Remember when email expert Dela Quist told marketers in this earlier blog post that they should find value-driven ways to increase their email sending frequency?
One way you can increase frequency strategically—that is, not just sending another broadcast campaign—is by creating automated messages that either remind subscribers to take an action or build engagement and drive more revenue through a coordinated series of messages.
These can be everything from a simple reminder about a great promotion or a membership deal that’s about to expire to an onboarding program for new customers. Below are four possible constructions, ranging from the simplest method to the most complex—but potentially the most rewarding:
1. Resend the original message. This is the easiest way to remind subscribers about an expiring offer or subscription. It also will probably deliver the lowest return and has the most potential to annoy recipients.
2. Send a modified version of the original. Here, the offer is the same, but you modify the subject line, perhaps to add a deadline, and add a reminder in the copy or images.
3. Create a scheduled email series. This is a group of email messages designed to drive one or more actions or improve engagement. Each succeeding email builds on the previous one with a different but related message.
4. Create behavior-based email tracks. Here, you create a sophisticated set of business rules that apportion customers into different tracks based on their actions or lack of action.
Each of these approaches assumes that it takes more than one email message to move your customers into acting. I know I need an extra nudge or two when my wife wants me to clean the bathroom, just as someone who abandoned a shopping cart before checkout might need an email—or two, or three—before he or she comes back to finish the process.
I provide more details about each of these email methods in my recent Email Insider column, “When One Email Isn’t Enough.” Please check it out, and let me know if you have any questions or if I left out an email series that has worked well for your company. I look forward to your comments.
Related Reading:
1) Blog: “3 Variations on Resending Emails to Non-Openers”
2) White Paper: “Turning Lost Carts, Incomplete Forms and Interrupted Browse Sessions into Revenue”
3) Blog: “Guest Q&A: Dela Quist Talks Email Frequency, Branding”
With Facebook recently announcing that 200 million users now share their location through Facebook each month, more and more marketers are now launching location-based marketing programs.
In their haste to capitalize on the impressive growth of Foursquare, Facebook and other location-based services, though, marketers sometimes get wrapped up in the excitement of the new technology and overlook the basics of program planning and execution.
Below, we present three common mistakes when implementing location-based marketing programs, tips for avoiding them, and tactics for creating promotions that build engagement, loyalty and revenue.
Mistake #1: Forgetting Fulfillment and Training
For marketers running location-based marketing campaigns that involve local stores or franchisees, the most common mistake is forgetting to train in-store staff. In the rush to get a program up and running that provides an offer or discount to customers that check in, marketers often neglect to communicate this new promotion to their local store staff members and forget to train them on how to fulfill these special offers.
If you’ve ever checked in somewhere, received an offer and showed it to a store employee, only to have the staff member tell you they don’t know what this special is, then you’ve been a victim of poor planning and training.
The Solution: Consult and train your local store staff prior to launching your location-based marketing program. You’ll want to train employees on what a check-in is, about Foursquare and Facebook, and in particular how to recognize and redeem an offer when presented.
As an alternative, choose to only train your store managers on these new promotions. They can communicate to staff to speak with them before redeeming any new promotions.
Mistake #2: Not Creating Compelling Offers
Visit any online coupon website, and you’re likely to find a 10 percent coupon for your favorite store. So why make this your reward to loyal customers that visit and check in? Customers participating in location-based marketing programs are savvy enough to recognize when brands don’t create special content for this channel and are trying to “pull the wool over their eyes.”
The Solution: Create unique offers and content for customers participating in your location-based marketing programs. Don’t simply try to plug in the same offers you distribute via other channels. Better yet, get creative and try to do something that doesn’t involve a typical price discount. What about letting customers that check in skip the wait line? Or providing a special guided tour with the owner or executive chef? Or even inviting guests that check in to an exclusive event?
