E-mail Campaigns

I thought I would get my blog off the ground with a quick discussion of email campaigns.  I have seen quite a few horrible ones come in my inbox and also have saved clients a fortune by ?tweaking? the email so that it maximizes the open and click-thru rates, etc.  Here are some tips if you are considering an email campaign for your company:

• Copy COUNTS!!  The best way to increase your open rates for an email campaign is to have the body of the email in HTML format (and also revert to text if HTML is not supported on the client side) and the body of the email must be geared to job seekers.  Have a recruitment ad agency create the look and feel of the ad, do not put it together yourself!!  You can?t slap on a company logo, put in some text, and hope the campaign is successful.  Use the pro?s to do what they do best.
• Target candidates that are relevant!  The great thing about email campaigns is that you can ?get granular? (I hate that term) and target by location, keyword, etc.  For example, if you want to hit salespeople in Los Angeles, San Franciso, and San Diego with college degrees you can do so?.I also recommend keywords as well if you are looking for a targeted candidate (i.e. RF engineers, etc.)  This will help separate your ?garden variety? engineers from those that you are on the lookout for. 
• Try using the ?niche? boards!  Typical e-mail campaigns with the top 3 job boards are normally in the range of $1 per email?.still pretty cheap considering the results but usually smaller boards will be much more willing to negotiate on the price which can not only save you money, but hit the relevant candidates you are after.
• Link to your career section or special splash page in the email.  Make sure to have a bold, direct call to action ?CLICK HERE TO APPLY? and link directly to your career section or job posting on your site IF you have a good ATS that can track applicant?s full cycle.  Let me explain?in the past few years typically when I would do an email campaign with a client all I could give them afterwards were a few basic stats (open rate and click-thru rate) but if you create a ?dummy link? in your ATS you can link to that and you can track the email campaign effectiveness full cycle.  If this is still greek to you feel free to IM me for more info, but the great thing about this is that you can establish metrics and pit Yahoo against CB and Monster, etc. to compete for pricing?and of course your boss will always want to see metrics aka ROI in this case.
• Make sure any list you purchase is ?opt-in?.  This is mostly standard with the job boards but you need to make sure that these are folks who signed up for Monster for example and want to hear about open positions in their area or areas they indicated they would relocate to.  If they are not ?opt-on? then they are probably spam which means no one will open your email much less click-thru.