This blog post will delve into the benefits of having a newsletter for your niche job board and provide a step-by-step guide on how to create one that resonates with your audience.
Benefits of a newsletter for your niche job board
Collect an email list of professionals in your niche
A newsletter allows you to build a valuable database of professionals in your industry. This list can be monetized in the future or used for further marketing initiatives, such as targeted ads or promotional campaigns. It’s a resource that grows with every new subscriber, with very minimal input.
"The job board has benefits beyond revenue. Having a contact list of professionals in our niche, with CVs and job titles, is an important resource that can bring us value in the future. It can become a community, we might be able to sell it or use this list for marketing."
- Annika Puura, Draft.dev
Drive organic traffic to your job board
Newsletters can significantly boost organic traffic to your job board. By sharing engaging content such as new job listings, and industry trends, you encourage subscribers to go back to your job board site. This additional traffic can improve your site’s search engine ranking, making it easier for job seekers to find you.
Own the distribution channel
Owning your distribution channel is an important benefit when considering different marketing strategies. With a newsletter, you control the medium, message, and frequency of communication. You’re not driven by social media algorithms or search engine updates. This direct line to your job seeker audience allows for targeted content that speaks directly to their interests and questions.
Whether you’re a seasoned job board owner or just starting out, we’ll guide you through the steps to create a newsletter that drives growth and increases traffic to your job board.
1. Capture email addresses
The very first step is having a clear email signup form on your job board visitors can easily subscribe to your newsletter. Yes, allow users to select the frequency and content they’re interested in, but keep the steps to signup to a minimum. This not only increases the likelihood of subscriptions but also ensures you’re delivering content that meets your audience's needs, keeping your churn low.
A word on email platforms: there’s a whole lot of newsletter platforms to choose from...
But to get started quickly, you can make use of Niceboard’s built-in email capture form, automatically sending job alerts with the newest jobs from your board. Subscribers can choose frequency of alerts and filter for the roles they are interested in. Beginning with a job alerts-only newsletter can be a great way to start building your audience.
For more a personalized email, Niceboard also supports the embedding of custom email signup forms from platforms like ConvertKit, Substack, Ghost and more. These platforms allow you to create content rich newsletters for your job seeker audience, while still including relevant jobs from your board.
2. Create useful content
Content is the heart of your newsletter, obviously! Provide actual value to your subscribers, for example by keeping them informed about jobs and their specific job market. Consider including weekly job market insights, career advice, success stories, and featured job listings—all specific to your niche.
If you have a blog (you can host it for free on your Niceboard job board), you can repurpose its content for your newsletter. Or drive readers directly to your blog for more in-depth information.
The best advice for creating content can be summarized to: Solve your user’s problems. Whatever your job seekers’ “problems” are, you want to help them navigate their challenges with your content. In our case, these “problems” usually fall into one of two categories:
- Job market/industry insights: talk about popular roles, salary ranges and hiring trends for your niche.
For example, a section in your newsletter could highlight salary ranges for different job titles, helping readers get an idea of which jobs in the industry are desirable. - Career advancement: give advice for crafting compelling CVs and applications, nailing job interviews, and networking in your industry.
For example, list upcoming industry events, such as summits, conferences, and expos in your newsletter, supporting job seekers in finding networking opportunities.
Tool tip: Google Alerts to automate your industry research
This overlooked, free tool can be used to stay up to date with industry news, monitor publications, and receive notifications when your niche, industry, or job board is mentioned online. Once setup, you'll receive a curated feed, sent directly to your inbox on a daily, weekly or “as-it-happens” basis.
The setup process is straight forward: enter a word, topic, or phrase and create an alert for that term. If you want to get more granular, you can filter your alerts by sources (such as News, Blogs, Web, Video or Books), language, region and more.
Bonus tip: You can use Google’s search operators (- @ “” site: +) to make your alerts even more specific to your use case.
3. Send your job board newsletter
Consistency is key when sending newsletters, or really for any marketing activities you decide do for your job board.
The idea is simple: choose a schedule (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly) and stick to it. This helps build anticipation among your subscribers and establishes your newsletter as a reliable source of information.
Deliverability of your emails
We won’t get too technical, but depending on the platform you use, you might need to keep an eye on email deliverability. The goal here is to reduce the chance of your emails ending up in the spam folder or bouncing from subscribers’ inboxes.
The easiest way to do this, is not doing it at all: pick an email platform that uses a reputable sending domain and is on top of the newest regulations. Of course, Niceboard manages all things job alerts and deliverability for you, automatically.
If you want to get your hands dirty with email deliverability, here are 3 simple (& non-technical) steps you can implement:
- Check your email with a free spam checker, ensuring you avoid words that may trigger spam filters landing you in the spam folder.
- Keep your email list clean. And by that we mean: removing unengaged or inactive subscribers from your recipient list.
- Ask readers to move your emails into their main inbox, mark your email as a safe sender or even reply to your emails. This signals that you are a trusted newsletter.
4. Promote your newsletter
Conventional methods such as organic and paid social media, and optimizing your signup page will definitely help you add subscribers, but here are a few different ideas:
- Sharable content: Publish content that is actually valuable and/or entertaining. We discussed topics relevant to job seekers before. Adding in a little humor never hurts, especially when it comes to making your emails sharable. Try adding a funny meme, a valuable database or shortlist of the best paid jobs in the industry to get readers to share your content.
- Email signature: Include a link to your newsletter signup in your email signature. This way, every email you send can potentially generate new subscribers.
- Word of mouth from subscribers: Encourage your current subscribers to share your newsletter with their network. Chances are, their colleagues would benefit from your industry insights, jobs or career resources.
Try adding a call-to-action at the beginning or end of your emails, asking readers to share your newsletter with their connections. Something like: If you think your network would benefit from reading this newsletter, feel free to share it with them.
5. Measure your success
Which metrics best reflect the success of your newsletter depends on what your goals are.
Are you looking to drive traffic to your job board? Look at the click-through-rate (CTR) of the featured jobs in your email.
Want to increase job applications? Keep an eye on the number of applications you receive to jobs listed in your newsletter vs those not listed, and include a UTM tracking code in the links leading to your jobs.
Focused on boosting engagement with your brand? Open rates are a strong signal of brand affinity and whether the content you provide is valuable to readers. Number of new subscriptions can also be a good indicator.
Remember, your subscriber growth will be linear at first (10 to 15 to 20) before it becomes exponential (300, 600, 1200). So don’t be afraid to experiment with different content angles, ask for feedback from your readers and stay flexible in your approach!
And there you have it—another tool for building authority, driving traffic, and sharing job opportunities with your audience: a job board newsletter.