Mistake #3: Making It Too Confusing
Many offers from location-based programs include terms like this: “Check in five times within 30 days to receive 15% off a purchase of at least $20.” These programs simply have too many terms and restrictions to make it easy for customers to understand. Therefore, your participation—and program success—will be diminished.
The Solution: Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Focus on providing immediate value to customers that check in. For example, “Check in and receive a buy-one-get-one-free coupon” provides immediate value and makes it easy for customers to understand what’s in it for them.
So there you have it—three common location-based marketing mistakes and how to avoid them. What challenges have you seen with location-based marketing, and how have you solved them?
More on Location-Based Marketing:
1) Tip Sheet: “7 Tips for Getting Started with Location-Based Marketing”
2) Webinar: “How to Run Successful Campaigns with Foursquare and Facebook Places”
3) Blog: “How to Claim Your Venue on Foursquare”
While working at a large membership organization (numbers changed to preserve confidentiality), I learned about an aspect of email marketing that I hadn’t encountered before. This company has roughly 1 million members who pay an annual membership fee of about $500 per year. The members receive direct mail once a month, offering them many different products. In addition, about one-third of them are also signed up for emails, receiving about three emails per month.
I was trying to learn the lifetime value of the email subscribers. At first I assumed that the LTV should be based only on the products sold, since the membership fee was common to all members. But then I thought, “I wonder if the emails help decrease membership cancellations?”
To answer this question, I had the company’s analytical department track all members over a two-year period, comparing those who received direct mail only to those who received the direct mail plus the emails. The results were amazing.
 As you’d expect, in both groups there were members who cancelled their membership. But those receiving emails were much more loyal as a group than those who received only direct mail. In fact, the emails saved 5.75 percent of the members from cancelling their membership over the two years. This made a major difference in the LTV of email subscribers. Here’s how the LTV of the email subscribers looked:
 Previously, the company had been basing its email subscriber LTV only on the sales in the emails. With this data it saw that by far the most important aspect of the emails was the reduction in the membership cancellation rate.
Why do emails boost persistence? Because emails are a conversation with members. They’re interactive. They encourage members to respond to surveys, to watch videos, to ask questions and get answers. Email subscribers feel closer to the company than those who receive direct mail alone. Persistence applies to many different companies.
Arthur Middleton Hughes’ most recent book, “Strategic Database Marketing 4th Edition” (McGraw-Hill 2012), has information on computing email subscriber LTV.
Related Resources:
1) Blog: “Unengaged Subscribers Are Costing You“
2) Webinar: “Inactive Email Subscribers: Tips for Taming the Beast”
3) Blog: “Inactive Subscribers and the Potato Skin Myth“
This month, I’m excited to have Dave Hendricks, COO for Silverpop partner LiveIntent, contribute a blog post about a hot topic in the marketing world today—the rise of real-time marketing and advertising, and how marketers can take advantage of all the benefits it has to offer.
1) How has the rise of real time changed the marketing landscape?
 Dave Hendricks, COO, LiveIntent Marketing has always been real-time to one degree or another. Store window displays, in-store sale racks and “blue-light specials” are nothing new. Marketers have always been trying to get in your face and make it personal, urgent, customized and “now.”
However, none of these tried-and-true methods are able to do what we can do with “real-time” data today. Real time today means the synthesis of several data sets—most never available before the advent of mobile computing devices—to produce something which is uniquely, but predictively, compelling for each and every consumer. It’s the logical extension of what we’ve called “dynamic content” or “dynamic personalization” in the past. The difference is that these new real-time methods rely far less on users’ self-reported data than previous marketing methods.
These new methods are reliant on gadgets for assistance. Now, real time means that you may be presented with a marketing message ONLY when you qualify AND are proximate to the offer. Don’t have your mobile phone with you? You won’t receive the offer—because the offer doesn’t work where your phone is.
