How to Use Outreach: Best Practices When Cold Emailing Candidates
Outreach lets you manage email messaging campaigns from within your Projects in SeekOut. In this guide, you'll learn how to use Outreach along with best practices to apply to your campaigns.
Table of contents
What is Outreach?
SeekOut's Outreach module helps recruiters and talent acquisition professionals streamline candidate communication through automated, personalized email series (called Sequences). Outreach is designed for cold emailing potential candidates.
What is cold emailing?
Cold emailing is the practice of sending emails to individuals who have not yet expressed interest in your organization. Talent professionals use cold emailing as a strategic method of initiating conversations, nurturing relationships, and converting passive candidates into active applicants. Outreach will help you manage these conversations in one place.
Best practices when cold emailing candidates
For a full rundown of best practices, we recommend reading this blog post about creating engaging recruiting emails. Here are several key takeaways:
Personalize your messages. Mention their current company, a skill they’ve listed, or something from their background that shows you’re not sending the same message to everyone.
Highlight why the open role is relevant to the candidate: To best capture the candidate's attention, your email needs to answer one question for them: “What’s in it for me?”
Keep messages concise: Maintain the candidate's attention by making it easy for them to read the entire message quickly.
Offer a low-pressure CTA: Open the door with a simple call-to-action that asks for interest or permission to follow up.
Benchmarking your Outreach campaigns
A successful cold email campaign typically sees open rates between 20 to 40% and reply rates of around 5 to 15%. Regularly monitor these benchmarks and optimize your sequences accordingly if they're outside of these benchmarks.
Before setting up your Outreach campaign
First, there are a few things you need to do before sending an Outreach Campaign.
1. Connect your email to SeekOut
If you haven't connected your email account to SeekOut, follow the steps listed in this guide.
2. Add candidates to a Project
Outreach is accessible within each Project. A Project is a workspace within SeekOut where you can save candidates for a specific job, collaborate with your team, or share candidates with your hiring manager.
Please read our Projects guide for step-by-step instructions on how to add candidates to Projects.
Setting up your Outreach campaign
Outreach is located within each of your projects as the last tab along the top.
1. Get candidate email addresses
Candidates will need to have an email address associated with their profile to begin an Outreach campaign. Candidates without an email address will have a status of Missing email next to their name.
Select your Project and click on the Outreach tab
To retrieve individual email addresses:
Click Get email next to each candidate to use a contact credit.
To retrieve email addresses for every candidate in your Project:
Click on Get email for all in the toolbar directly above the list of candidates
Note: See the guide Contact Information Credits for more information on how contact credits are counted.
2. Creating an Outreach Sequence
A Sequence is a series of Outreach emails scheduled to be automatically sent to candidates.
Go to the Outreach tab in your Project
Click on Create Sequence
Choose either:
Create new from scratch or
Sequences library to access previously your previously saved Sequences. (Learn about your Sequences library here.)
3. Design your email
Add a subject line and write or paste your message into the box.
Use the edit toolbar to format your text.
Tip: Use the {X} buttons to add variables that will be automatically filled in when you send your message, such as the candidate's name, job title, or the day of the week.
4. Other customizations you can include
Edit or Add Signatures
Click the Email signatures icon (the pen)
Select Add Signature
Use the edit toolbar to format your signature, then click Save signature.
To edit your signature, click on the Email signatures and select Edit signature.
Attachments
Click the Attach files icon (the paper clip) and select your file.
The file name will appear at the bottom of the message body in the campaign pop-up.
To remove the attachment from the message, click on the trash can icon.
Note: Some email hosts will block emails with attachments before the recipient has read it. If you use attachments and many of your messages are not opened, try removing attachments from future campaigns. This could improve your open rate.
5. Creating and accessing a template
When creating an Outreach message, you can save a message as a template to use for future campaigns or access a template you've already created to use in your Sequence.
Note: Learn about the differences between your Sequence Library and a Template in this quick guide.
Finish writing and designing your message.
Click the Email templates icon (small envelope)
To access your saved email templates:
Click on Use template in the drop down and search for your template. (You can also edit your templates here.)
Click Use this template
To create a New template
Click Save as a template
Name your template and click Save
6. Add another email to your campaign
Click Add step (this is a new email in the Sequence)
Email thread options. Choose whether subsequent emails are sent in the same thread for continuity or in new threads for distinct messaging.
Click the arrow next to new thread.
