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Compliments of Allan Zander. He may be contacted at ajzander@hotmail.com.

GUERRILLA INTELLIGENCE

Be Your Own Recruiter with E-Mail Marketing

Joseph Nour

Most people think of e-mail marketing as a way for businesses to promote products or services by sending thousands of e-mails. Guerrillas understand they can use it stay in touch with prospective employers on a one-to-one basis, too. Let me give you an example.

Let’s say you’re a marketing professional seeking a communications director position with a growing company. In addition to your resume, you have an electronic portfolio showcasing some of the best work such as brochures, advertisements, sell sheets, and published articles. In most cases, the only chance you’ll get to share your portfolio is when you get to the interview stage, but you know that if potential employers could actually see some of your work up front, your chances of quickly finding the right job would dramatically improve. E-mail marketing can provide the vehicle for you to do just that.

With e-mail marketing, you can provide your contacts with regular samples of your work through a monthly e-newsletter with Web links to published articles or to your blog. It’s a great nonintrusive way to enhance your mindshare. The first step is to build your opt-in e-mail list. Include your professional contacts as well as recruiters and those recruitment services that your company may be using.

A best practices e-mail marketing service should offer a host of features including:

• On demand online access

• Tools for helping you grow your opt-in e-mail list

• Easy-to-use tools for quick e-mail campaign creation

• HTML templates for newsletters, e-cards, promotions, and so on

• Campaign tracking and reporting features

• Automatic CAN-SPAM compliance

• Image hosting for uploading captivating images to enhance your campaigns

Take advantage of the metrics and tracking reports to see who opened your e-mail and the specific content they clicked. Use this information to follow up personally with those who showed a clear interest in what you have to offer.

Here are a few more useful tips to specifically aid your job search:

• Keep your e-mail as short as possible.

• Tease them with the e-mail message and get them to click to your resume, online portfolio, or blog—you want to hook them, NOT pitch them.

• Keep it personal—use the mail merge functionality so all of your contacts receive a personally addressed e-mail. If your e-mail looks like a bulk or mass mailing, your recipient is less likely to read it or respond.

• Use HTML so you can get the advantage of tracking, but keep it simple!

• Spend most of the time on the top 3 inches of the e-mail; it’s what they see if they are using “preview” in Outlook.

• Ask them to forward the e-mail to other colleagues who may be looking for your skills.

• Spend time on your subject line—legally it can’t be misleading and it must reflect the contents of the e-mail, but you want to make it punchy.

• Does it look like spam? Send a copy of the e-mail to yourself and see if you’d open or delete it unread.

• Always use both first and last names in the “from” line—most people assume mail from Lily or Irene or any other first name only person is spam.

Attachments = viruses in my mind. I have never opened a resume from someone I didn’t know that came as an attachment—EVER. If the resume wasn’t in the body of the e-mail, it was an immediate delete.

Joseph Nour is CEO of Protus IT Solutions, owners of www.campaigner.com, an e-mail marketing service for small-to-medium sized businesses. Access a free trial as well as tips, webinars and other resources at www.campaigner.com.

■ E-MAIL CHAIN LETTER

Take a list of 20 companies you want to work for and send an e-mail to everyone you know asking them to read the list to see if they know anyone who works at any of the companies. Ask them to contact you if they do so that you can ask for a referral. Finally, ask them