Best Practices for Targeted Email Campaigns (Email Blasts)

Employers and schools are increasingly turning using targeted email campaigns to help them reach a highly targeted yet large groups of college students and recent graduates. The reason is that the costs per hire and speed to hire are usually awesome. Many of our clients report to us that their costs per hire are $100 to $200 when they use targeted email campaigns and they receive virtually all of their responses within just a few days. Quite simply, targeted email campaigns combine the best of job postings (high quantity of response) with the best of resume searching (high quality of response and speediness of responses).
The successfulness of targeted email campaigns depends largely upon the quality of the list, how well targeted the list is (we offer at no additional charge any combination of up to 700 fields of data such as school, major, program, GPA, year in school, graduation date, experience, hobbies, interests, diversity, and more), how well written the subject line is, how well designed the creative (the ad in the body of the email is), the quality of the offer itself, and how well designed the landing page is (the page on the site of the employer or school to which candidates click through and at which they apply if interested). Some tips:

From & Subject Lines
Use your organization’s name or other such identifying information in the “from” line, which helps recipients easily identify what is being sent to them.
Write a brief (six words or less is ideal) subject line that accurately represents the message’s major content. Longer subject lines are OK, just make sure each word is critical and the most important are in the first 50 characters those that follow will get cut off in many email clients. It is a good idea to repeat the email’s title in the body of the email itself in case that happens.
Be sure to match the subject line’s message with the specific interests of the recipient. If you are speaking directly to law school candidates then address that curriculum. Focus on the benefits to the candidate, not your needs and wants.
Email Body
Keep HTML-format messages as simple as possible. The more gizmos you pack into an HTML message — superfluous images, graphics, sound or video — the more likely something won’t work on the’ computers of your recipients. Store rich-media content on the Web; limit image size and use colors that reflect your logo.
In HTML messages, use alt tags and support text around images so that readers whose email clients block images by default will still get the gist of your message. Email clients such as gmail and Outlook 2003 block HTML images by default and some email clients even block alt tags. Good use of text within the creative is key. When you design your creative, use a graphic or two (i.e., your logo and a photo) but the guts of the message should be in text as that will be visible to virtually all recipients even if your logo and photo are blocked.
Load up on relevant links. If your goal is to funnel readers to your Web site, give them many access points, such as two or three order buttons sprinkled around a promo message instead of just one, or links to related information on your site. You have a wealth of information at your site; make it easy for your readers to find it. But send the candidates to the same landing page or perhaps two different ones at most. If you start to give them too many choices for which page to go to, you’ll overwhelm them. Give them lots of links to click on, but have the links all take them to the same page or two.
Lose the generic action button. Instead of “click here,” use descriptive terms such as “Enroll Today!” or “Open House Schedule” or “Get familiar with U.” Be explicit about the actions you want users to take.
Testing
Test each email message before you send it, in different browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, etc.), email clients (Outlook, Lotus Notes, Gmail, Yahoo!) and platforms (Macintosh and PC). Click each link. Watch out for oddities and inconsistencies in the way images load (or don’t load).
Deployment Days & Times
There is a diversity of opinion on this issue with some surveys showing that the best times to get emails delivered is overnight or on the weekends and some showing that the best day to email is Friday because people will respond over the weekend. I have yet to read one of those studies that pertains to recruitment so all I have to go on is years of experience of delivering multiple emails per week for a wide variety of clients. Well, I guess that’s actually a fair amount to go on.
My experience shows that the best day to send email is on Tuesdays. If you can’t mail on a Tuesday, then Monday afternoon or Wednesdays are close seconds. Do not mail later in the week than Thursday morning for recruitment offers. Delivery should be scheduled for mid-morning local time, so if the mail is being delivered nationally, that means that you want to stagger the delivery so that Eastern time zone recipients receive their emails, then an hour later Central time zone recipients, then an hour later Mountain, then an hour later Pacific. If you have to send them all at once, send at about 1pm to 2pm Eastern as that’s 9am to 10am Pacific. That’s early enough in the east so that people are still at work or school yet late enough in the west that people have cleared out their overnight spams and will be more likely to notice your email when it comes in.