Content in emails, like images, links and subject lines impact whether a campaign ends up in a candidate’s inbox, or in their spam folders. It is important to consider these factors in your campaign creation to improve overall deliverability for your messaging.

Improving the number of emails that land in the inbox improves the number of emails that can be opened and engaged by candidates, and helps you more effectively address your long-term hiring goals.

For instructions on creating a new Campaign, check out this article.

Table of Contents

Adding Links to an Email
Consider your Audience
Adding Images or Video

Adding Links to an Email

Including relevant links - like to open jobs or a great blog post - are great additions to an email campaign. When adding links to campaigns, there are a few things to keep in mind. 

Do: Include links that match the sender domain. 

If you are sending emails from yourcompany.com, you should try to limit the links in your email mostly to those hosted by that same domain. For example, your company blog or careers page.

Occasional links from other trusted sites, like sharing an article about your organization or industry from a popular online publication, won’t automatically filter to spam. But excessive links from different domains will raise the suspicions of Email Service Provider (ESP) Spam filters and may result in the campaign going to the Spam folder. 

Don’t: Use link shorteners. 

Link shorteners (like bit.ly) can make otherwise trustworthy links look suspicious since ESP’s cannot tell where the link is hosted and may erroneously assume the link is spam. Additionally, shortened links make it unclear where a candidate will be directed if they click and may reduce their desire to engage with Campaign content. 

Instead, if a link is really long and unruly, rather than shorten, consider embedding it in the text with a clear indication of where the link leads (e.g. “Check out our employment opportunities here!”). Hyperlinks can easily be added to message text when composing your campaign.

Consider your Audience

Do: Properly Segment Candidates and Tailor Messages accordingly

Consider tailoring even broad messages to a specific audience. Before sending your campaign, use pools to thoughtfully segment and group your recipients. Personal and relevant messages are more likely to be of interest to Candidates, and therefore more likely to garner positive engagement. 

For example, when describing the team a candidate would be joining, a Sales candidate may be most interested in the social culture of the team, while someone in Engineering may be more interested in the workstation and technology that would be provided. Candidates are more likely to engage with content that speaks to them personally, and more likely to ignore or unsubscribe from content that isn’t relevant.

Do: Keep Branding Consistent 

Inboxes are full and people are busy. Candidates that are actively job-hunting may get dozens of emails a week from different companies - some solicited and some not. If a Candidate does not recognize a message from a company, because their branding has suddenly and dramatically changed, the Candidate may ignore the message, or worse, actively mark it as spam or junk. 

Keeping branding consistent - both visual elements and voice - will reduce this risk. Consistent messaging also creates a cohesive vision of your employer brand for prospective candidates and can help them determine if your company is a good fit for their next career move. 

Don’t: Bombard Candidates with Email

It is important to remember that a Candidate’s email address is a piece of personal contact information, and should be used judiciously, as one would use a phone number. Schedule campaigns with appropriate spacing between messages (at least 2-3 days) and the appropriate number of touches to avoid inundating candidates with emails (typically no more than 5). 

Remember that the goal of emailing candidates is to encourage them to join an organization. Upsetting a candidate by abusing the privilege to email them is unlikely to create a positive association with your customer’s brand or organization. From a deliverability standpoint, over-emailing can cause candidates to unsubscribe or mark the email as spam, both of which will hurt your customer’s sender score, thus impacting your entire organization's outreach efforts.

Adding Images or Video

Do: Add Images to Emails 

Balance the text in your emails with visual elements to create highly engaging email content. Engaging content is more likely to receive a positive response from candidates, but a message that relies too heavily on all text or visual elements can be problematic.

Anti-spam tools scan the email format to check for dubious content and may find long, all-text or all-image emails suspicious. Generally speaking, a balance of about 40% images, 60% text is considered ideal, although differentiating from this ratio is not an immediate ticket to the Spam folder. 

It’s also important to use a text backup in case an image cannot render on a user's device. Beamery adds text backup to images by default, so there is no action needed by users when creating campaigns.

Do: Embed (short) Videos

This is a recent change within the email industry. Previous advice was to link out to videos, as some older Email Service Providers had not yet enabled embedded videos to render. Embedding videos is now considered acceptable practice and is a seamless experience for the recipient. 

Embedded videos should be less than 90 seconds or so in length and should have auto-play disabled for the optimal experience. If you'd like to share a longer video, you can link out to the video using the hyperlink functionality highlighted above.

To embed a video in a Beamery campaign, you will need to drag and drop the video content block into your email. Then click on the block to bring up the content editor where you will enter the YouTube link for the video you wish to embed. Note that your video must already be hosted on YouTube before it can be added to your campaign. As always, it is best to send a test of your email first, so that you can preview your video content as a recipient.