User Experience ResearchImproving job alert performance

Tracy Godding, December 2015

Optimising your job board performance: Job alerts

With a mix of usability research, analytics, benchmarking and market

trends analysis, Madgex have spent over 15 years honing our job board

technology to deliver optimal performance, meaning that our clients see

outstanding results and are always ahead of the competition.

We take a user-centred approach to our job board software, to help

ensure fantastic audience engagement and strong commercial results.

To help you build stronger relationships with your audience, we strive to

deliver a high quality experience at every touch point.

We never stop looking for ways to improve the performance of our job

boards and spend a lot of time researching job seeker behaviour in order

to deliver the best results.

As a job board owner, you will know that job alerts are one of the biggest

drivers of job applications. With job alerts being such an integral and

important part of job boards, Madgex invest a lot of time and resource

researching this area, studying every aspect of the experience and looking

at ways to improve conversions.

Our own research in to this area has shown that:

An average of 20%

applications come from

job alerts

Some niche sites are closer

to 50% applications from

job alerts

Job alerts application

rate is 4% higher than

site application rate

50%

Typical areas we would focus on include:

Signup/Registration – how do we create the best user journeys?

How do we ensure we are capturing the right information? How do we

maximise conversions?

Email content/structure – How does the content of job alert emails

impact on the number of conversions? Can we increase engagement

through optimising email format?

User Journeys – How do we ensure job seekers complete their journey

from email to viewing to applying for jobs? Are there any barriers that

break up this journey?

Our UX team study email performance year round to ensure our

technology delivers the best results and adapts to changing user

behaviour.

In recent years, we have seen a huge growth in audiences using mobile

devices as part of their job seeking journey. Across our network 30-50%

of traffic is mobile, and we expect this to surpass desktop by the end of

2016.

With this in mind, job boards have to ensure they are addressing this

change in user behaviour not just on their job seeking site, but across all

of the touch points they have with their users.

Our job board platform is built using responsive design, which means the

content naturally adapts to different screen sizes. Our job boards are built

on a responsive grid system and will change size accordingly, depending

on which device a jobseeker is using. This provides a far greater user

experience than switching between a mobile and desktop site.

However, as we know, engagement with users extends far beyond the

main job seeker site, and many users main interaction comes via their job

alert emails.

Job alert emails are increasingly being opened on mobile devices, as users

check their emails on the go and our latest research indicated that 41% of

job seekers open job alert emails this way.

With this in mind, we have recently been focussing on ensuring our job

alerts deliver the best possible results. In order for this to be achieved, it is

important for these to render well and be easy to read on any screen size.

We never make assumptions during our design process and wanted to

test whether a job alert email would benefit from responsive design. We

needed conclusive evidence that responsive design would improve the

experience and therefore increase engagement, job views and actual

applications.

To test this, we compared the performance of a responsively designed

job alert with a fixed width job alert, measuring both engagement and

conversions.

Job alert emails are increasingly being opened on mobile devices, as users

check their emails on the go and our latest research indicated that 41% of

job seekers open job alert emails this way.

With this in mind, we have recently been focussing on ensuring our job

alerts deliver the best possible results. In order for this to be achieved, it is

important for these to render well and be easy to read on any screen size.

We never make assumptions during our design process and wanted to

test whether a job alert email would benefit from responsive design. We

needed conclusive evidence that responsive design would improve the

experience and therefore increase engagement, job views and actual

applications.

To test this, we compared the performance of a responsively designed

job alert with a fixed width job alert, measuring both engagement and

conversions.

For conversions we measured the number of views against the number of

alerts sent (views per send) and also the percentage of views that ended

in an application (application rate). To measure engagement we used

Litmus to track opens and the duration of the read on different devices.

For conversions we measured the number of views against the number of

alerts sent (views per send) and also the percentage of views that ended

in an application (application rate). To measure engagement we used

Litmus to track opens and the duration of the read on different devices.

Our tests showed a significant increase in engagement across both mobile and desktop

We saw a 3% increase

in the number of job

alert opens

A 4% increase in the number of

emails that were read for more

than 8 seconds

There was also a

2.5% increase in the

application rate

However, with our 15 years’ experience delivering outstanding job board

technology, we can confidently say based on our recent research job

alerts perform best when they are optimised for mobile.

We are passionate about design, quality and user experience. This

attention to detail results in excellent job board performance and

commercial results.

Keeping your job board optimised and competitive in a constantly

changing digital world, means keeping ahead of the latest trends,

regularly adding upgrades and integrating new features. We do just that

for all our clients – every month, for free.

There are obvious difficulties in testing job alerts as there are so many

variables involved. JBE’s are not straight forward marketing emails selling

a product or service - they deliver personalised jobs to users. Those jobs

vary in number and type in nearly every email sent and the actual number

of job alerts sent constantly varies too which makes this harder to quantify

and measure.

A clear indicator that responsive job alerts provided better user experience.

We are here to help you grow your business. To find out more

about our market leading job board technology contact our sales

team today by emailing sales@madgex.com