Until recently, email marketing has utilized mostly “Bayesian” approaches to support content presentation decisions, relying on large data sets of older data, some immediately prior (like “clicked on this link in the last message”) and some fixed (like “self-reported to live in Atlanta”) to inform the content of a marketing message. Some of these Bayesian methods have been combined with “Nthing” approaches to test marketing hypotheses and then apply the winning formula to the rest of an audience.
What real time has done is reduced the value of self-reported user data compared to data that’s gathered in real time. Making marketing decisions based on what someone told you five years ago is going to reduce your probability of success. Making a marketing decision based on where I am now is probably going to work better.
2) What are some of the best practices marketers should keep in mind when foraying into the world of real-time advertising?
First off, start understanding your users’ mobile habits. Real-time and mobile are kissing cousins. Certainly there’s also a big market for real time on the traditional “lean-forward” platforms like desktop PCs and Laptops—specifically real-time bidding (RTB). Another best practice: Don’t try to predict what device someone is going to open your message on.
3) What advantages and opportunities does access to an advertising exchange within email offer to today’s digital marketers?
Advertisers, specifically e-commerce companies, rely on email to drive traffic and sales. It’s worked well for them. However, most customers only open one out of 10 retail messages they’ve subscribed to.
Using an advertising exchange, retailers can take advantage of a channel that they’ve been using for centuries: advertising next to news. Newspapers are a common method of retail advertising. Until now, it was neither operationally simple nor cost-effective for retailers to buy ad impressions in publishers’ newsletters like they already can in newspapers, magazines and Web display. LiveIntent is helping open up this market so that retail advertisers can run in “news”-focused newsletters. Consumers have a higher propensity to open and consume general news from publishers than they do a communication from a commercial entity.
LiveIntent is the only company with a real-time display ad platform for email. LiveIntent works with advertisers, publishers and agencies to provide ad optimization, DSP/trading desk and exchanges capabilities. To learn more about LiveIntent, visit www.liveintent.com.
This month’s blog interview is with Fred Swain, a longtime Silverpop customer at Tafford Uniforms, a leading provider of scrubs and nursing uniforms. Fred has been with Tafford for almost five years, and in his role as marketing manager he’s responsible for overseeing Tafford’s direct marketing efforts, which includes its catalog, email and loyalty program.
Scrubs come in all shapes, sizes and, coincidentally, preferences, so Tafford’s marketing has to appeal to each customer’s tastes. Fred has spent the past four years optimizing his program according to those customer preferences and behavior.
1) Tafford has a pretty cool welcome program. Can you tell us more about it? Did you start small and build upon it?
 Fred Swain, marketing manager, Tafford Uniforms Our welcome program is a work in progress and has been since we began it about four years ago. Currently it consists of a maximum of four emails. An auto responder thanking recipients for signing up goes to all subscribers, but after that the communications you receive vary based on your purchase history. Other emails in the welcome program are a coupon reminder (we incent sign-ups on site with a coupon, and the second email just reminds subscribers of their discount), an informational message highlighting what we’re told are the best things about Tafford, and an “update your preferences” mailing.
2) You gather information about your subscribers through a preference center. What types of info do you collect? And how do you use it in your email campaigns?
We’ve really just started to scratch the surface. Four years ago I had all kinds of grand plans to do this and that and a little more of this and then we found that our product mix was so limited the slices and dices we wanted were too small to make any real difference, so we moved away from using the data.
 Tafford's "thank you" emails have been strong performers. In 2011 our product mix began to change; we’re now carrying less of our own product and more of other branded merchandise. So we’ve begun to see a shift in our customers. With this shift, we realized the importance of the preference center to get the right messages to the right people. We’re now collecting brand preference, gender (previously we were overwhelmingly female), uniform policy information, birthday and ZIP code.
For instance, if we have a sale on a particular brand, we can do one broadcast email to all subscribers, but subsequent broadcast emails don’t hold up. So, we then use the customer’s brand preference to tailor subsequent email messages.
3) What’s been the most successful email campaign for Tafford?
