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Are Targeted Email Campaigns Dying?

ningcontent Avatarningcontent
January 27, 2011


There’s little doubt that today’s college students, most of whom are members of Gen Y, favor interacting with their friends via cell phone text messaging more than by phone and email. Phoning or even emailing a friend is seen as inefficient and even slow as you can’t simultaneously and immediately communicate with many people. But does that mean that targeted email campaigns are no longer a great tool for employers and others who want to reach Gen Y? Hardly.
As stated in the Email Insider, we need to remember when we were teens and young adults and the tools that we used. Many of us got everywhere on our bicycles and even skateboards. How many of us still use those tools as our primary methods of transportation? As we age and mature, we change and we change which tools we use to best fit our new lifestyles. Given the reliance by organizations upon email, it is inevitable that Gen Y will use email more and text messaging less as more of them move into the workplace and more of those in the workplace move into positions of greater responsibility.
So what does an employer do if they want to reach a lot of college students about internship opportunities or recent graduates about entry level job openings? Well, several strategies come to mind:

  1. Understand that college students and recent graduates are all different from each other and use technology in different ways so market your opportunities to them in different ways. Different strokes for different folks. Will it take you more time? Sure. Will it cost you more? Probably. Will it pay off by allowing you to hire the people that you need when you need them? Definitely.
  2. Understand the needs of your audience so that you can tailor how you communicate with them to be in line with their needs and wants even if that isn’t as convenient or efficient for you.
  3. Communicate using a variety of media. One of the basic tenets of advertising is repetition. Few respond to ads the first time they see them. Most require several and sometimes even more impressions. But hitting them with the same message using the same media over and over again doesn’t do any good if they don’t respond well to messages delivered via that media or if they get annoyed. That’s why we provide a free targeted email follow-up to the same candidates for those organizations that use our cell phone text messaging product. This has the added benefit of making it convenient for candidates to respond to your message using a device that works well for them. Even though I have a BlackBerry and easily see web pages and respond to text messages, most people do not have smartphones so can’t go to your web site on their phone. For those folks, asking them to go to your web page in a text message is asking them to do the impossible. But if you follow-up with an email…

The bottom line is that targeted email campaigns are not dying. Far from it. We’re seeing even more interest in them from our clients this year over last and last year was a record year for us. In addition, we saw more interest last year than the previous year. Targeted email campaigns, when handled with care, are an incredibly efficient and effective means of reaching Gen Y but as is the case with any other project, you need use a variety of tools in order to get a difficult and sometimes complicated job done.

Originally posted by Steven Rothberg

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