Deliverability advice to the DNC

I was working on another post for this afternoon, but when I checked Facebook Autumn Tyr-Salvia had posted a link that’s much more interesting to talk about.
It seems the Democratic National Committee has acquired President Obama’s email list from the 2012 campaign.

The […] list […] includes details about the amount donors gave and how they prefer to be contacted, will be a key tool in winning the 2016 election. With it, the Democratic nominee next year will gain access to a trove of millions of names and likely donors.

I’m sure there are a lot of people on that list who will turn into donors for the 2016 democratic candidate, but just having the list isn’t enough. One very important reason that the list was so valuable for President Obama is how they managed it. The list hammered recipients, but in a way that made people engage with it. The sheer volume ended up as a topic for discussion during President Obama’s “The Daily Show” interview.
Mailing a list from 2012, even a pristine, engaged list, is going to be a challenge. Some percentage of addresses are going to be gone. Some recipients are going to have decided they’re not happy with the current democratic field. Four years is even long enough for addresses to have recycled to new users, who may not be Democratic voters.
StrategyGlobeIf the DNC were a client I would spend a lot of time talking deliverability strategy with them. This is not a list you can just drop into a database and start mailing. It needs to be revived and processed. There is time for them to develop and re-engage with the recipients. I’d even say that in this case the good deliverability strategies are also good marketing strategies.
For the DNC I’d start with the following suggestions on how to get reliable deliverability for this list and throughout the campaign season.

  1. Segment the list into categories of engagers. Know who reliably opened and engaged with mail. This includes recipients who made donations even if those donations were not directly through the mail.
  2. Segment the list into categories of important recipients. What recipients does the DNC think are absolutely critical to talk to?
  3. Start mailing the list now. Engage the recipients so that when we really get into the heat of campaign season the list has been bounce handled and is full of engaged recipients.
  4. When you mail the first few times use the same address as the original list did. Take advantage of the filters and whitelisting done 4 years ago to improve inbox delivery.
  5. Start courting recipients using a series of emails about the Obama Presidency. These are the people who helped it happen, talk to them about the results and the things he did while in office.
  6. When someone interacts with any of the emails, move those addresses to a verified list.
  7. Set up the emails to encourage interaction with them.
    1. Ask a question. “Do you approve of the Iran Deal as negotiated?” “Have you contacted the White House in the last 4 years?” “Will you volunteer with the campaign?” Don’t overload the email with question, just ask per email.
    2. Make an offer. “Get your free campaign sticker!” “Lawn signs available here!”
    3. Have them take a quiz. Anyone on Facebook knows that quizzes generate clicks, put together a quiz they can take and then post their results on social media.
  8. Have a limit to the number of times you’ll mail to an address without getting some interaction back from them. This can be a number of mailings, or it can be a time frame. Continuing to mail unengaged people will hurt your delivery and delivery problems will hurt fundraising totals.

That’s just the start of things, but these are all issues the DNC should be considering and addressing. They’ve got time, they can do this and the list can be as valuable for the new candidate as it was for President Obama. The worst thing they can do, however, is just load the list into their database and start mailing it. That way will lead to delivery problems, like Secretary Clinton had when she started mailing her list from the 2008 campaign.

