How Jopwell tripled their email volume—and maintained an open rate of 30%

Published: April 2, 2020

As Chief of Staff at Jopwell, a career advancement platform for Black, Latinx, and Native American students and professionals, Tani Brown understands the importance of audience data in any successful marketing or communication strategy. Since 2016, Jopwell has used Mailchimp to reach new audiences—like potential partners, investors, or community members—and to stay connected with the candidates and customers they’ve already established a relationship with.

“Mailchimp has been really vital for us to optimize our email marketing strategy and segment these audiences so that we can talk to them based on who they are,” Tani tells us. And it’s Mailchimp’s Marketing CRM and data insights that help them do it.

The challenge: Finding and targeting the right audience

Jopwell’s success is dependent on its ability to connect the right companies with the right job seekers. In many cases, that means first helping companies change how they think about and build diversity and inclusion within the workplace.

“Some of our defining challenges really focus on converting a company’s desire to be better at diversity and inclusion into tangible next steps and digestible action items, like getting their brand (and jobs) in front of Black, Latinx, and Native American job seekers or getting them to sponsor an event that we’re putting on,” Tani explains.

The tools: Mailchimp’s Marketing CRM and data insights

To help match its job candidates with relevant employment opportunities, Jopwell uses tags to turn the stuff they know about their audience into actionable insights. And since Mailchimp’s audience dashboard surfaces their most-used tags, it’s always easy to segment their audience and send targeted campaigns—and they’re able to save valuable time along the way, too.

“Mailchimp’s tagging feature is vital to our business model in that it helps us organize vast, disparate sets of data,” says Tani. "This expedites our production process by allowing us to identify segments of users by demographic and behavioral information and keep our communications with them relevant."

That way, they always know what resonates, what doesn’t, and where there might be room for improvement. “Reporting is vital in optimizing our email marketing strategy, and Mailchimp's reporting feature lets us do some cool stuff. We can easily share reports across our organization, view predicted demographics data, identify audience device data, and view click maps that show the frequency of clicks and where subscribers click—or don't click!”

The audience insights collected through Mailchimp help Jopwell when they’re talking with companies, too. “We're able to go to the companies that we work with and actually show them there is demonstrated interest in the work that they do and qualified individuals that are leveraging our community and our platform to connect with [them]. Mailchimp allows us to translate that interest into connections, introductions, job applications, and attendance at events, which is extremely important.”

Having all of their audience data and insights in one convenient location has helped Jopwell know who they should talk to, when they should talk to them, and which channel they should use to deliver their message. And that’s led to some pretty impressive results. On average, businesses in the recruitment and staffing industry see a 21% open rate and 2.5% click rate for their emails. But since 2016, Jopwell has maintained an aggregate open rate between 27-30% and increased their click rate from 2.5% to 4.68%, all while growing their annual email volume from 1.8 million sends to more than 5 million sends per year as they find new, innovative ways to engage with their users.

“This is indicative of our growth as a company and the role Mailchimp plays in our ability to scale our business,” says Tani. “Mailchimp has helped us adapt our marketing, leverage our growing tech capabilities, and keep our user engagement strong.”