1. Our targeted email list is double opt-in, which is the highest standard in the industry, so it is hard for candidates to get onto the list. That helps to ensure an excellent response rate because they must really want to get the emails in order to get onto the list.

2. Our list has a single click to unsubscribe, which is the highest standard in the industry, so it is really easy to get off of the list. That helps to ensure a really clean list because people who no longer want the emails can immediately and very easily remove themselves from the list.

3. We have 10 million students, recent graduates, and alumni in our database so our clients aren't forced to take names which aren't well targeted to them because we usually have more than enough names for their needs.

4. We have up to 700 fields of data so we can target by school, year of graduation, geography (right down to the zip code), major, experience, diversity, and more. All of these selects allow an employer to really drill down to get their emails to the candidates they most want to hit. Again, no need to sacrifice quality in order to get quantity.

5. We know what we're doing and we're not afraid to push back on our clients. We've been delivered targeted email campaigns for almost a decade and it is our biggest product by revenue. Virtually all job boards generate 90 to 95 percent of their revenue from selling job postings and resume searching and every once in a while will sell a targeted email campaign. You just can't get good at something that you don't do very often. We regularly deliver targeted emails. We deliver multiple campaigns virtually every week and often multiple campaigns in a single day.

6. We're good communicators. It astounds me to hear from clients that many and perhaps most of our competitors either don't provide tracking reports after the completion of a campaign or do so only when pushed. We want our clients to see how many emails we've delivered (we guarantee 100 percent delivered emails), how many were opened, how many clicked, and how few unsubscribed. They're usually impressed and that leads to more renewals and bigger renewals. If another vendor doesn't want to share with you the numbers for your campaign, you have to assume they don't want you to see them. Is keeping a client ignorant a good selling strategy? Maybe it works for some in the short run, but it doesn't work well in the long run.
   

So what types of results have we seen? One example was a campaign that we ran in February 2007 for a federal government agency which came to us weeks ahead of an application deadline to find out how many candidates we had which fit their desired profile. The skills required were fairly broad so we had 1.2 million students and recent graduates who fit their requirements. Then the agency sat back and waited to see what their already running efforts would produce because if those other efforts bore enough fruit then the agency could save the taxpayers some money by not buying our email list. A week before their deadline they knew they were in trouble.

The agency still needed 8,000 applications, they needed a much higher number of diverse candidates than they were getting, and the application took an average of two hours to complete. Not an easy chore for any employer. The agency had us deliver a very clean, simple, and powerful creative on their behalf to 500,000 of the 1.2 million students and recent graduates. The result? They were able to track 5,000 completed applications from our email blast in the last five days of the campaign. We also received anecdotal feedback that a couple of thousand of additional applicants started to apply but didn't get through the two hour ordeal prior to the deadline.

So what are our typical metrics? Let's assume that the campaign is to 50,000 candidates. That's our minimum size in the sense that you pay the same whether we deploy an email to one person or 50,000 people. You'll typically see about 7,500 opens, which is 15 percent and about three times industry average. Of those, about 1,000 will click through to your web site. That's a click through rate of 13.33 percent and about 2.67 times the industry average. At that point, the employer's metrics take over but we hear from many clients that about 20 percent of these pre-qualified candidates will apply. If so, then you'll see 200 applications. Many employers also tell us that they hire about 10 percent of these pre-qualified candidates. If so, they'll hire about 20 people. The cost of an email campaign to 50,000 candidates is $2,250 and if you hire 20 people that works out to a cost per hire of $112.50. Not bad. Not bad at all.