Nelson Schmidt

Northwestern Mutual – Recruitment Marketing

Recruiting female professionals presented a challenge for Northwestern Mutual. Women tend to be passive candidates – higher female employment rates mean that they often aren’t actively looking for a job. To offset this, we created a custom email application that allowed regional sales offices to create messaging that resonated with female professionals and improved their recruitment efforts targeting this demographic.

Case Study

Discover

Improve Northwestern Mutual Life (NML) recruitment of female professionals, a highly diverse target audience which is difficult to identify and challenging to reach and attract since they are generally currently employed. Improve local and regional recruitment in the distribution network while creating opportunities for corporate marketing to monitor sales lead activity.

Formulate

Develop profile of the ideal candidate by interviewing current female financial representatives. Create customized, relevant messaging and tonality that resonates with female sales professionals. Position the financial sales representative career as one that will allow female professionals to meet their career goals. Provide a mechanism for candidates to easily learn about a financial representative career and submit an application online. Provide sales leads directly to local recruiters for follow-up interviews while tracking and reporting all sales lead activity to authorized users.

Execute
Nelson Schmidt helped NML launch the Womens’ Integrated Network (WIN) campaign to appeal to busy female sales professionals using online display ads, customized microsites and personalized emails with video testimonials. A secure online application allowed local sales reps to customize the series of e-mail templates which were designed in a style and voice that caught the prospects’ attention and guided them through the recruitment process. The application also provided campaign and management reporting tools to monitor sales lead activity at the local rep, sales region, state, and national levels.

Measure
87% national email open rates and 26% click-through rates greatly exceeded historical performance and industry standards. Annual female recruitment goals met after only 12 weeks, far exceeding the program objectives.

Execute

Nelson Schmidt helped NML launch the Womens’ Integrated Network (WIN) campaign to appeal to busy female sales professionals using online display ads, customized microsites and personalized emails with video testimonials. A secure online application allowed local sales reps to customize the series of e-mail templates which were designed in a style and voice that caught the prospects’ attention and guided them through the recruitment process. The application also provided campaign and management reporting tools to monitor sales lead activity at the local rep, sales region, state, and national levels.

Measure

A custom web application developed by Nelson Schmidt for NML provided customized e-mail templates and local, regional and national campaign reporting capabilities.

87% national email open rates and 26% click-through rates greatly exceeded historical performance and industry standards. Annual female recruitment goals met after only 12 weeks, far exceeding the program objectives.