Select either Send in the same thread or Send in new thread
Add delays. Specify delays between each email step to control the pace. Delays can range from hours to days so you can space out communication at natural intervals that won't trigger spam filters.
In the same section as the thread option:
Click on the arrow next to days
Choose the time frame
Edit the number in the field box
Click Save in the upper right corner of the pop-up.
7. Define your Sequence schedule
Click Change in the left-hand side of your message.
Select which email address you'd like to send your campaigns from.
Under Scheduler, select which days you want your campaign to be sent.
Select the time zone and time frame indicating when you'd like your campaign to be sent.
Manage your email send limits under Global outreach settings (see step 8 right below for more details).
Click Save
8. Verify email limits
Before launching a campaign, we recommend checking your defined message limits on Daily sent and Delay between messages to ensure you're staying within the parameters you've chosen. This can be accessed by clicking Outreach settings next to the Outreach tab in addition to Global outreach settings from step 7 above.
These limits are set so that email clients do not flag your message as spam (i.e., sending too many emails at once or sending all at the same time). While the following fields are editable, we recommend not changing them unless required by your mail server or SeekOut:
Delay between messages: The amount of time, in seconds, between sending each email in a messaging campaign. The default is 60.
Send limit per day: The maximum number of emails that will be sent per day in a campaign. The default is 1000.
SeekOut will always honor these defined limits. If you start a campaign with a number of candidate over the limits you've set, SeekOut will space out the launch so that it fits within your parameters. Keep in mind that your campaign may take longer to complete if you run multiple campaigns with too many candidates at once.
8. Save and edit your campaign
When you're done creating your campaign, click Save at the top of the campaign pop-up.
You can edit your campaign messages in the Outreach tab by clicking Edit sequence at the top right of the candidate list.
Testing your campaign
We highly recommend testing your campaign steps before sending them to candidates. This will allow you to verify that everything looks and works as you planned, such as ensuring that personalization tokens are accurate and hyperlinks are going to the right places. Missteps like these can impact engagement, the candidate experience, and conversion rates.
How to test your campaign
After creating your Sequence:
Select the candidates to be included in the campaign
Click on Preview. (You'll see the number of candidates you selected in this button.) The Outreach pop-up will appear.
Scroll through each candidate's message and select Customize message if needed
Click on the dropdown icon next to Start campaign on the top right.
Select which step you'd like to test and which email address to send the test email to.
Click on Test email.
Choose which step you'd like to test in the drop down menu.
Enter your email address or the address of a colleague and click Send test message.
Go to your email inbox and review the test email. Ensure all elements (e.g., personalization tokens, formatting, links) function correctly.
To make adjustments, go back to your Project's Outreach tab, de-select candidates, and select Edit sequence.
Repeat the above for each step in your Sequence.
Note: Once you've edited a specific candidate's message, you'll no longer be able to make changes to the campaign template via the Edit campaign button above the candidate list.
Launch your campaign
Initiate your Outreach Sequence either by
Clicking Start campaign for an individual candidate
Or bulk selecting candidates, clicking on Preview and selecting Start campaign for [number of candidates selected] in the drop-down menu.
SeekOut will begin sending emails according to your defined schedule.
Learn how we validate and schedule emails in the short guide "How it Works: Outreach Campaign Delivery."
Campaign statuses and their meaning
After you've built a campaign message, you can see each candidate's status next to their name on the candidate list.
Waiting for Preview
The candidate has a valid email and you can preview your outreach message to them by clicking the Preview button.
Missing Email
The candidate is missing a valid email address. Either click Get Email to use a contact credit and retrieve the candidate's email address, or click the arrow on the far right of the candidate's entry and select Add Email to manually add an email address.
Running
The outreach campaign has started for this candidate.
Paused
The outreach campaign for this candidate has been paused. Click Resume Campaign to resume the campaign from where you left off.
Opened
The candidate has opened at least one of your outreach messages.
Replied
The candidate has replied to one or more of your outreach messages.
Clicked
The candidate clicked on a link you included in your campaign message.
Campaign Ended
All of the campaign messages have been sent to the candidate and the campaign has ended.
Error
An error has occurred preventing the campaign from running for this candidate. Please reach out to your CSM or support@seekout.com if you see an Error status on one of your outreach campaigns.
Bounced
A message sent to your candidate has bounced and couldn't be delivered. Here's what you can do:
Find the candidate in your Outreach tab and click the Add email button in the right column or click on the
Add a new email address
Click the Start campaign button in the right column.