My colleague, Michelle, recently attended an email marketing course. Her notes were so good that I thought I’d steal borrow them and share them with you.
What follows is stuff you should do if you’re planning to use email newsletters to stay in touch with visitors to your vacancy pages…
Best practice email marketing tips
1. Have a plan
- Collect email addresses of candidates from your website
- Plan frequency of contact
- Use the right incentive to secure sign-ups
- Don’t go for quantity – quality counts for more
- Check whether offering an email newsletter is the best option for your organisation
2. Capturing email addresses
- The email capture page should look the same as the rest of your website
- Ask profiling questions – improves targeting later
- Create anticipation and add real value
- Offer exclusive information for email subscribers e.g. ‘be first to hear of job vacancies’
3. Content of newsletter
- Make it relevant
- Make it personal
- Send different messages to different types of candidates
- Don’t go overboard and try to appeal to too many people
4. Email design
- Have one key message
- Ensure design is professional and consistent
- Use email templates if you have no time/resources for design
- Don’t use animated gifs or background images with gradients
- In Outlook 2007, HTML is unlikely to work
- Keep text short with a link to remainder of article/job(s) on your site
- Use top left for an index of the email
- At the top of email have a ‘Click here to update your details’
- Include statement, ‘Please add us to your address book so that you won’t miss out’
- Include your full postal, email, website and telephone details
- Provide a ‘Click here to forward to a friend’
- Include ‘Can’t see the content? Click here to view in a browser’
- Check how your email looks in an email preview pane
- 26.6% people at home use preview panes
- 69% people at work use preview panes
5. Reasons why people open email
- The Sender – 40%
- The Sender plus Subject line – 56%
- Subject line alone – 3%
- 79% hit ‘mark as spam’ when they don’t know the Sender
6. Getting your email opened
- Include your organisation name in the email Subject line
- If full personalisation is impossible use their name in Subject line
- Make Subject line a synopsis of the email e.g. ‘Latest vacancies’
- Get around Spam Filters
- Compare your text against common lists of blocked words
- Don’t just check for one spam filter e.g. Spam Assassin, Brightmail (Hotmail)
- Run email copy through all major ISPs and email providers – Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Virgin, Gmail etc – to see if getting blocked
7. Monitoring results
- Always do A/B split testing
- Be prepared for 5-8% of sign-ups being a ‘Mr M Mouse’!
- Monitor how many people click through to your site
- Every time you send a newsletter, monitor how many people unsubscribe
- Ask people why they are unsubscribing
Seen any good newsletters lately?
Please send me examples of good email newsletters. I’ll post them here so that other people can learn from them too.
And thanks Michelle for your notes!
Share your comments and feedback