Tom Belford points out an important article on Politico about the diminishing returns of political e-mail marketing:

The public is fast learning how to dodge and ignore the hail of political email, quickly diminishing the impact of what’s been a reliable and low-cost campaign tool.

Open rates for marketing-related emails are now at historic lows — more than 80 percent go unread — a trend that is scary to campaign operatives who rely on it as their primary mode of communications with potential donors, voters and volunteers.

“People aren’t opening candidates’ emails as much because campaigns have abused the tool so many times,” said former Barack Obama 2008 external online director Scott Goodstein of the online campaign firm Revolution Messaging. “Nobody should be shocked that their email response has deteriorated.”

The Obama campaign even sent an e-mail last week with the subject line, “We send a lot of emails — here’s why.” It was, of course, a fundraising appeal.

There’s a good reason campaigns are doing this: they are focused only on the short term, and care nothing for the long-term cultivation of their supporters. So long as they can raise the funds and turn out the volunteers now to ensure victory on November 6, what does it matter to them how their supporters behave after that?

This is another reason non-profit fundraisers and other online marketers should be wary of using the Obama or Romney campaigns as models.

What have you done to break through the clutter of campaign messages?

A liberal political group makes clever use of HTML5 to tell a story in the browser. But is scrolling like this an intuitive navigation mechanism?

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What would William Safire or William F. Buckley think?

It was a classic Mittism, as friends and advisers call the verbal quirks of the Republican presidential candidate. In Romneyspeak, passengers do not get off airplanes, they “disembark.” People do not laugh, they “guffaw.” Criminals do not go to jail, they land in the “big house.” Insults are not hurled, “brickbats” are.

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They say that the first step to solving any problem is to accept that you have one. If that’s the case, our problem may just be that we still consider the mobile web a separate thing.

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The entire technology industry uses the word “user” to describe its customers. While it might be convenient, “users” is a rather passive and abstract word. No one wants to be thought of as a “user” (or “consumer” for that matter). I certainly don’t. And I wouldn’t consider my mom a “user” either, she’s my mom. The word “user” abstracts the actual individual. This may seem like a small and insignificant detail that doesn’t matter, but the vernacular and words we use here at Square set a very strong and subtle tone for everything we do. So let’s now part ways with our industry and rethink this.

Via John Gruber.

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