40 percent of e-mails are opened on mobile devices →

That’s according to a September study by Campaign Monitor. Here’s the full breakdown of where e-mails are opened from their report:

E-mail client data from Campaign Monitor.

Graphic: Campaign Monitor

Do your e-mails work on mobile devices?


How Obama used data to win reelection →

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.”


Nathanael Yellis is right about Apple’s e-mails →

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.

How an Apple e-mail renders on an iPhone: it's hard to read.


What the Obama campaign gets right about online fundraising →

For all the grief I give the Obama campaign about its fundraising, it gets a lot right. The targeted donation pages are particularly good.


Starbucks explains changes to its rewards program →

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.