Category: Recruitment Websites

Communication is crucial for recruitment agencies. Your clients and candidates depend on timely updates, and as email is often the primary method of contact, it’s essential that your WordPress website can send emails efficiently and securely. Meet SMTP. In this blog we’ll explain what it is, how it works and the details you’ll need to work with your WordPress website’s SMTP plugin.  

What is SMTP? 

Simple Mail Transfer Protocols (SMTPs) are the industry-standard protocol for sending emails from your WordPress website. It ensures the safe and efficient delivery of your messages, reducing the risk of them ending up in the recipient’s spam folder by sending them from a reliable source. It’s the software that most people use to send emails from their websites, such as newsletters, automated responses, etc.  

So why is it important?  

Improved Deliverability 

If you want to stop your emails from getting stuck in a spam filter, using an SMTP on your WordPress site is the way to go. Using an SMTP significantly increases the chances of your emails reaching their intended recipients by avoiding email delivery issues, such as messages being classified as spam or not being delivered at all. 

Enhanced Security 

SMTPs allow for secure email transmission using encryption methods like SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security). This ensures your emails are protected against hacking and interception, providing your clients with more security and trust.  

Professionalism 

SMTPs ensure that your emails appear professional and legitimate to recipients. Using an SMTP increases the credibility of your messages, which is especially important for recruitment agencies who need to maintain a professional image to support cold outreach. 

Tracking and Monitoring 

An SMTP allows you to monitor your emails, providing insights into your messages’ delivery status and open rate. This is helpful when troubleshooting email delivery issues or when you want to analyse your email marketing campaign’s success. 

How to Use Your SMTP  

Setting up SMTP might seem intimidating, but it’s easier than you think. Here’s a breakdown for gathering the necessary SMTP details from popular email providers like GoDaddy, Google, Outlook, and IONOS. 

A question we get asked a lot when beginning a new project with a client is ‘What’s your process?’ We get it, it’s important to know what going to happen when you trust us to help with one of your most important assets, the website.

So we’ve detailed what a typical process is going to look like when partnering with Search Stack to either redesign or build a new website.

1. Discovery call

Every website project begins with the discovery call. You the client will come to us with the brief, whether they need a completely new site and brand, or just a simple refresh. We book a 30minute call online to discuss your project. We’ll talk about how we work, the process, costings, and rough time frames. We’ll aim to get a proposal over to you within a few days.

2. Branding questionnaire

No matter the project it is vital for us to get a crash course in your business. We need to know what you stand for, what you want to be famous for, your why, services, ideal clients, and most importantly what success looks like to you.

It’s a bit of homework and it may require a bit of critical thinking, you may be tackling some of these questions for the first time, but it’s important for us to get a deeper understanding so we can challenge and create something that goes above and beyond.

We’ll also send our initial invoice to get the project underway at this point.

3. Branding workshop and next steps

We’ll take a couple of days to go through your answers from the questionnaire and book in an online workshop. This will allow us to report back our findings and pitch what we feel the site could look and feel like from our research and interpretations of your business.

We don’t want to just create something that just looks great (although we definitely do this) but has substance, thought, brand strategy, and meaning behind it. Because this is what will help you stand out and inspire action from your visitors.

4. Wireframes and mock-up design

Once we know our direction and strategy we’ll get started on wireframes and mockups. We’ll usually present to you basic wireframes to show the user experience (UX) and flow of the customer journey on your site.

Once we’ve done the wireframes we’ll create and pitch a mock-up design, we like to make sure we really nail and the look and feel before we start the build as it’ll make the build process quicker.

Our Mockups are done on AdobeXD and we send through a full .pdf as well as an interactive link that will allow you to make notes on the design.

We’ll usually wrap this all up with a final call to discuss any thoughts on the design, tweaks, and changes.

5. Website build and catch-ups

This is where the fun happens. We’ll crack on with the build of your site, coding away on a development domain on our server; this means your current site will stay live while we build your new site. And when we’re ready to finally go live it makes the swap super simple. We’ll catch up with you weekly to show our progress and get your ongoing feedback as we build the site.

6. Final run through and go live

We always have a final run-through of the site where we’ll jump on a share screen call to talk through anything.

As standard, we offer 2 free weeks post-launch to make any changes to the site to get it absolutely perfect, anything after the two weeks that may be extra additions to the site will be charged at an hourly rate.

We will also send you through your site logins and record a loom video going through the backend, that’ll be a tutorial on how to make the necessary changes to your website.

Case studies

• Give a personal and human lead story, a real account of good work done for familiar sectors/job roles.
  • Leverage this in social media posts
  • Include things like, location, time to hire, timeframe
  • Make sure to get a candidate and client quote

Podcast section

• Creating a podcast is a fantastic source of content, but also a great addition to add to your website. It adds gravitas as well as SEO benefits
  • Positions you as a thought leader in your marketplace
  • Allows you to show to clients the calibre of guests you’ve talked to
  • Grows the depth of your website improving SEO with your growing content

Get a blog on your site and post regularly

• Having a stocked blog on your website helps enormously for SEO but also cements your status as a thought-leading business with its finger on the pulse.
  • Repurpose sound bites from your podcast to create relevant snippets
  • Take the time to find out what your client/candidates pain points are and write content about it
  • Improve your website SEO but touching on keywords and building depth to your website

Whitepaper / Brochure download

• Leverage a consistent source of contacts by adding in call to actions allowing people to download whitepapers or your sales decks/brochures.
  • Think Salary survey, state of the market, future of the sector content (Lean on your clients/candidates to contribute to help create the best possible content)
  • Connect it up to a marketing automation software to create workflows once people download. (Add to CRM + send follow up emails)
  • Make the download process as easy as possible, and don’t ask for too much personal data. Manually qualify later.

Ease of contact

• Make getting in touch with you idiot proof, there should be 2/3 clear Call to actions on your website on every page.
  • Add a chatbot onto your website (We have seen success with Facebook’s own chatbot widget, people like to talk to you via messenger)
  • Add a quick to submit form on the bottom of each page. Try to get in the habit of getting in touch quickly while they’re relevant.
  • Add a clear-to-see call button on your menu and footer, make sure it’s especially easy to click to call via mobile.