Having all your data in one place gives you a huge advantage: it allows you to create predictive models about customer behavior. This insight helped Barack Obama’s reelection campaign prevail on Tuesday:
So over the first 18 months, the campaign started over, creating a single massive system that could merge the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states.
The new megafile didn’t just tell the campaign how to find voters and get their attention; it also allowed the number crunchers to run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals. Call lists in field offices, for instance, didn’t just list names and numbers; they also ranked names in order of their persuadability, with the campaign’s most important priorities first. About 75% of the determining factors were basics like age, sex, race, neighborhood and voting record. Consumer data about voters helped round out the picture. “We could [predict] people who were going to give online. We could model people who were going to give through mail. We could model volunteers,” said one of the senior advisers about the predictive profiles built by the data. “In the end, modeling became something way bigger for us in ’12 than in ’08 because it made our time more efficient.”
The font in Apple’s e-mails is too small on mobile devices. You’d think mobile phone pioneer Apple would send messages that work better on its own devices.
Customers often focus on what they lose when a rewards program’s benefits change. Starbucks has attempted to get ahead of this problem by clearly outlining what’s gone and what’s new.
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?
