4 ms·

What the Obama Emails teach us about Email Marketing

48 points by hemancuso 14y ago

adjwilli 14y ago
I agree with a lot of this analysis, but one things stuck out: "Marketing will become better – and harder to resist." While I don't doubt that marketing will become better, I do think we'll develop ways of filtering it out just as we have with "banner blindness", SPAM filtering and DVR-skipping commercials. Maybe the people who continually bug their friends about some cause, campaign or product will tend to lose those friends too. It wasn't uncommon to hear people say they're unfriending people on Facebook during the last election for political posts. I know I personally tried hard to resist posting political comments on social networks to maintain peace and tranquility from amateur campaigners.
- edhallen 14y ago
  This is a really interesting point - I think the question will really come down to how well campaigns / businesses can measure the impact of their marketing. If your messages/posts aren't driving donations or purchases (or hurt the long term usefulness of the person you're marketing to), then you won't run them. The problem is that today most marketing is blind - completely unlinkedin from the impact it causes. I'm counting on technology / big data / analytics to change that.
- marmot1101 14y ago
  I think that the overall idea that marketing will become better will be true, but not until after it becomes worse. Now that the best minds of political campaigning have shown the way forward on the bring your friends along front, the hacks are all going to take a whack at it. And they will kick that horse to death and probably decry the failure of personalized marketing. However, there will still be the professionals who know how to use personalized email marketing surgically to accomplish a goal. Perhaps they will have to be more implicit in the future. They will also have to accept that there is a ceiling to the power of this new tool. I don't believe that that ceiling has been hit yet however.
- efsavage 14y ago
  I think our ability to resist marketing decreases marginally with each marginal increase in quality. At a certain point it does become useful, and we don't want to resist. Telling me about a product I really do want and/or need and can afford, that I ultimately buy, is not the type of marketing we will learn to resist. To a certain extent we even seek it out (Twitter followers, catalog subscriptions, etc.)
crusso 14y ago
Ugh. A little bit of me just died realizing that politicians are going to get even more aggressive about their marketing after the success of Obama's campaign tactics. They'll use it as a template moving forward. Since they're the ones writing the anti-spam and anti-robo-call laws, we'll have absolutely no protection from their pursuit of marketing their messages to us. The really sad thing is that back around 2007, Obama promised an open campaign that would use public funding - signaling that he was a different kind of candidate who didn't want the corruption of money to taint his campaign. Rather than leading the way on the high ground, the whole process is being dragged rather deeply through the mud.
- hooande 14y ago
  Obama's use of public funding is rather historic. In his first election, he raised more money in small increments from individual donors than any other candidate before him. That's regular people paying $10 or $20 each instead of Citizens United or "Swiftboat Veterans For Truth" putting hundreds of millions behind candidates. Do we want to have "secret donors" investing billions dollars to get the government to suit their business interests? Or do we want to get spammed daily by politicians asking for money? The first route cedes control to businesses, assuming that what they want will be good for most people. The second involves direct participation and a small amount of suffering from individual citizens, but puts the financial aspect of politics more into the hands of the people. This is a question that's more fundamental to the concept of democracy than it may seem.
  - oinksoft 14y ago
    The trouble with the micro-payments (micro, campaign-funding-wise) is that they are not vetted in the same way that larger payments are. Pardon my ignorance, but would it not be trivial for a foreign entity to take advantage of this and create a great many small payments from disparate sources (prepaid credit cards and such)? I understand there was some minor hand-wringing over this prospect in the most recent US presidential election.
    - johnrgrace 14y ago
jrockway 14y ago
Was the marketing successful? Popular-vote wise, it seems like most Americans just flipped a coin and voted heads for Obama and tails for Romney. Hardly a success, if you ask me.
- marmot1101 14y ago
  The GOTV campaign by Obama was considered very successful. His opponents even said as much.
- tokipin 14y ago
  the campaign only focused on swing states
danso 14y ago
First of all, it is hard to take seriously any analysis that leads with a word cloud. Two...as someone pointed out, this really isn't marketing. These are emails to the kind of people who would sign up for campaign emails, I.e. the candidate's supporters. So there really isn't much today about which approach is more successful in an apolitical contest because for one thing, you aren't correcting for demographics of the supporter base. Romney's approach could have been far more successful in terms of open-rate, but garnered lower donations because of his's base's spending habits. And of course, this is all moot without knowing the actual open rates for any of these emails
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  > First of all, it is hard to take seriously any analysis that leads with a word cloud. Furthermore, the word clouds don't even use the same fonts at all. The point they're trying to make is clear; they don't need to modify the graphs to drive it home. That's disingenuous, just like displaying a pie chart at an angle.
- r00fus 14y ago
  > Two...as someone pointed out, this really isn't marketing. These are emails to the kind of people who would sign up for campaign emails, I.e. the candidate's supporters. Are you serious? This is a great case exhibiting what email marketing does best - repeat business - keeping your customer base aware of (and buying) your products/services, and discussing it with others. That aside, Obama's emails were a call to action (fed the grassroots operations that led to his smashing victory in many swing states), while Romney's were more about inspiring the recipient about the candidate - which given the many gaffes commited by Romney, seem like a rearguard action. Shorter: Obama wanted you to get others to vote. Romney wanted you to vote.
jff 14y ago
The Romney word cloud was clearly election-based. To look at Obama's, you'd think it was a collection from a Groupon mailing list or something. Same goes for the subject line analysis: Obama's subject lines have the same qualities as spam subjects. And it worked.
alexshye 14y ago
The difference in email strategies is very interesting. However, this article assumes that the outcome of the election proves that one strategy is better than another. Is this true? If true, how much better is it? People vote for candidates and email campaigns are one part of the whole campaign machine. I'm not saying that the article is wrong, but it is hard to draw conclusions from it without knowing more information.