Wow, that’s a tough one, A few years ago when gas spiked a “Free Shipping” campaign kicked butt, but now free shipping is much more prevalent, especially from us. Our most consistent campaign has been the tried-and-true “Thank You” campaigns to recent customers, which we run a few times each year.
 Tafford has seen success with creative use of "free shipping" offers.
4) A big part of your success has been through testing, testing, testing. What have been some key takeaways of your efforts?
“Free shipping” wins every time. We’ve tested this over and over again. For a while we were doing free shipping with no threshold on almost all campaigns. Over time, we morphed to a low threshold. We tested our low threshold against a higher threshold (just about our average order value) and the lower threshold won hands down.
Showing the discount on the product rather than in the cart is huge! Don’t make your customer do math. I don’t think they like it.
5) What’s your approach to inactive subscribers?
The simple answer is that we try to not let them become inactive. For those who do lapse into the realm of inactivity, we worked with Loren McDonald of Silverpop to create and refine a program to re-engage with them. We studied our subscriber habits and found that the majority of open/click activity happens in the first 120 days.
Once subscribers get beyond that point they’re hard to reactivate, so we tweaked a few things prior to day 120, and after day 120 inactives get major changes in messaging. Cadence goes from three to five messages per week to one message per week with different send times. Also, the offers are different: a coupon, outside-the-norm subject lines, a survey about our email program (which we hope will provide continuous learning for us), a big discount offer and a sweepstakes for free product.
We found through testing this program that with much less send volume to a group of inactives (400 percent less!) we were able to keep about the same revenue (14 percent less) as if they had received five emails each week. Hopefully as the program continues it will lead to a better understanding of what our subscribers want and truly re-engage them with the Tafford email program. (Read more on marketing to inactives.)
For those of you coming to Silverpop Amplify on May 17-18, check out Fred’s presentation with fellow client SmartPak called “Rethinking Inactives: Reduce First, Then Reactivate.” Thanks Fred!
By Jeff Ogden ( @Jeff_Ogden), April 17, 2012
(This is the third in a series of guest posts for Silverpop written by Jeff Ogden, president of B2B lead generation company Find New Customers.)
As many as nine out of 10 visitors to your website aren’t ready to buy. But about eight out of 10 of them will buy eventually. So how do you convert today’s visitors into tomorrow’s buyers? The answer: lead nurturing.
 Nuturing leads will help you convert the 80 percent of visitors to your site who aren't ready to make a purchase today--but who will buy at some point. Silverpop offers wonderful lead-nurturing capabilities, but software alone does not do lead nurturing. It merely automates the labor-insensitive delivery process. It’s up to people to create the content and processes needed. But what are the key concepts to keep in mind when crafting lead nurturing programs?
1) Start with a deep understanding of prospective customers.
Too many times companies send out product information that fails to answer buyer questions. Instead, learn what buyers truly care about by conducting buyer interviews.
2) Tell a story.
Human nature is to be programmed to respond to stories. So tell a good story and tie every step together so that it flows from one to the next. I suggest that if you lack the skills to craft stories in-house, you look to outside firms.
3) Make it really valuable—to them and not you.
Your goal is to earn your prospects’ trust, and to do that you need to share really valuable content. But value lies in the eyes of the beholder. You need to take the understandings you developed earlier and use them to craft highly valuable content.
4) Include calls to action.
One of the most important jobs of content is to move the prospective buyer though the buying process. So, you want the recipient to act on what you sent them. Offer a clear call to action—something compelling you want the person to engage with.
5) Be patient.
One of the most common mistakes I see is companies trying to move too fast. One software firm called everyone who signed up for a Webinar to give them a product pitch. Watch prospects’ digital body language (for instance, what pages of your website they’re visiting can tell a lot). Make sure you deliver the right message in the right media to the right person at the right time. That takes patience.
Note: I’m presenting this information in a Webinar on April 19 at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET, sponsored by Data.com. Register here.
