Tactics > reinventing customer recruitment
The secret to successful online recruitment
By Chloë Thomas
Tips on honing
your online customer acquisition campaigns
M Pure brand awareness Online PR Social media
Cold email data Blogger liaison
any ecommerce businesses spend thousands of pounds on catalogue mailings each year, relying on this as their primary source of new customers. Online
recruitment is less straightforward but in many cases overall performance would increase if it was invested in too.
The secret to successful online recruitment relies on understanding what any recruitment campaign does: 1. Drives response 2. Spreads brand awareness 3. Targets the right audience
Many ignore the brand awareness aspect in their online recruitment tests, and it is vitally important. For example, a consumer wants to buy a map of Cornwall and sees two PPC ads, one from WHSmith and one from i-sell-maps.
co.uk. • The consumer is more likely to click on WHSmith’s ad because he knows the brand
• He’s more likely to buy from WHSmith because he knows the brand
So because the consumer knows WHSmith’s brand, WHSmith is getting both a better click- through rate, and a better conversion rate— and who wouldn’t want that?
Unlike catalogue mailings, online you can’t achieve all three points effectively with one tactic; you have to employ a combination of marketing tactics to cover all three bases. Once you start to get the right mix in place, it drives a very virtuous circle as results improve and it becomes easier to run.
Possible Online Recruitment Tactics
Mainly brand awareness, Mainly Response Driving, Pure Response Driving some response driving
some Brand Awareness
Email capture competitions Social media advertising
Group buying / social commerce Advertising
Search-engine optimisation Google Base Affiliates PPC
eBay shop 12 Email enquirers
Explanation of the key tactics The table below outlines common recruitment tactics, here’s a little more on each one: • Online PR—getting magazines and papers to write about you online as well as using online press releases to build coverage. Online PR will build brand awareness and optimise search-engine performance as it is a form of link building. It overlaps with several other tactics. • Social media—Building a social-media community or follower base in one or more of the social media engines—Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn—and leveraging that community to drive traffic to the website and spread knowledge of your brand. Here I’ve classed social media as “pure brand building” because response rates tend to be very low so it’s not until you hit thousands of followers that you’ll start to see the sales impact. From the moment you start though, it can be very powerful in building brand awareness. • Cold email data—renting email data in the same way as you would postal data. This usually results in a very poor response, so I’d suggest steering clear of it. • Blogger liaison—building relationships with a group of bloggers who you would like to write about you. A little bit like PR, a little bit like competitions, a little bit like SEO, a little bit like affiliates. It’s time- consuming, and will take a while to really kick in, but can have a big impact. • Email capture competitions—running a competition on another website, usually a magazine or community site, where you provide the prize and the entrants sign up to your email programme. This is a very effective method of growing your email database and building brand awareness. The key is to choose the right sites on which to run the competitions.
Direct Commerce Catalogue e-business
www.catalog-biz.com
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