Promo Job Search Results

As designers, we tend to leave a lot of the tracking and numbers side of things to the marketing and analytics folks.

We are, as a species, more interested in whether it worked or didn’t work. We tend to be too inclined to just say, “Give me the results.”

But, over the past half-decade, working for a company that is very highly driven by analytics, I’ve learned how useful, and yes, even cool tracking the details of results can be!

Earlier this week, I sent out my first “Hire Me Please” email blast, drawing on things I have learned in email marketing over the years. I used MailChimp to send my comic book ad promo out, so let me take a few minutes to give them some free marketing. MailChimp is a great service, and its absolutely FREE provided your email list is less than 2,000 subscribers and you send less than 12k of emails a month. Go beyond those numbers and its still hella affordable. (Nope. I don’t make a dime by telling you this….I just LOVE the service)

In return, they give you ready made templates, or allow you to create your own mailers. You can schedule your sends, manage your email list, and all of the things the larger more expensive services offer…for FREE. Forever. Really.

On top of that, they give you a pretty robust tracking feature.

So here is what I learned about my own promo this week:

It was pretty successful, even if I haven’t gotten a job from it yet (although I have gotten a small amount of interest).

Of the entire send, 46.6% were opened and 10.8% were clicked. Really good numbers for a first send. MailChimp compares your results to the average for your industry (mine being “Arts and Artists “), and I am 20.2% higher than the industry average. I will also in future be able to see how I rank against this list, so I will be able to see what different promos do when pitted against each other.

“So what?” I hear you say.

Well, these numbers not only allow me to see how many of my target addresses view my emails, but they allow me to try different subject lines to see how that affects the open rate. I’ll get to see which style of email gets better clicks. And if this were a long-term email marketing plan, I could fine-tune the promotional campaigns to achieve the best rate of conversion.

Although, once I find a job, that’s the only conversion rate I need.

I’m already hard at work planning my next promo…hopefully this info will help you plan yours.