Are Targeted Email Campaigns Dead?

The good folks over at Exceler8ion recently posted a blog entry in which they argued that targeted email campaigns were a huge missed opportunity for many employers in 2005. I couldn’t agree more. Targeted email campaigns aren’t dead as some believe. To the contrary, they’re thriving.

Perhaps the most significant reason that early email marketing campaigns often failed was that advertisers did not properly target the intended recipients. For about five years, we’ve been using targeted email campaigns to help the employers hire candidates from CollegeRecruiter.com. That part of our business has been growing astronomically and is now much bigger than job postings and resume searching.
Employers which are looking to hire one or two people are usually not well served by targeted email campaigns because the costs are too high. But those which are looking to hire dozens, hundreds, or even thousands are unlikely to find a better medium. Within a few days, they can reach tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of targeted candidates. Targeted email vendors that work closely with the consumer ISPs have a high deliverability rate so ISP-level spam filters aren’t an issue.
The bottom line for employers is their cost per hire and that’s very low for properly targeted email campaigns. We typically see about 15 percent of the emails being opened (read), which is about three times the industry average, and about 15 percent of those turn into click throughs. Employers typically see about 20 percent of the clicks turning into applications (leads) and they hire about five to 10 percent of those. When you work through the math, the cost per hire tends to be $100 to $200, which is VERY inexpensive when compared to the cost of newspaper advertising. In addition, the time to hire is excellent, as virtually all of the responses occur within just a few days.
So are targeted email campaigns dead? Far from it. They’re thriving and should be.