3 Factors that Contribute to Successful Email Marketing for Campaigns
Saturday, November 21, 2015, 6:00 AM | Leave Comment
We all began to appreciate the power of email marketing when we saw how the 2012 presidential campaign was run. In fact, President Barack Obama’s email marketing strategy brought him over $500 million, just from online donations.
So, how did he do this? His email marketing team simply followed and capitalized on the three most important principles that drive email marketing i.e. subscriber list size, placement in inbox and engagement.
Let’s go into the details of these principles.
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Email subscriber list
The email subscription list is just about the most important asset in an email marketer’s possession. Going back to the president’s 2012 campaign, he had a subscriber list that was five times longer than his closest competitors.
Email marketing, being an owned channel, is considerably more effective for driving conversions compared to other paid online advertising techniques, and it is also much cheaper as an added bonus.
Another advantage is that email marketing provides a permanent marketing channel, unless the subscriber performs an action to change that.
This is in comparison with other channels like social media where algorithms are used to determine whether and when a message will be displayed to your social following.
Having a large email subscription list is a better way to increase donations, as well as getting important messages out there as the election date approaches.
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Deliverability – inbox placement
Even with the largest email audience, poor deliverability will significantly decrease the efficacy of your email marketing campaign.
Deliverability refers to ability to reach a subscriber’s inbox. It is affected by a host of factors including lack of engagement, bad spending reputation, poor subscriber list quality and of course the content shared.
For a campaign, most of the time candidates use relatively new IP addresses with little history, which means that some may run into deliverability issues. Starting your online campaign earlier may help to establish your reputation to the audience.
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Engagement
The best email marketers are those who track sent emails to determine how many actually reach subscriber inboxes and how many are read/opened, especially since these are direct pointers to the engagement levels for each email message.
Few subscribers bother to go into their spam folder and find out whether there’s anything worth saving, unless they have a very important reason to do so.
Taking care to tailor the campaign, sending schedule and content to register the highest engagement is what pushed President Obama over the top in his email strategy.
