- Tension: Social feeds dominate the hype cycle for reaching Gen Z and young professionals, yet some of the most effective engagement still happens in the oldest channel on the internet—email.
- Noise: Headlines promising “AI-written threads” and “TikTok hacks” drown out the quieter truth that personalised email, fuelled by clean first-party data, can double on-site actions when done well.
- The Direct Message: Brands that treat email as a living feedback engine—rather than a static newsletter blast—unlock deeper behaviour signals and higher ROI than social alone can deliver.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message Methodology
A decade ago, career-advice platform The Muse rode social virality and Facebook listicles. By 2023, organic reach had cratered and Instagram acquisition costs were rising fast. Cue an unexpected pivot: invest new Series B funding in data science and rediscover the humble inbox.
“People don’t necessarily want to do the most obvious thing based on what they did last,” co-founder Kathryn Minshew told Forbes after raising $16 million. “How do you help them see new options based on their skill set?”
The Muse’s answer was a partnership with customer-data platform Blueshift. Within three months, personalised triggers lifted email open rates by 59 percent and visits to the job board by 200 percent—results detailed in a joint case study.
What the data actually said—versus what marketers assumed
Assumption: Young professionals live in DMs; email is for receipts.
Reality: Behavioural telemetry (resume uploads, city moves, article reads) revealed users were primed for hyper-personalised nudges that social algorithms routinely mis-fired.
Blueshift’s “database of verbs” architecture turned every click on The Muse into an event—location change, salary search, career-coach request—and piped it into four distinct email motions:
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Complex multi-trigger journeys fire off when, say, a UX designer in Austin saves two product-manager roles in Seattle.
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Daily and best-of-week digests adapt to explicit frequency settings (unsubscribe risk drops by 17 percent).
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Rich segmentations marry topic interest with city, feeding local job drops.
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Geo-specific alerts mix articles, company profiles and open roles inside a 50-mile radius.
Within three months, open rates jumped 59 percent, click-throughs to targeted site sections doubled, and visits to the job board soared 200 percent, per a joint case study hosted on Blueshift’s newsroom.
Pattern recognition: three laws behind the lift
1. User verbs beat user traits.
Demographic slices (“female, 27, Boston”) took a back seat to live signals (“uploaded new resume Tuesday”). Every email felt less like a blast and more like a just-in-time micro-coaching nudge.
2. Personalisation needs tight feedback loops.
The Muse’s data scientists sit in the same Slack channel as content editors and email ops. If a headline under-performs, copy A/B tests go live the next morning; if a job alert spikes bounce-rate, the algorithm throttles frequency in under an hour.
3. Email thrives when it embraces context, not inbox real estate.
QR codes and AMP widgets were deliberately skipped. Instead, clean HTML loads fast on subway Wi-Fi and defers heavy assets until click-through—respecting bandwidth and attention alike.
Contemporary connection: social fatigue fuels inbox revival
TikTok CPMs climbed 31 percent in Q1 2025 (SensorTower data) while brand safety scandals kept erupting.
At the same time, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection blindsided open-rate tracking, forcing marketers back to first-party interactions they can actually measure—like clicks to a My Jobs dashboard.
The Muse’s timing synced with this backlash: by offering truly useful, data-driven email, they side-stepped pay-to-play algorithms and proved a point—email isn’t legacy; it’s a permissioned, identity-rich channel hiding in plain sight.
Direct Message
The inbox isn’t dead—it’s where the data lives. When brands pivot from megaphone blasts to behaviour-driven coaching, email outperforms flashier channels and cements loyalty one personalised nudge at a time.
How any brand can start replicating the win
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Track actions, not vibes – instrument key verbs (save, share, apply) and feed them to your ESP.
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Launch just a handful of journeys – one trigger per funnel stage beats sprawling automation you never optimise.
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Ask for location early – geo relevance doubles click intent for events, stores, and jobs.
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Keep copy human, data dynamic – robots segment; real words convert.
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Review models quarterly – user behaviour shifts, and your scoring logic should shift with it.
Where The Muse goes next—and where you can too
Minshew’s team is doubling down on metadata cleanliness: resume skills taxonomies, company-culture tags, even preferred work-style flags.
Blueshift’s CEO Vijay Chittoor calls it the “second half of the chessboard” moment—each new attribute multiplies recommendation permutations.
For marketers outside career tech, the takeaway is universal: collect with consent, classify with care, and communicate like a coach rather than a broadcaster.
Your users will reply with clicks, trust—and maybe even a forwarded email to a friend, proving that 50-year-old channel can still move culture in 2025.
Looking ahead
The Muse is now tagging every resume skill, company culture cue, and work-style preference, multiplying recommendation power.
Blueshift calls this the “second half of the chessboard” moment: each new attribute explodes permutations for timely, relevant email.
For marketers beyond career tech, the takeaway is universal: collect with consent, classify with care, and communicate like a coach rather than a broadcaster.
Data used this intentionally closes the expectation-reality gap—turning the inbox into your most reliable growth lever in 2025.
