How to structure and optimize your email outreach campaigns

3 mins, 32 secs read time

Finding talent to match the skills and experience needed for a role can be challenging. That’s why it’s critical for recruiters to be able to deliver personalized and well-thought-out email outreach campaigns.

And since you’re probably not the only one sending outreach emails to prospects, you need to think about what might get them to respond to you.

If your emails are going to stand out from the rest, it’s important to be thoughtful in your approach to get prospects interested in opening your emails and learning more. Read on for our expert tips on how to structure and optimize your email outreach campaigns.

1. Determine your goals and KPIs

You can write more effective and engaging emails by outlining the goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) you’re looking for first. For an effective email outreach campaign, think about why you’re reaching out and what goals or outcomes you hope to achieve.

If you’re evaluating your email performance, your goals and KPIs can help you evaluate how to increase your open, click-through and reply rates. If you want to focus on assessing your sourcing and hiring performance, you might take a look at how many meetings were scheduled, the percentage of prospects that convert to candidates or the number of sourced candidates that advance to different interview stages.

Getting clarity on your goals should help you assess how your outreach is performing
and what needs to be adjusted as you source prospective candidates.

2. Create segmented email lists

Use segmented email lists to ensure you’re targeting the right people in your email outreach campaign. To build out your lists, you’ll first need to properly vet people and then segment them into different lists based on their job title, skills and any other relevant criteria.

One great way to segment people is by leveraging your organization’s talent CRM to create and organize your prospect or talent pools.

3. Add personalization to your email templates

Using templates can save you a ton of time when creating your email outreach campaign. When using email templates, be sure to include some room for personalization so you can add an engaging, human touch to your messages.

Here are some things to keep in mind when personalizing your email templates:

• Ask your team about any templates they’re using to get some sources of inspiration and ideas and then choose the ones that align with your goals.
• Change a few key elements like the subject line, opening paragraph and call to action so your template differs from the original.
• Perform an A/B test with a couple of variations each template to determine which one is most effective.
  
  

4. Establish your timeline and email frequency

To make achieving your goals more likely, it helps to establish the timeline for your campaign and the frequency of your email schedule.

If you’ve run any previous campaigns, you can use that data to help you make a more educated guess on how long your next email outreach campaign should run. Knowing the average amount of email steps and the email frequency for past campaigns can also provide you with more insight.

You can also figure out how to best structure your campaign timeline and email frequency by testing how many touchpoints are needed to get an open, click or reply from prospects.

5. Monitor your campaign’s progress and outcomes

To keep your campaign on track, be sure to check on it periodically to see if it’s making progress toward your goals. That will help you determine whether you need to make any changes to get better results. Changes might include adding or removing email steps or altering the time between each sent email to see if it improves results.

The best way to see what yields great results is to see what resonates with your prospects. By experimenting with different approaches, you can learn what works well and how to keep improving for long-term success.

Now that you know more about how to structure a great email outreach campaign, you can start putting these strategies into practice to ensure you’re running an optimal candidate sourcing strategy.

Ready to start sourcing more effectively? Download our informative new eBook to make the most of your candidate sourcing outreach efforts.