Five Tips for Clickable Email Subject Lines

January 15, 2018

 

iCIMS Staff

3 min read

Recruitment marketing is a complex process — you need to meet candidates where they’re searching for information about your company, either on your website, social media or a third-party website like Glassdoor.com. Once you’ve connected with those potential candidates, you need to stay in contact with them. One of the best ways to do this is to have candidates opt in to an automated email campaign, which you can run with a Talent (CRM) tool, sometimes referred to as a recruitment marketing automation tool.

These tools allow you to engage passive candidates with information about your company culture, new career opportunities being offered or improvements made to your employee benefits. Most CRM tools come with recruiting email templates, but you’ll need to create compelling subject lines when emailing potential candidates. In fact, an email subject line needs just as much thought as the content of the email — 33 percent of email recipients open emails based solely on the subject line, meaning that if your subject line isn’t engaging, the candidate won’t bother clicking on it to read what’s inside.

So, how do you create clickable email subject lines? Here are five tips:

1. Keep It Short

In today’s world, most people check their email on mobile devices, which unfortunately suffer from some severe screen space limitations compared to desktop computers. It’s for this reason that email subject lines must be short and sweet — 50 characters or less is generally considered the best length for email subject lines.

2. Don’t Be Vague

Don’t make your audience guess what your email is about — let them know exactly what they’re getting from the email. This should go without saying, but make sure you don’t make any kinds of false claims in the email, otherwise your company can lose credibility with those potential candidates very fast.

3. Make it Action Oriented

You always want to give your candidate an action in a subject line, because you want them to take action — in this case, clicking on the email. Even if you’re just sending sample emails to keep candidates warm, you want to make sure they have a reason to take action based on your subject line.

4. Don’t Ask a Question

You send emails to potential clients because you believe they have a problem, and that you have the solution. That’s why it’s tempting to ask a question in email subject lines, because you already have the answer. But what if the answer is “no” because the recipient doesn’t even know they have a problem yet? An attention-grabbing statement is usually the better choice over asking a question.

5. Use Stats or Numbers

Building off the last tip, using numbers or statistics in your subject lines is a great way to grab the recipient’s attention. This can also help you tie in other tips from this list, since numbers allow you to make clear exactly what’s in the email, while also helping you to keep the character length fairly short.

iCIMS Connect allows recruiters to regularly communicate with potential candidates through email campaigns, then use reporting technology to track how those candidates apply to jobs or register for networking events. iCIMS also tracks important recruitment marketing metrics like open- and click-through rates to help improve the impact of future email campaigns.

For more information about automated email campaigns and recruitment marketing, please check out our eBook Recruitment Marketing: Fad or Future?