48 points by hemancuso 14y ago

I agree with a lot of this analysis, but one things stuck out: "Marketing will become better – and harder to resist." While I don't doubt that marketing will become better, I do think we'll develop ways of filtering it out just as we have with "banner blindness", SPAM filtering and DVR-skipping commercials. Maybe the people who continually bug their friends about some cause, campaign or product will tend to lose those friends too. It wasn't uncommon to hear people say they're unfriending people on Facebook during the last election for political posts. I know I personally tried hard to resist posting political comments on social networks to maintain peace and tranquility from amateur campaigners.

edhallen 14y ago
This is a really interesting point - I think the question will really come down to how well campaigns / businesses can measure the impact of their marketing. If your messages/posts aren't driving donations or purchases (or hurt the long term usefulness of the person you're marketing to), then you won't run them. The problem is that today most marketing is blind - completely unlinkedin from the impact it causes. I'm counting on technology / big data / analytics to change that.
marmot1101 14y ago
I think that the overall idea that marketing will become better will be true, but not until after it becomes worse. Now that the best minds of political campaigning have shown the way forward on the bring your friends along front, the hacks are all going to take a whack at it. And they will kick that horse to death and probably decry the failure of personalized marketing. However, there will still be the professionals who know how to use personalized email marketing surgically to accomplish a goal. Perhaps they will have to be more implicit in the future. They will also have to accept that there is a ceiling to the power of this new tool. I don't believe that that ceiling has been hit yet however.
efsavage 14y ago
I think our ability to resist marketing decreases marginally with each marginal increase in quality. At a certain point it does become useful, and we don't want to resist. Telling me about a product I really do want and/or need and can afford, that I ultimately buy, is not the type of marketing we will learn to resist. To a certain extent we even seek it out (Twitter followers, catalog subscriptions, etc.)

crusso 14y ago

Ugh. A little bit of me just died realizing that politicians are going to get even more aggressive about their marketing after the success of Obama's campaign tactics. They'll use it as a template moving forward. Since they're the ones writing the anti-spam and anti-robo-call laws, we'll have absolutely no protection from their pursuit of marketing their messages to us. The really sad thing is that back around 2007, Obama promised an open campaign that would use public funding - signaling that he was a different kind of candidate who didn't want the corruption of money to taint his campaign. Rather than leading the way on the high ground, the whole process is being dragged rather deeply through the mud.

hooande 14y ago
Obama's use of public funding is rather historic. In his first election, he raised more money in small increments from individual donors than any other candidate before him. That's regular people paying $10 or $20 each instead of Citizens United or "Swiftboat Veterans For Truth" putting hundreds of millions behind candidates. Do we want to have "secret donors" investing billions dollars to get the government to suit their business interests? Or do we want to get spammed daily by politicians asking for money? The first route cedes control to businesses, assuming that what they want will be good for most people. The second involves direct participation and a small amount of suffering from individual citizens, but puts the financial aspect of politics more into the hands of the people. This is a question that's more fundamental to the concept of democracy than it may seem.
- oinksoft 14y ago
  The trouble with the micro-payments (micro, campaign-funding-wise) is that they are not vetted in the same way that larger payments are. Pardon my ignorance, but would it not be trivial for a foreign entity to take advantage of this and create a great many small payments from disparate sources (prepaid credit cards and such)? I understand there was some minor hand-wringing over this prospect in the most recent US presidential election.
  - johnrgrace 14y ago

jrockway 14y ago

Was the marketing successful? Popular-vote wise, it seems like most Americans just flipped a coin and voted heads for Obama and tails for Romney. Hardly a success, if you ask me.

marmot1101 14y ago
The GOTV campaign by Obama was considered very successful. His opponents even said as much.
tokipin 14y ago
the campaign only focused on swing states

danso 14y ago

First of all, it is hard to take seriously any analysis that leads with a word cloud. Two...as someone pointed out, this really isn't marketing. These are emails to the kind of people who would sign up for campaign emails, I.e. the candidate's supporters. So there really isn't much today about which approach is more successful in an apolitical contest because for one thing, you aren't correcting for demographics of the supporter base. Romney's approach could have been far more successful in terms of open-rate, but garnered lower donations because of his's base's spending habits. And of course, this is all moot without knowing the actual open rates for any of these emails

chimeracoder 14y ago
> First of all, it is hard to take seriously any analysis that leads with a word cloud. Furthermore, the word clouds don't even use the same fonts at all. The point they're trying to make is clear; they don't need to modify the graphs to drive it home. That's disingenuous, just like displaying a pie chart at an angle.
r00fus 14y ago
> Two...as someone pointed out, this really isn't marketing. These are emails to the kind of people who would sign up for campaign emails, I.e. the candidate's supporters. Are you serious? This is a great case exhibiting what email marketing does best - repeat business - keeping your customer base aware of (and buying) your products/services, and discussing it with others. That aside, Obama's emails were a call to action (fed the grassroots operations that led to his smashing victory in many swing states), while Romney's were more about inspiring the recipient about the candidate - which given the many gaffes commited by Romney, seem like a rearguard action. Shorter: Obama wanted you to get others to vote. Romney wanted you to vote.

jff 14y ago

The Romney word cloud was clearly election-based. To look at Obama's, you'd think it was a collection from a Groupon mailing list or something. Same goes for the subject line analysis: Obama's subject lines have the same qualities as spam subjects. And it worked.

alexshye 14y ago

The difference in email strategies is very interesting. However, this article assumes that the outcome of the election proves that one strategy is better than another. Is this true? If true, how much better is it? People vote for candidates and email campaigns are one part of the whole campaign machine. I'm not saying that the article is wrong, but it is hard to draw conclusions from it without knowing more information.