Related Resources:
1) Tip Sheet: “9 Tactics for Updating Your Scoring Model and Nurturing More Strategically”
2) Lead Nurturing Video: “Silverpop Programs”
3) Blog: “Feeding the Content Beast”
4) Tip Sheet: “10 Tips for Delivering the Right Message at the Right Time”
Good news comes to us in the final form of the regulations associated with the soon-to-be-effective Canadian Anti-Spam legislation (CASL). In October of last year, I wrote about the proposed set of regulations and had concerns about several of the requirements. After reviewing the feedback presented by many parties on these proposed regulations, the Canadian government has significantly improved the legislation.
Here’s what I see as the two most important changes:
1) Form of consent requirement: In the original proposed regulation, opt-in consent was required to be in written form. This presented two significant problems, each of which has been addressed in the revised law. The first was whether “written” included electronic forms. The new regulations specifically state that electronic forms do qualify as written permission.
The second problem was that written consent would eliminate many industry-standard methods of acquiring permission, including collection of business cards at trade shows or verbal permission given during point-of-sale transactions. The new regulations now allow for verbal as well as written permission.
2) Unsubscribe mechanism: The proposed regulations stipulated that a subscriber must be able to opt out with only two clicks. This presented problems for those who may be using preference pages to control permission. While opting out via a preference page may be easy, it often requires more than two clicks to do so, especially when including clicking the link in the message that takes the subscriber to the preference page. The new regulations satisfactorily address this concern by stating that the opt-out must be able to be “readily performed.”
Here’s a summary of the key proposed regulations:
While we don’t yet have a specific date for when the Canadian Anti-Spam law will go into effect, it’s expected to sometime this year. U.S.-based senders should remain aware that certain parts of this legislation are cross-border enforceable with the United States. As always with legislation issues, please seek counsel for advice on compliance.
It’s also important to note that the legislation provides for mitigation of penalties when the sender has made a good-faith effort to comply. Documented processes and training programs are critical to all senders of commercial electronic message. Silverpop Consulting Services has extensive experience in providing best practice training and helping our clients develop written policies and procedures for managing commercial messaging. If you’d like assistance in these areas, please contact us at SilverpopStrategyConsulting@silverpop.com. And remember, have fun and keep learning.
Silverpop does not provide legal guidance and presents this information as a discussion of general legislation issues and not as legal advice. Please consult your attorney for legislation compliance guidance.
Related Articles:
1) “Keeping Our Eye on CASL (Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation)”
2) “4 Ways to ‘Legislation-proof’ Your Email Marketing”
In retail, Black Friday isn’t just a huge shopping day in November but often the biggest sales day of the year for many merchants.
Whatever industry you are in, I want you to think about what your “Black Friday” is. I’m not defining it necessarily as a single day but as the fulcrum, or the trigger event that generates a majority of revenue or conversion activity and helps your program meet or exceed its goals.
Identifying your Black Friday moment and how to improve it can be the single most important thing you can do to achieve the greatest improvement ever in your email marketing results.
 Identifying your "fulcrum event" and how to optimize it is one of the most important steps you can take to improve email marketing results.
Think Big, Act Big
For many email marketers, their “Black Friday” is the fulcrum event in the customer relationship that drives revenue, repeat purchases, engagement, and loyalty. It could be an on-boarding or welcome program, post-purchase follow-up or other behavioral triggers.
For one Silverpop client, the fulcrum email became a triggered email reminder of a standing product order.
After conducting significant order-size analysis, the company added a free-shipping offer to encourage additional purchases, as well as product recommendations, top sellers and other information.
That reminder email is now its single largest revenue-generating email, without even including revenue from the recurring order.
How Fulcrum Thinking Fosters the Improvement Process
Focusing your attention on your fulcrum event helps you answer one of the great questions in email marketing: Where do I start to make things better?
It also clarifies your thinking, avoids distractions and frames the case you might need to make to your management for interdepartmental cooperation (such as IT or customer service) and additional budget resources.
