recruitment emails when they pop up in their inboxes.
If you want to be effective in healthcare recruiting, you need to implement a multi-channel marketing approach. These channels should include email, direct mail, job sites, and online and print advertisements. With the usage of a multi-channel approach, you can reach potential candidates multiple times across different spectrums. To ensure success, you will need consistent brand messaging.
Leveraging one channel may work initially but over time, you will see reduce effectiveness from this campaign. This will lead to a lower number of job applicants in the pipeline and lower levels of hires.