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6 Email Marketing Tips for your Political Campaign in 2021
Political campaigns don’t have a full season or year to run. So if you are looking to jump-start your campaign by adding email marketing to it, you are at the right place.
This is a guide about what you can achieve with email marketing and 6 very valuable tips to make your email campaigns successful.
If you are looking to dive into creating campaigns straight away, you should checkout SendX. Create a test campaign, use all the features, test their customer support for 14 days. For free.
It has all the right set of features to make your campaign successful. And once the campaign is successful, we know that it will translate to votes, victory, and increasing the impact of your work.
Now let’s read in detail about email marketing for political campaigns.
How Email Marketing Will Benefit Your Political Campaign
Big money comes from email marketing
The no. 1 reason email marketing is so effective in political campaigns is that it helps raise donations from all across. People have their credit cards and bank details handy on their laptop or mobile and a persuasive email can really convince them to take action.
A major share of $690 million that the Obama campaign raised in 2016 was driven by email marketing.
Reminder about important dates
Emails are great to share important dates like voter registration deadlines, deadlines to provide their signature so a candidate or issue can be presented, an important fundraising deadline for donations, or when official voting polls in their region close.
This makes the candidate reliable and builds trust. Ultimately gaining popularity and winning elections.
Most effective channel for your campaign
Email is the fastest, most cost-effective way to reach a wide audience. Instead of being shown ads or banner, voters have the choice to open and read email messages at a time that’s convenient for them—something that they certainly appreciate.
More importantly, it’s getting as close to the voter as you can get.
6 tips that can take your political campaign from stale to truly effective
Segmentation & Personalization
When you are running a political email campaign, there is something in the manifesto for each group. But if you send a tax-free policy plan for industries to homemakers, you just wasted a valuable email.
The days of ‘spray-and-pray’ are over.
The solution is segmentation - dividing your email list into groups based on certain criteria and delivering a more targeted message based on their geographic location, age group and much more.
Individuals want to feel that you truly understand them.
If you don’t know the criteria to segment, in your initial emails you can send a survey form & then analyze results from there to create your segmented groups.
Now, the same email is sent to millions of people but even a tiny amount of personalization coming from a political candidate can influence people’s votes. If you establish a connection with them, they are less likely to disappoint you.
So, use personalization techniques like:
- Using subscriber’s first name not just in subject lines or greeting, but in the email copy as well
- Sending out emails according to time zone
- Referring to subscriber’s home city by its name
Stand out with your subject lines
The subject line is the first impression your readers get from your email. It can be the end of your interaction if it is not curiosity-driven, scarcity infused, or doesn’t move the reader emotionally.
Here are some popular examples from Bernie Sanders’s campaign…
- “You really deserve an explanation”
- “A very difficult decision”
- “I need to be frank with you”
Test your content
Political campaigns have huge email lists and thus a chance to get statistically significant results with A/B tests.
Test your subject lines, content, CTA & even images. See which one is most effective, and then distribute the most successful version to the larger audience.
Even a 1% difference can have a huge impact a political campaign list is quite huge.
For this, it’s important that you choose an ESP that lets you do unlimited A/B testing and even provides accurate data on metrics.
Adjust email cadence with activity level
There is no right answer for how many emails to send per day. Emailing too much can cause ‘list fatigue’ - your list getting tired of seeing your emails every day and finally opting out or worse, marking you spam.
But not emailing aggressively can hurt the election campaign as it’s for a short period of time that you would be emailing.
Usually, political campaigns have furious cadence, ranging from 3 to 5 emails in ONE day.
You can find an optimal frequency to email by observing the engagement level on your emails and testing a few variations.
Make it interactive
Political emails are rarely thought of as fun, interesting, and interactive. But you can put interactive with things like polls and quizzes and make a traditionally static channel a little bit interactive.
You can poll about the popularity of candidates or ask about the topics most important voters.
This will improve the engagement rate and break the monotony of long political emails, asking for votes or money.
Choose the right ESP
Choosing the right ESP for a political campaign is crucial as you have one shot at your campaign and you don’t want to keep experimenting.
You know you will be sending a lot of emails in a short period of time. So you will require an email service provider that can give you good prices for a large volume of subscribers and unlimited emails.
Stakes are high, so you don’t want to crash land into subscriber’s spam box. Choose an ESP with a high email delivery rate.
And of course, you might need support at any time of the day ( or night.. We know campaign volunteers work hard) so choose an ESP that provides timely customer support via email, and chat.
Not surprisingly, SendX checks all these boxes and is extremely intuitive to use. SendX for president.. oh, I meant SendX for the best ESP for president.