6 Tips for Helping Physician Recruitment Emails Avoid the SPAM Folder

For physician recruiters, getting a new opportunity in front of prospective physician candidates is becoming more difficult by the day. With candidates constantly inundated with recruitment calls, texts, and emails, the chances of getting through to these elusive candidates are smaller than ever before. But when it comes to email, it’s not just recruitment overload that is keeping candidates from seeing your efforts – email service providers might be preventing them from even reaching the inbox.

The SPAM filters for email service providers have become exceedingly advanced, filtering out all but the most relevant emails from trusted and highly rated senders. So what can recruiters do to help ensure that their emails reach candidates’ inboxes? Below are six tips  on how to help your physician recruitment emails avoid the SPAM folder.

1. Get Whitelisted

One of the best ways of avoiding the SPAM filter is getting whitelisted. While your email service provider will often ask other email service providers to whitelist your domain, candidates can also whitelist your email address. By adding you to their email address book, candidates can guarantee that they’ll be seeing your emails in their inbox without fail.

Tip: If you’re considering using an email marketing database like Med-Ties or another service, make sure to ask if they have all the candidates in their database whitelist them. If not, you may be paying to send emails that will never reach the inbox.

2. Maintain Good List Health

Email providers have become increasingly involved in deciding what users see in their inbox. One way they have dramatically decreased  the amount of emails individuals see is by flagging messages sent to unengaged recipients, abandoned inboxes, and SPAM traps. These candidates haven’t engaged with any of your emails in months, and the majority likely won’t in the future. Once an email provider starts seeing that you are repeatedly sending emails to unengaged individuals, they will start sending your emails into the SPAM folder – even those sent to engaged recipients using the same email provider.

3. Text to Image Ratio

One of the dirty tricks  spammers used to employ to get past email providers’ SPAM filters was hiding a text message in an image. Because of this, email providers started sending emails with little text but plenty of images to the SPAM folder. To avoid this, make sure to use maybe one or two images in an email at most.

4. Avoid SPAM Trigger Words

Probably the oldest tip in the book for avoiding the SPAM folder is avoiding trigger words. Using these words in the subject line or body of your email will greatly decrease your chances of ending up in the inbox. Some recruitment-specific examples of trigger words to avoid include bonus, opportunity, and loan.

5. Provide Opportunities for Engagement

Email providers aren’t just making sure you aren’t using trigger words or flooding inboxes with images. Recently, email providers have also started measuring “engagement,” such as opens and clicks. As more candidates begin to engage with your emails, your sender reputation will improve with email providers, increasing your chances of ending up in candidates’ inboxes. Because of this, make sure to include clear calls to action linking to your careers page, application, and/or opportunity detail. 

6. Pick the Right ESP

Not all email service providers are created equally. While many make sure to ban spammers and only send solicited emails, others are far less diligent in maintaining their reputation. ESPs with clients that have poor sending habits will likely have a negative reputation with other service providers, eventually being blocked by other email providers  and making it so your physician recruitment emails never reach the inbox.

Key Take Aways:

• Maintaining a good sender reputation is key to getting into the inbox. Make sure to send to candidates that have given you their permission to email them, are opening and clicking on your emails, and come from a reputable email service provider.
• Make sure to avoid classic SPAM triggers such as excessive images and words like free, bonus, and opportunity.
• When possible, have candidates add you to their address books to ensure that your emails end up in their inbox.