Subject Lines for Targeted Email Campaigns

Most job boards seem to operate under a typical 80-20 rule for revenue generation: about 80 percent of their revenues are generated from the sale to their employer clients of job posting ads and resume searching. The other 20 percent are miscellaneous items such as banner advertising, sponsorships, lead generation, and targeted emails.
CollegeRecruiter.com also operates under an 80-20 rule for revenue generation but for us about 80 percent of our revenues are generated from the sale to our employer clients of targeted email campaigns, cell phone text messaging, and other such non-traditional products. We generate revenue from the sale of job posting ads and for a very limited period of time will also from resume searching, but we’ve learned over the years how to effectively and efficiently target tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of candidates via double opt-in email and cell phone text messaging.

But enough of the self-serving blather. Where is this blog article going? Well, I read with great interest a blog article posted yesterday by Derrick Moe of sales recruiting firm Select Metrix about what makes for a terrible subject line for targeted email campaigns. Derrick’s blog article includes some great tips:

• Don’t discount the importance of the From field. Use your company name and not an individual’s name or drawn-out term.
• Keep your company name out of the subject line: It’s redundant as you already have it in the From field.
• Do not use all caps in a subject line. OK? (Unless it’s “OK.”) Seriously, all caps in email is akin to screaming. You don’t want to scream at your potential candidates.
• Write a compelling subject line that won’t deceive people. If people aren’t opening it, that’s okay as they weren’t interested. You’re paying to recruit candidates, not to get people to click through to your web site. And forget the argument that if you can just get them to your web site that you’ll be able to recruit them. Wrong. Your web site may be nice, but no web site is that nice. Web sites help with sourcing. People recruit.
• Most important, have fun with your subject lines! If you’re struggling that much with how to talk to your audience in a single-sentence format, give it to someone else to write.

Originally posted by Steven Rothberg