by Sean Devlin, Front Rush
Love them or hate them, emoticons (you know the smiley faces like :)) have found their place in common written correspondence and if you choose NOT to use them, you might be at a disadvantage. Experian (CheetahMail) recently did a study showing 56% of brands studied had an improvement in their unique open-rate when using emoticons in their subject line. What?
So when brands send out emails, and put an emoticon in their subject line, they’ve seen more people are opening them. Getting recipients to open emails is a fundamental challenge for marketers, recruiters, coaches, etc. It seems like such an easy task but with the amount of marketing emails the average person gets day to day, finding that niche can be a huge benefit. In the world of college recruiting, no doubt you are running into similar issues. A recruit might get an email from 10 different coaches in a day. So how do you improve the probability that they will open yours? An emoticon might be a potential answer. Fortunately it is simple math. You take whatever subject you were using before and add a 🙂 to the end. Or use any other emoticon that might be fitting. The trick will be testing which work and which don’t.
If you are a purist and have an issue with emoticons, that’s fine. You might argue it dilutes the professionalism of the email and reflects negatively on your institution. That is a fair argument. The balance you have to weigh is whether that matters or not if less people are even reading the email to begin with.
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