Email Appends Are NOT Opt-In Email Addresses
From Blue State Digital:
Every campaign is looking for the easiest way to meet their fundraising goals – and there are plenty of vendors here in Washington DC looking to make a buck off of those eager campaigns. Recently, that means a whole lot of campaigns are being sold on email appends: a system of matching email addresses to existing voter files or old supporter lists.
The question has come up with a few of our clients in the past week, so we thought we’d clear this up for the world:
Email appends are NOT opt-in email addresses. Blue State Digital will not allow you to send to appended email addresses through our system. This is a strict rule, and BSD can and will shut off your technology access for breaking it…
…Why are we all so strict? Simply put, it’s spam. These people didn’t ask to hear from you via email. The likelihood that an email append will mark you as spam in their inbox is exponentially higher than any other email address you have.
Read the whole post here.
Related posts on not buying email lists here and how to build your email database here.
The Future of Social/E-Mail Integration
From The Future of Social/E-Mail Integration – eMarketer:
Combining the forces of social media with e-mail marketing has been under way for some time, with savvy marketers using the two channels to complement each other rather than compete. As companies gain experience in the area, their choice of tactics may change.
A survey of small businesses by e-mail marketing company AWeber found the most common tactics implemented last year were tweeting e-mail newsletters and sending out blog entries to e-mail lists. Fewer than four in 10 small businesses were engaging in those activities, and only about one-quarter had e-mail sign-up forms on their social profiles or links within e-mail messages to follow them on social sites.
Social Media Marketing Tactics US Small Businesses Integrated with Their E-Mail Marketing Campaigns in 2009 (% of respondents)
Many more small businesses have plans for the coming year, and more than three-quarters consider integration of e-mail and social at least somewhat important. A majority plan to allow users to sign up for e-mails directly from social media sites like Facebook. This tactic allows e-mail marketers to grow their lists—cited as the top benefit of integrating social and e-mail by one-third of respondents—by allowing consumers to use their channel of choice and sign up on their own terms.
Social Media Marketing Tactics US Small Businesses Plan to Integrate* with Their E-Mail Marketing Campaigns, May 2010 (% of respondents)
Almost one-half of small businesses will include “follow us” links in their e-mails, and about 44% will include share options in their messages. Just 13.1% of respondents had such options last year.
According to a study by e-mail marketing company GetResponse, including a social sharing option in an e-mail increased their clients’ click-through rates from an average of 7.2% to 8.7%, and including as many as three different sharing options boosted the rate to 11.2%.
Read the whole post and see the graphs here.
How to Build Your E-Mail List
Following on from the recommendation not to buy, sell or steal email lists is advice on how to build them yourself:
* Organic list growth. There is no cheaper and steadier way to build an email list than sending your existing list interesting, timely, action-oriented emails. Always give your supporters something simple and meaningful to do, and always remind them to tell their friends to take the action.
* Simplify your website. Nobody should struggle to find the email signup form on your website. Make sure the home page of your website has a quick signup form in a highly visible place, and consider implementing a splash page to collect email addresses when people come to your website for the first time.
Check out Karen Diebel and Martha Roby’s offerings as examples of wonderfully simple-looking websites.
* Collect email addresses offline. Nobody likes to be the person manning the sign-in booth at an event – but it works. If a person is dedicated enough to your cause to show up to an event, get their email address. Make sure you have a structure in place to collect email addresses offline and get them imported into your system on a regular basis as quickly as possible.
* Use partner sends from allied organizations. While you can’t import another organization’s email list into your own, you can ask partners to send emails to their own lists, encouraging them to sign up for your program. So long as people sign themselves up to your program, the list is legitimate. Partner send swaps from organizations that already work together on a regular basis can be a great way to jumpstart a new or stale list. This rule also allow organizations like Care2 to legally “sell” email addresses, often with very strong results, because every name you receive is someone who volunteered to join your list.
* Advertise online. Google AdWords – the sponsored links that show up next to a Google search – are a proven, cost-effective way to build a list online. By paying for cost per click – not cost per impression – you’re only paying for people who were motivated enough by your ad to visit your website. If you set up your ads wisely, send people to a signup form, rather than the home page, to capture as many of those visitors’ email addresses as possible. What’s more, Google has a valuable Google Grants program for nonprofit organizations to receive free AdWords advertising.
* Social networking. People on Facebook don’t seem to want to leave Facebook – and it’s hard to fit your message into 140 characters. But if you’re already using social networking programs, make sure to link back to your website as much as possible – and make sure to tell your email list to share your organizations’ actions on their own accounts.
Read the entire post here: BSD Shares the Best Ways to Build Your E-Mail List | Blue State Digital
Don’t buy, sell or steal email lists
Obama’s digital team, Blue State Digital, recommend NOT buying email lists. Here’s why:
- These people didn’t ask to hear from you. Nobody – not even you — likes to receive emails from organizations that they didn’t ask to hear from. Sure, your list might suddenly double in size, but do those names care about your cause? Are they going to take action on your behalf? Probably not. Time after time, clients who come to us with purchased email lists want to know (a) how to scrub their lists and clean out the bad names, and (b) how they can grow their list in smarter, healthier ways than what they previously tried. Save yourself the trouble – don’t do it to begin with.
- You’re killing your statistics. Everybody who runs an email campaign is obsessed with metrics. What’s a good open rate? What’s a good click-through rate? What’s a good action rate? What’s a low unsubscribe rate? If you dilute your email list with purchased names, you’re immediately dropping those statistics. With nearly every client we’ve ever worked for that had purchased their list, the performance has been dismal – sometimes with open rates as low as 6-8% (which, when you account for different email providers, essentially means that nobody is reading your email). And after those clients send out a few emails, the bulk unsubscribe rate of emails that repeatedly bounce back can result in a huge chunk of the purchased list – sometimes a quarter to a third of the list — dropping off.
No email list you buy or steal will ever perform as well as a list built with good, old-fashioned hard work: giving people meaningful things to do, empowering them to take action, and making it as easy as possible for those people to tell their friends to take the action also. (And do you really want to be the person who has to explain to your boss why the list you purchased for $5,000 caused open rates to drop from 20% to 12%?) - It’s disingenuous. One of the key components of a really successful online campaign is authenticity. People organize online because they want to be a part of a grassroots movement bigger than themselves; they don’t want to feel like they’re a pawn of a purchased PR stunt. Repeatedly we’ve seen corporate entities like Wal-Mart and the insurance industry torn apart by the media for running “astroturf” fake-grassroots campaigns – paying people to act like supporters. Don’t be the organization that has to pay people to show up; create a quality campaign that people want to line up to join.
HT (Don’t buy, sell or steal email lists | Blue State Digital)
What would you do?
Candidate Branding Online
Read the full post from 2010 Candidates Focus on BrandingWhen you get down to it, campaign websites typically have two main audiences: (1) people looking to learn about a candidate and (2) supporters looking for ways to help the campaign out. Most campaign website designs focus on the supporter audience, taking on a look that is somewhere between a news site and an action center. This approach probably makes sense for well known candidates with established brands. But I’ve always thought that less well known candidates should focus their sites more on introducing themselves than on updating folks on the minutiae of their campaign. They should use their website to tell folks who they are.HT: TechRepublican
Nathan Deal (R-GA)Karen Diebel (R-FL)
Sean Duffy (R-WI)
Martha Roby
Pat Toomey (R-PA)
Kevin Yoder (R-KS)
