You invest significant time in identifying the right candidates for recruitment. Ensure your messages reach them by following email best practices for recruiting campaigns. To run a successful recruitment campaign, you must take action. There are also things that the recipients can do.
Segment Your Lists
Segment lists into different demographic categories, such as age range or gender. This ensures that each recipient receives content tailored to them instead of a generic message. Content not tailored to specific audiences may lower overall response rates due to a lack of personalization.
Scrub Your Lists
Fuel Cycle partners with providers who scan your recruitment emails for troublesome emails. These actors may hurt your email reputation and cause low delivery rates. The general idea is to have clean lists (whitelisting) and remove anything that can hurt you (blacklisting).
Remove any invalid addresses or members who may have unsubscribed from previous mailings. This can lead to higher bounce rates if not taken care of beforehand.
Characters that may contribute to invalid addresses and require review before Email List upload are as follows:
- Email domains should not include the following:
`~!@#$%^&*()+=[{]}\|:;"'<>,/?
Domains can include symbols such as:
-__ . (hyphen, underscore, period) - The @ symbol is only used before the email domain (e.g. @gmail.com).
- Delete all empty columns to the right and below any Email List fields in your file if miscellaneous characters negatively affect the bounce rate.
After scrubbing your list and uploading your emails to Fuel Cycle, our platform performs a secondary scrub of your data. This is a final check and should not be used as your sole data-scrubbing method.
An email distribution will terminate for any of the following contributing to 5% of the total sent:
- Bounced emails
- Domains marked as spam
- Emails not delivered
This is a proactive effort to make sure emails do not negatively contribute to a community email domain. It is a signal to the Fuel Cycle team that the list needs to be reviewed.
If you send a recruitment, and the email status is deemed Terminated, please get in touch with the Solutions team via the Answer Bot in the bottom right-hand corner. The team will run the list through an additional vendor to better assess email deliverability and remove any remaining domains contributing negatively to the recruitment email bounce rate.
Limit Links
According to SafeMailer, it is recommended that emails contain 2–3 links to avoid triggering spam filters. However, it's important to note that the optimal number of links can vary based on the specific audience, the email's content, and the email campaign's goals. Conducting A/B tests can be beneficial in determining the most effective number of links to include in emails.
Match From and Reply-to Addresses
We get it! It's cool to look like you're receiving an email from the CEO, but replies go to a dead-end marketing email address. Make sure your email ‘reply to’ and ‘from’ email addresses match. It sounds silly, but this is a key indicator of spam.
Email Preview Text
Current trends show that more emails are opened on mobile devices than on desktops. When recipients receive your email in their inbox, they view your email address, the subject line, and a snippet of your content known as preview text or preheader text.
Most mobile email apps show a preview of around 30 and 55 characters. The shift to mobile has made email preview text usage important for anyone using email to grow responses.
You will be able to add up to 150 characters to a preview text in Fuel Cycle.
Start Sending Slowly
"Warm up" your email server by gradually increasing sending volumes over time. Hence, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are less likely to flag your messages as spam or block the emails from being sent out.
- This process should be done slowly with low volume sends, increasing over time until desired levels have been reached. Batches of no more than 15-20,000 emails are a good place to start.
- Starting with small batches will help build trust between you and ISPs and, gradually, allow more of your messages through without any issues.
- If some time has passed (approximately 2 months or more) since your last email campaign, start again with small batches to work towards reestablishing rapport between you and ISPs.Keep Your Lists Scrubbed
Regular maintenance should be carried out on your lists by removing inactive members from them; this ensures that your lists remain relevant and useful for analysis purposes rather than being skewed due to outdated information being included in survey results or other reports.
Recruitment emails should be sent out regularly with incentives offered if possible; this helps attract new participants while also encouraging existing ones to stay engaged with their studies or projects over time.
Keep Your Emails Out of Spam Folders
Here are some general best practices that should be in place to help protect against unexpected spam filtering and improve your email deliverability.
Familiarize yourself with Fuel Cycle's anti-spam policy.
To ensure that your emails reach your subscribers' inboxes, it is important to take certain measures to authenticate your traffic. This involves a two-pronged approach:
- Firstly, you should verify your email domain through email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC (if you send through Fuel Cycle, we take care of this for you).
- Secondly, you should encourage subscribers to add you to their address book. This will help improve your email deliverability rates, reduce the likelihood of your emails being marked as spam, and ensure that your messages are always visible to your intended recipients.
When it comes to sending out emails to your subscribers, it's important to only send your emails to those who have specifically signed up for your mailing list, and who have engaged with your content in the last 12 months. This helps to ensure that your emails are reaching people who are interested and invested in your brand and can help avoid spam complaints or unsubscribing.
It's important to set an expected frequency for your emails so that your subscribers know when to expect to hear from you.
Additionally, you should make sure that the content of your emails is focused and relevant to your subscribers. This means tailoring your messaging to their interests and needs and avoiding generic or overly promotional language.
Avoid using spam trigger words (full list here). Common terms you should avoid (that we see a lot):
- Earn
- Order
- Offers
- Discount
- Price
- Click here
- Click below
- Click
- Prize
- Winner
- Won
- Win
- Get
- For you
- Urgent
- Bonus
Test your email (with headers) using the following tools:
Beware of Spam Traps
Spam traps are email addresses that have been created solely to identify and filter out unwanted messages, such as those sent by spammers or recruiters. By using spam traps, service providers can ensure only good messages reach the right people.
To protect yourself from inadvertently creating an environment where your recruitment emails get blocked due to potential spam traps, make sure you take steps such as verifying each member wants to participate before sending them anything.
Recipients' Actions
- Ask users to save you as a contact. This shows the provider the recipient wants to hear from you.
- Ask users to move your emails to the Primary Inbox (if Gmail). This shows Gmail's algorithm they want to hear from you.