Double Opt-in Targeted Emails, SMS, and Direct Mail Database
One of the questions that we're often asked by our employer, school, consumer marketing, and other clients is how we've managed to create a double opt-in database of over 10 million college students and recent graduates. Well, the answer is that is hasn't been easy and it hasn't all been our work.
CollegeRecruiter.com is part of a network of sites, most of which are job boards but some of which are used to find a new school, research scholarships, enter contests, etc. Also, those who come to CollegeRecruiter.com or many of the sites in our network may register in a variety of ways. For example, a student searching for an internship or recent graduate looking for an entry level job is likely to post their resume at our site:
But they can also opt-in to receive information from CollegeRecruiter.com through our free resume evaluation service:
or our free school finder product that matches up candidates with schools offering certificates, associate's degrees, bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, and even PhD's:
In addition to opting in through their registration in one of a bunch of different ways on CollegeRecruiter.com, they can do the same on the other sites in our network:
Regardless of which site they were on when they opted in to receive information from the site or its marketing partners, they then receive a follow-up email in which they are asked to confirm their desire to receive information from the site or its marketing partners. They must click on the email in order to confirm their desire. Ignoring the email does not suffice.
Once they have clicked on the email, they have provided us with their first opt-in on the web site and their second opt-in to the email. That's a double opt-in and is the highest standard in the industry. We then purchase consumer marketing information to better understand who these people are. These additional fields include their schools, GPA's, year of graduation, work history, race, gender, age, income, etc. The employers, schools, and other clients can then properly target their opportunities to just those who are most likely to be interested. That boosts their response rate and return on investment while also minimizing the annoyance factor for those who have twice opted in to receive the information.
The response rate that we typically see to targeted email campaigns is about 15 percent open (read) the emails and about 15 percent click through. Both are about three times the industry average. Why? Because we're 100 percent double opt-in even though the industry is more typically single opt-in and we have up to 700 fields of data per name so the messages that we send are highly targeted even though many in the industry believe in blasting out messages and hoping that some stick.
The double opt-in database of over 10 million students recent graduates is fully integrated between our targeted email, cell phone text messaging (SMS), and direct mail products. As a result, if you have us deliver, for example, an SMS campaign then we can follow-up by delivering a targeted email to the same people. Our competitors typically can email or SMS and even those which can do both are unable to deliver both to the same people.
We're proud of the direct marketing products.They're highly effective and provide excellent value to our clients, maximize the quality of information to our candidates, and minimize the quantity of annoying messages being sent to our candidates. Win-win.
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