Employment: Dear Sir…..

Saturday, August 15th, 2009 - cover letter, Employment, Job Application, professionalism

Employment: Dear Sir…

When I get up in the morning, while the kettle brews for a cup of coffee, when I get down to the front door to pick up the mail, my life is always made easier by those who have sent me letters. Like most, I can quickly sort the junk mail from the serious stuff. Normally I end up with four piles of correspondence:

• Letters address to me that are not bills
• Bills and administration
• Letters that are address to me, but look like junk mail
• Junk mail

Anything in the junk mail category gets scraped. Letter mailing campaigns on average get a response rate of around 2%, but because it is relatively cheap per new sale (ie – 50 pieces of paper plus postage per customer, costing around 50p letter makes customer acquisition cost £25/customer in mailing costs alone), it makes business economic sense. What it does for your or my perception of a brand that we keep chucking in the bin as rubbish is another point altogether.

Anything in the letters address to me category gets opened. It might look like junk mail, but I will open it to have a curious look. It is then down to the first page, and the “offer” as to whether I read further and take action. But, to get to this pile these marketers have done three things:

• They address the correspondence to me – no Dear Sir or To Whom it may concern: me, Ian! Note: List selling companies will charge 10x what they charge just for an address to include a name. It makes sense because it has 10x’s the impact/response rate. You never see Dear Sir now, if they don’t but the names they will use something akin to the product they are selling: eg, household insurance “Dear home owner..”
  
• They made it look interesting
• They grabbed my attention, and made me read

Job Search

Writing Professional CV’s and teaching people how to apply for jobs is not difficult, but it seems that many place certain resistance factors as barriers in the way to successfully Get The Job You Want!

• Rather knowing their skills, and what the market wants, they update an old CV
• Rather than reading adverts, they click to apply
• Rather than enclosing address Cover Letters, they trawl job boards

When you go down on Monday morning to pick up your post, just think for a moment: what makes a bigger impact on me and make me take action in my own life? What have these marketers or companies done to make me take action?

If you don’t follow the same rules, then your job application will end up in the junk mail bin: rejected.

Good Luck!

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One Response to “Employment: Dear Sir…..”

1. To Whom it may concern Says:
   August 25th, 2009 at 1:32 pm

   […] on cv4.biz I read a post dealing with this specific topic. The core statement for this phrase was, that mail […]