A Newsletter Employs New Tactics

Finding a new job is stressful; job-search sites should help—not hinder—the hunt. CareerBuilder.com, the largest job-search and employment Web site, aims to ease the search burden by providing email newsletters offering relevant job postings and career advice. The site has teamed with ExactTarget, a marketing automation company, for more than five years, but recently launched a new segmentation campaign that won an ExactTarget award.

Given that the old segmentation was on geographic region alone, Joanna Freeman, the site’s email marketing manager, admits the newsletters needed work. So her team segmented further—beginning with each recipient’s position in the job-search cycle. CareerBuilder and ExactTarget began gauging customers’ priorities by the number of mouse clicks on each newsletter link. A subscriber who hasn’t opened an email in several weeks or has clicked few links, for example, is categorized as not actively looking for a job. The newsletter content, therefore, is focused more upon workplace tips than on, say, interview strategies.

“When you are applying, we are there weekly [with new job recommendations],” Freeman explains. “If you are not applying, but you’re opening and clicking, we send more content-related things. We infer that you have a job, but you’re peeking around to see what’s out there—so you still find us of value.”

Freeman says increased personalization for the newsletters is the ultimate goal. “We would like to have an even better understanding of what these people are doing in each stage of their careers,” she says. More-accurate job recommendations lead to more-qualified candidates applying to more-relevant positions. This, in turn, leads to more site traffic and happier advertisers—and even appeases recruiters posting on the site. That’s a strategy worth employing. 

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