Once you have optimized this key point in your email-marketing program, many other incremental improvements will fall into place or become obvious that they are next up on your list of things to tackle.
Focus on Your Fulcrum Opportunity
1. Identify your fulcrum event (or events). It could be your busiest sales period of the year or critical conversion triggers such as these:
- Membership or standing-order renewals
- The first 30 days after an email opt-in
- First purchases that drive follow-on revenue
- Converting free users to premium accounts
- Product demos
- Reducing churn driven by inactivity
2. Analyze your current performance, and identify opportunities where you could improve. Use output metrics such as percentage of conversions from basic to premium service, free trial to paid or first purchase.
Once you have found your stumbling blocks to conversions or opportunities to improve, you’re ready to go to your boss and ask for help.
3. Advocate for more budget and resources to help you achieve your goals. Speak your boss’s language here.
Lay out the problem in clear terms. Show the strategies you plan to deploy to solve it, the resources you need to make that happen, and the top- or bottom-line results the investment should generate.
4. Focus your energy and attention on the aspects that improve and support your fulcrum area. Many marketers get frustrated when they try to focus on the most important things because they have so many demands on their time and so many problems to fix.
It’s essential to not get distracted from your big goal. Once you have improved your fulcrum event, many other incremental improvements will either fall into place or become obvious that they are next up on your list of things to tackle.
What’s Next?
Need more help to identify the Black Friday moment that will help your email program meet or exceed your goals? You’ll find additional strategies and advice in the two articles below:
Last fall, my colleague Loren McDonald outlined a modern framework for email marketing best practices. His article provides a robust road map for examining all your email strategies and techniques. My new eBook, “Best Practices for Marketing Excellence and Operational Efficiency,” builds on Loren’s approach and expands the scope to all aspects of B2B marketing automation. Within the guide, you’ll find comprehensive sections on landing pages and data collection, data management and integration, programs and campaign automation, scoring and routing, and reporting and analytics.
There’s also a section on email best practices. You’ll see many similarities with Loren’s article, but each of the recommendations has been reviewed and tailored for modern B2B email. This means that some practices are identical, some are brand new and some are slightly modified.
Some may ask why email is even discussed within an eBook on marketing automation. The answer is that email is still the core activity and central enabler of successful digital marketing. Without an effective email capability embedded within your marketing automation solution, you’ll be relegated to voice mail and in-person conversations. That’s why a comprehensive look at email best practices within the construct of your marketing automation program is provided in the eBook.
As you’re adopting various aspects of marketing automation, there are a few general guidelines that I recommend adhering to, which I discuss in the eBook introduction:
1) Assess the impact marketing automation could have for your company. Review all the capabilities and benefits that a marketing automation solution has to offer, and develop a preliminary road map of which aspects you’re going to implement and in which order.
2) Evaluate impact to processes and workflow. To successfully implement certain aspects of marketing automation, such as developing new ways to track and manage accounts in the sales funnel, you’ll need to get the demand generation team in alignment, which may take time. Others tactics, such as using landing pages, personalization and dynamic content, require less discussion and collaboration with other departments. Keep these considerations in mind as you’re determining where to focus.
3) Start with a few key features and gradually grow in sophistication over time. While marketing automation can drive a wide array of business optimizations, adopting them all at once could overwhelm your team and push out the time to launch and in turn require accompanying process changes. It may be wise to postpone implementing key sections of the software as you focus on increasing the efficiencies and effectiveness of other facets of your marketing automation installation.
To help guide you through the process, the eBook looks at each aspect of marketing automation and provides a series of suggestions broken down into foundational principles, recommended practices and better practices.
The eBook is designed to be a workbook that allows you to think, plan and record your progress in adapting to modern B2B approaches. Use the worksheets and logs to document what you’re doing and how you’d like to improve. Review each practice to see if it’s applicable to your environment, if you’re currently conforming to the approach and if it’s a recommendation you plan to implement. When used rigorously, the eBook should provide a practical road map to allow you to achieve excellence in B2B marketing automation.
