Job Boards and their Emails

I have talked to 20+ job boards in the past few months about helping them with their marketing efforts. One thing I have learned in those discussions is that many of them are woefully behind the curve when it comes to email marketing.

Sites that have been around years and that have accumulated thousands of email via signups have not been marketing to those people. That means their email lists have lots of dead, cold emails that are no longer valid. One board I talked to had 100,000 emails from 10+ years ago and had never sent any kind of newsletter or other campaign. What a waste.

I can tell you this job board owners, if you do not clean up your email lists and get started with a simple monthly newsletter your job board is going to struggle. At the very least it will be a huge headache if you ever want to sell down the road.

But in order to get there you need to clean up your email lists first and get rid of the dead weight. How do you know if an email is bad? Well, if you upload your list as it exists now into a service like Mailchimp and try to send something you will get flagged and possibly suspended if a large portion of those bounce off mail servers.

So you need to use an Email Cleaning Service. These services let you uplaod your email list and they will verify them with mail servers across the web if those accounts still exist. There is always fee for this service (usually $250 and above) depending on the number of emails you want to check. Some of the services I found online are below.

• Neverbounce – claims they will be integrating with services like Mailchimp soon. Interesting stat: 30% of emails go bad in first year.
• DataValidation – self-service platform provides free reports, multiple ESP integrations, and daily monitoring.
• Mailbox Validator – They have free trial as do most of them.
• Listwise – When you acquire new lists, you rarely have any clues what percentage of those email addresses will bounce or end up as invalid.
• Verifalia – web-based email validation service that lets you upload and validate lists of email addresses simply and easily.

Running a job board today means you have to keep pace with internet marketing tactics. Email is still king.