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The perils of politics

I’ve talked a little bit about political and activist mail in the past. In general, I believe political mailers tend to be aggressive in their address collection techniques and sloppy in acquiring permission.
For the most part, politicians can get away with aggressive email marketing in a way that commercial emailers can’t always. The laws for commercial email don’t really apply to political emails. Politicians and activists don’t have to comply with CAN SPAM. They don’t even have to stop mailing if you opt-out. They don’t have to identify themselves the way commercial emailers do. They trade, sell, barter and borrow voter data, including email addresses.
This doesn’t mean the politicians don’t get blocked. They most certainly do suffer delivery consequences to their behaviour.
Well, today I saw another article talking about the pitfalls of political mailings. According to US News, a number of people who are unlikely to be Republican supporters were reporting that they were spammed by the Romney campaign.
The Romney campaign says it wasn’t them, and that they are only sending mail to people who signed up to receive it. This is possible, the article at US News says that the signups came from an IP address that is part of the Tor network. What is Tor? Tor is a way to hide your location on the internet. Ever watch a crime show and see the master geek track a bad guy all over the world by IP address? That’s basically what Tor does.
It’s very possible someone did find a list of email addresses of people guaranteed to be angry about getting mail from the Romney campaign. It’s very possible they used Tor nodes to submit those addresses the campaign lists. It’s been known to happen, and it’s not like this election is getting any less contentious as we get closer to November.
Forged subscriptions are a problem for every activist and political mailing list. But most of them don’t take any steps to protect themselves from maliciousness. Welcome emails, confirmation emails, audit trails, monitoring can help minimize the chance of subscribing a lot of people who don’t want that mail. Most political and activist groups won’t take that step, though. They’d rather increase lists by any means necessary without adding any controls on making sure those addresses are valid.
The irony is that the first thing activists blame when they do have email delivery problems is their political opponents forging addresses into their list. But they still push back against actually implementing controls and protections against the practice.
As with many things, politicians want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the extra volume that comes from indiscriminate signups, but don’t think that should cause them any problems. It doesn’t work that way in the real world, though.

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Michele Bachmann Announces She's Done

U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) announced today that she’s not going to seek re-election in 2014.
Last time around, the race between her and Minnesota businessman Jim Graves was very close. Mr. Graves lost by a very narrow margin. Graves had already announced his intention to take on Ms. Bachmann again next year. As the news came out on Bachmann’s decision, both camps made it clear that they think their person would have won the rematch. Just yesterday, Minnesota Public Radio explained that Graves seemed to be facing “an uphill battle vs. Bachmann.” At the same time, recent polling by the Graves campaign showed him slightly ahead of Bachmann. The race certainly would have been very close, but it was looking to be a scenario much like last time around, which, at the end of the day, Ms. Bachmann did end up winning.
So if she’s got at least a fair shake at winning, why wouldn’t she take it all the way? Well, that’s what brings us to why I’m writing about this here. It seems that Bachmann’s failed 2012 presidential campaign was accused of stealing the email list of Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators (NICHE) back in 2011. In a bit of an attempt to re-write history, they later came to an after-the-fact settlement to label the action a “rental” and NICHE received a $2,000 payment from the Bachmann campaign.
And that’s just one of multiple ethics issues Minnesota’s face of the Tea Party is facing. In March, her attorney confirmed that Bachmann is under investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics for alleged misuse of campaign funds. One of her own 2012 presidential campaign staffers, Peter Waldron, filed a complaint that Ms. Bachmann’s campaign improperly used leadership PAC funds to pay campaign staff. There were further allegations regarding payment of staffers and attempting to require exiting staffers to sign non-disclosure agreements prohibiting them from talking to police or attorneys. And the FBI is now said to be involved.
I’ve consulted for multiple email service providers who have told me how challenging it can be to work with political senders. At least one ESP prohibits this kind of mail outright, out of frustration with candidates regularly playing fast and loose with permission. PACs, parties, candidates and other groups seem to buy, sell or trade lists constantly, and as a result, spam complaints and blocking would often follow. Thus, it doesn’t surprise me to see Ms. Bachmann’s campaign engaging in something email list-related that they probably thought was just common usage, when the rest of us in the email community would find that use unwelcome and unethical. (And it’s not just her party guilty of this kind of thing.)

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Fast and loose

Politicians often play fast and loose with permission and data. This can cause them all sorts of problems with email delivery at major ISPs. I really expect that politicians buy, sell, transfer, spindle, mutilate and fold data. If they can use it to further their goals, they will. And, many of the consumer protection and privacy laws don’t apply to political groups.
The news that Representative Bachman may have known that some of her mailing list was taken and used by others is a surprise even to me. I talked with a few ESP reps, though, and they told me that this was mostly par for the course and that they often have a lot of delivery and compliance issues with their political clients. Many have had to suspend or terminate political clients, and a couple people mentioned SBL listings.
This isn’t a problem with just one side of the political spectrum, it seems endemic in how the game is played.
 
 

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