Case Study: E-Newsletter Open Rate

How did Ghost Bureau improve a company newsletter’s open rate?

BY CHANTEL GUERTIN, GHOST BUREAU PARTNER

One of our clients, a staffing agency, sent out a weekly e-newsletter campaign that featured the latest job postings from their website.

The problem:

A low open rate meant the e-newsletter was garnering a very low job application rate.

Our approach:

A weekly campaign detailing job openings with the exact same headline each week only interests someone actively looking for work. We needed to find another reason for recipients to open the email.

With that in mind, we created a colourful series of career tips to help people with their job search, applications, interviews, and even best practices while they’re in their current position. We set short, snappy text against beautiful, inspiring imagery and placed one tip each week at the top of the newsletter. We changed the email’s subject line from “New Jobs” to “Tip of the Week + New Jobs.” Each week we added a new, custom-designed tip to the top of the campaign email.

The result:

The company’s newsletter open rate went from a 13% average to a 46% average within two weeks—and stayed at that new average rate to date, more than six months later.

Why it worked:

Career advice can apply to any working person, so the subject line (Tip of the Week) appealed to the recipients’ curiosity. And once they had opened the e-newsletter, they were more likely to scroll down through the jobs just to see what was available. Even if the job openings weren’t a good fit for them, they may have known someone who might be interested—which could lead to a forwarded email, and potentially a new job applicant or newsletter subscriber.

Thinking about how to make your e-newsletter more effective? Reach out to us at hello@ghostbureau.com to see how we can help.