5 Tips to Make your Staffing Firm’s Email Marketing More Effective and Profitable

Contributed article from Jeanne Jennings, Email Optimization Shop

Looking to make your email marketing more effective? So was Advance Partners. I worked with them earlier this year to revamp a few of their automated email campaigns. In the past I’ve worked with all types of organizations, including temporary staffing firms, to help them make their email marketing more effective and more profitable. So Advance Partners asked me if I would share some tips on what we did to help you up your email marketing game.

So here we go!

1. Know your key features, benefits, and advantages

Every organization should do a features, benefits, advantages (FBA) analysis and make the results part of their marketing foundations. Here’s how I define each of these:

• A feature is some element of your service
• A benefit is how it helps the customer
• An advantage is how your service is a better way to get the benefit than other options

Each feature can have one or more benefits; each benefit can have one or more advantages. If you’re not sure what’s a benefit or an advantage, don’t worry, just do your best. The exact distinctions are less important than capturing the information.

2. Create a Message Map

The key to a successful series of emails, automated or not, is that each email carries a different message that makes sense on its own; but together, the series is greater than the sum of its parts. You do this with a message map. Your FBAs are the core of your message map. You decide which of your FBAs to use in each series, then lay them out. In terms of number of efforts, I always let my content determine how many efforts or unique email messages we create. Here’s my formula: the number of key messages plus 2. For example, if you have 4 key messages, take those and bookend with overview emails at the beginning and at the end to make a total of 6 efforts.

3. Leverage Customer Testimonials

Hopefully you’re asking happy customers for testimonials – if not, now’s the time to start!

We used testimonials throughout the series we created for Advance Partners. What your customers say about your organization carries a lot of weight – more than what you say about your own company. 

When I use testimonials, I set them apart with a border, a background color, or both.

4. Have a standard ‘elevator pitch’ that you include in every email you send

We all know what our companies do – but those receiving your email may not. Maybe they knew at one time and need to be reminded, or maybe they never knew. It doesn’t matter. Don’t make them think.

Including a brief ‘elevator pitch’ in each email makes sure there’s no question of who your firm is or what they do. They’re easy to craft – if you do press releases, I would start with the brief blurb about your organization that appears in each press release. If not, craft it yourself starting with your offline elevator pitch.

5. Set a bottom-line key performance indicator (KPI)

When most people think of email marketing metrics, they think of opens and clicks. These are diagnostic metrics which show us how people are (or are not) engaging with the email. But they should never be used as key performance indicators (KPI).

Your KPIs should always be business metrics, which gauge the success or failure of your campaign in terms of bottom-line goals, or steps toward bottom-line goals. Business metrics are either conversion- or revenue-based, depending on the goal of the email.

When the email isn’t going for a direct sale (when the purchase requires more than a visit to a website and a credit card), typically you use a conversion rate. Let’s say you want people to download a white paper – your goal would be a conversion rate, defined as:

(number of people who downloaded the white paper)/(email send quantity minus bounces)

Then you would multiply this number by 100 to make it a percentage.

In Conclusion

Email marketing is very cost effective and not too difficult. Many people have profitable email marketing programs; but often small changes like the ones discussed here can make profitable programs even more profitable.

Give these tips a try with your program and let me know how it goes!

About the Author:

Jeanne Jennings is a recognized expert in the email marketing world and a sought-after speaker and author on industry topics. Jeanne has over 20 years of experience in the email and online marketing and product development world. She is also the Founder of Email Optimization Shop, a consultancy with a direct response approach to digital marketing strategy, tactics and creative direction.