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Lessons Learned From Politicians

B to B has an interesting article: “Election ’08: The candidates’ e-mail errors”1

It lists four mistakes:

  1. Signup problems (including Obama’s site’s demand that you contribute!!)
  2. Lack of welcome messages
  3. Lack of relevance
  4. Obama’s list uses CAPTCHA on the unsubscribe page, something that would be illegal for you to do

These things are Email Marketing 101:

  1. Make it easy for the subscriber to sign up
  2. Let the subscriber know that sign-up was successful
  3. Send messages the subscriber thinks are relevant
  4. Make it easy for the subscriber to leave

There are more complex things, at least one of which2 (data verification) caused a small firestorm in the deliverability blogosphere not long ago.345678 (You shouldn’t be emailing “Stupid Poopypants” now should you?) But, if you can get those four things down, you will be doing better than at least 80% of your competition.

Footnotes

  1. Karen Bannan, Election ’08: The Candidates’ e-Mail Error, BtoB Magazine (2008), https://web.archive.org/web/20080922060430/http://www.btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080911/FREE/809109952/1084/FREE (last visited Sep 11, 2008). ↩︎
  2. Ken Magill, Stupid E-Mail Watch: Now Joe Biden’s Calling Me Names, Direct (Aug. 26, 2008), https://web.archive.org/web/20080911095437/http://directmag.com:80/disciplines/email/0826-obama-biden-email-signup/ (last visited Sep 11, 2008). ↩︎
  3. Dylan Boyd, You Are the Ones We Despise, The Email Wars (Aug. 27, 2008), https://web.archive.org/web/20080911133747/http://theemailwars.com:80/2008/08/27/you-are-the-ones-we-despise/ (last visited Sep 11, 2008). ↩︎
  4. Laura Atkins, Who Is Responsible for Data Integrity, Word to the Wise (Aug. 27, 2008), https://wordtothewise.com/2008/08/who-is-responsible-for-data-integrity/ (last visited Sep 11, 2008). ↩︎
  5. Laura Atkins, Data Integrity, Part 2, Word to the Wise (Aug. 28, 2008), https://wordtothewise.com/2008/08/data-integrity-part-2/ (last visited Sep 11, 2008). ↩︎
  6. Al Iverson, On Political Speech, DOI, and Mr. Poopyhead, Spam Resource (Aug. 29, 2008), https://www.spamresource.com/2008/08/on-political-speech-coi-and-mr.html (last visited Sep 11, 2008). ↩︎
  7. Ken Magill, You Ask for Garbage, You Get It, Direct (Sep. 2, 2008), https://web.archive.org/web/20080911231516/http://directmag.com/disciplines/email/0902-obama-biden-mail-followup/ (last visited Sep 11, 2008). ↩︎
  8. Laura Atkins, Garbage In… Garbage Out, Word to the Wise (Sep. 3, 2008), https://wordtothewise.com/2008/09/garbage-in-garbage-out/ (last visited Sep 11, 2008). ↩︎
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About the Author

Mickey Chandler
Mickey Chandler Consultant & Attorney

Mickey Chandler is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.