The Email Wars

What a great day to be in Park City with so many smart people from agencies, ESPs, brands and think tanks. Heck we were even lucky enough to have the lead email marketing strategist from the Obama campaign here to share with us how they used email to be the most important fund raising and organizational engine. Great work on Day One by Mediapost and the volunteer chairs that helped put on Email Insiders this year.

Overall the panels and speakers were great. They covered a lot of topics and took time to make sure to allow the audience to ask all the questions they wanted.

Looking forward to Day Two.

My Notes:

The Obama team uses the 3 M’s: Messaging, Mobilization and Money

Messaging: Strict Messaging Discipline – We followed everything that was said in the press, long term and short term messaging themes. Using email as the vehicle to drive home the points made that day, week or based on an event connected people more to the campaign than any other method.

Early on we learned that email could not only be a useful tool but a powerful vehicle to drive action. 

Mobilization: By using forms, surveys and behavior we were able to find evangelists, friends and people that could help us get to more people faster via word of mouth than ever before. People heard the calls to action for fund raising, voting, and helping which in turn allowed us to organize geographically faster and in a more efficient manner.

Money: Online donations for a political campaign set records using email. Although we did not feel as if we were always asking for money, we did always include a donate button. This drove micro donations for the campaign which added up fast. Using our database system to track individual donors we were able to match up their top out levels so that people cold maximize their donations over a period of time in support of the campaign and the candidate.

The Math: This was the first BIG email campaign that drove reactions.

It was a repurposed the press release turned into an email. Turned internal messaging into external messaging. Opened up the curtains with videos linked in emails before they were sent to the press. People knew sooner than the press in many cases. Messaging control gave us the power to make the average person just as powerful and informed as the media. Often times faster than the media could distribute the news.

Our Mantras:

Respect, Empower, Include the mantra of the campaign for grassroots mobilization. 

Customer Life Cycle Emails: 

Used series of emails to encourage increasing levels of participation in the community. Once you have actually become or run an local event, even in your home, they then moved the CLV campaign to asking them to become leaders. Empowerment. 

Take the elections into your own hands. Personal ownership of the event. 

$50 million raised online and 3 million people signing up were the two numbers that were widely used in this campaign. But the totals of both were staggeringly higher by the end of the campaign.

Our Three Biggest movements:

1. The Non test- 2007 smaller dollar donors given to meet Barack face to face – not a contest but due to lottery laws in states a “non-test”. So giving people the ability from donations to get inner circle was powerful.

2. Replacing the power of Washington insiders with the voice of the american

3. During the acceptance speech Palin made a mistake about community organizers. The sound bite was perfect for the narrative for the entire email list to drive donations and actions. It led to the single biggest day in fund raising in the history of politics. 

Build OR Buy?

The team decided to roll their own ESP and to bring on new servers so often as the list size grew so fast. Had to open new IPs and did not have time to condition and build reputation. Delivery was very important and a challenge. The balance of running the email management system was a huge part of the work.

They seemed to NOT use an industry standard platform. Maybe an open source email system that they built off of. Interesting that they would not use a trusted system with the importance of this campaign and email. I would have thought that they would have used a large trusted ESP to make the best use of the resources and time and not tied it to the cost. Maybe a lesson learned.

Email out raised the traditional streams of fund raising this election. 

I will be posting the video of the event I shot soon.

MOMS and Email

Over saturation or frequency causes them to just delete and tune out. When they get emails too often they simply stop losing value to them. They are busy people and only respond or take action when they had the benefit of time OR the call to action (aka Subject line) was powerful. It is not that they don’t want or value email but they are fast to delete something based on their perception of time.

One mom claims she has 5 email addresses and tries to be smart about what she uses them for. Is turned off on how much time it takes her to manage unsolicited emails. Feels that respect of her inbox is paramount.

Uses “Held Mail” at spamcop which was an interesting thing to hear from this demographic.

http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/336.html

Email is a filing system for my shopping and life management

Saves me time – yet funny that they talk about how it takes up all of their time

Moms use email as a massive referral platform. They share more sites, forward emails and word of mouth.

If brands get into the “real world community” of supporting schools, events etc then they will be noticed more. not just the inbox. 

Mentioning what is your Google search ranking as we don’t look past the 10 top links. 

Overall I think that this user group was not the norm. It was a 100K HHI group that to me at the Tech Elite in the home and did not represent the “typical” mom user. But maybe they are all just getting smarter than we credit them for.