Our next question is; What should you look for when selecting an email marketing/marketing automation tool?

To answer our first question, we have one of our industry friends, Jeffrey Hamelink, Co-Founder, CEO & CFO of Direct Impact.

Direct Impact loves building Marketing Tech stuff and showing people how to use it. They are a business that helps you implement pragmatic solutions to boost conversions. Fast. They have a team of agency, academy and staffing business units to help you “get (sh)it done”.

First of all: fantastic you’re willing to invest in email marketing/marketing automation. It’s never too late to join in on the fun. However, there are some major things to consider before you decide on the tooling itself.

Step 1: Define your goal
Sounds like a cliche right? Still, in 90% of all implementations we see, the goal is not clearly set. The result is that the value will not then be unlocked.

What does your strategy, team and process require? Do you want to send internal emails or also external? Do you need to activate an already existing database? Do you need to increase the opt-in rate? Do you need nurture campaigns for leads and potential clients? Do you need to focus more on branding? Start here. Then implement. Not the other way around.

Step 2: Operations excellence
After the goal is defined, you need to tackle the operational side.

Who is going to be responsible for the tool? Who will be writing the content? Who will be sending out the email campaigns and set up the automation flows? Who will be analysing the results? Who will work on the optimization part based on data and evaluations? Do you need to hire additional people to your team? Who will be informing the organisation on the results and necessary actions? Imagine what would happen if you pushed the pedal flat out in a formula 1 car with no training whatsoever.

Step 3: Setup your dataflows
Running an email or automation tool requires a connection to your ATS.

Ask yourself the question: do I have the right data available in my database to set up the campaigns? Are you missing out on essential data points? Do you have data silos? Do you understand your data architecture from your ATS? Do you have additional must-have tools to set up the integrations between tooling (from Google Tag Manager to APIs)?

So, now what?

Option 0, you don’t do anything. Let’s be real, that’s not an option. It’s 2020 and your competition is probably already blasting away and having conversations at scale with YOUR potential candidates/clients. Are you going to let them get away with that?

Option 1, Select an easy email tool just for marketing purpose. In this case, tools like Mailchimp can be connected to the right audience and you can schedule marketing-related emails such as newsletters or webinar sign-ups. You will miss out on some action and conditions based triggers that fire based on sales and recruitment processes but for simple marketing communication, you will be fine.

Option 2, Select a marketing automation tool if you need to tackle different areas of your business such as candidate communication, marketing or sales. Automation tools can help trigger the right email at the right time based on the conditions of your settings. Take into account: the messages and flows won’t appear out of anywhere, you will have to put in a lot of effort. Think about creating the emails, building the flows, run the tests and optimizing based on results.

Option 3, You ask for help. Selecting and integrating these tools can be difficult and time-consuming. Ensure a selection and integration partner who will work with you on this topic and helps you tackle everything from setting the requirements to the integration process.

We hope that you have learned something from Jeffrey and it is clearer for you to take the next step with your marketing automation whichever step that may be. If you have any questions about the above, you can reach out to Jeffrey and his team via email info@directimpact.online

If you have a question you would like us to answer in detail, send us an email to marketing@onrecruit.net and we will make it happen!