As we all know, marketing automation is rapidly changing. New techniques are being developed and new technologies are continuously being introduced. Over time, this guide will be updated as implementation recommendations mature and foundational principles and practices emerge. It’s my hope that the eBook will serve as a road map to help you improve your capabilities, communicate marketing automation practices to your management team and increase your effectiveness.
As you dig into the eBook, please let us know your thoughts. Are there any other major categories to be considered? Additional practices to be added? And has this guide provided a useful road map for your organization? We’ll take your feedback into account as we update the eBook in the future.
Related Resources:
1) eBook: “Best Practices for Marketing Excellence and Operational Efficiency”
2) Blog post: “The New Normal”
3) White paper: “How Marketing Automation Improves Efficiency and the Buyer Experience”
Until this week, the GOP race for the 2012 presidential nomination was beginning to look a lot like Christmas—or at least the holiday email season for retail email marketers.
A major series of primaries earlier in April helped heat up email frequency to near-”Super Tuesday” fervor, but frequency fell off after the primary elections and over the Easter holiday weekend. (See our Mashable infographic on Republican email strategies.)
Blurring the email-frequency picture was Rick Santorum’s announcement Tuesday that he’s ending his campaign, which was communicated in a farewell email titled “Thank You” sent shortly after the news about his campaign status broke.
Weekly frequency has retreated slightly to an average of 14.7 per week. It’s not clear whether Santorum’s departure, coupled with Newt Gingrich’s acknowledgement last week that Mitt Romney likely would capture the nomination, would continue the trend of decreased frequency even as primaries with large delegate pools approach.
 OBSERVATIONS
1. Hotter Campaigns = Higher Frequency
The heavier email frequency in early April reflected the heated rhetoric between Santorum and Romney. Romney holds more delegates, but Santorum had been the email leader, sending 70 emails since the study began, compared with 67 from the Romney campaign.
Romney’s totals include several geotargeted emails that went only to California and Wisconsin email addresses.
Ron Paul, on the other hand, cut back his email frequency markedly. Although he had been the most active emailer earlier in the study, in recent weeks his weekly average has fallen, from a high of nine per week to 3.8.
2. Frequency and the Fundraising Deadline
Romney vs. Santorum: The Romney and Santorum campaigns had markedly different cadences, or the rate at which messages arrived in the measuring periods.
Romney campaign emails appeared to hew to a set schedule, even those that responded to current events, such as election results or President Obama’s State of the Union address.
The campaign never exceeded more than two emails sent per day, and some multi-email days happened because one message was delayed arriving into the inbox a day or two.
In contrast, the Santorum campaign sent up to three emails a day twice during the campaign, several of which appeared to be quick notes dashed off by Santorum himself or a campaign staffer and sent in plain HTML text rather than using the official campaign template.
Fundraising deadline: If Super Tuesday was the “Black Friday” of the GOP race, then the March 31 contribution report deadline was the candidates’ equivalent of online retail’s “free shipping” deadlines.
Three of the four candidates sent a total of seven emails on or around March 31 specifically asking for donations before the quarterly fundraising reporting deadline: three from Paul and two each from Romney and Santorum.
3. Where’s Newt?
After receiving three emails in a row from Jan. 9 to Jan. 11 in the study period, we received no more Gingrich messages directly to the addresses we monitor. Did the campaign stop sending email to people outside of Georgia? Are certain ISPs blocking Gingrich emails? A co-worker did receive emails from Gingrich, but since neither I nor the other researcher received any messages, we’re staying with zero.
Note: These figures include all the messages that came to the various email addresses set up to receive campaign emails.
Several messages appeared to be “resends” of a previous message but were counted as another email. The numbers don’t include any emails that might have been geotargeted to ZIP codes other than those used in the study—the idea being to reflect the volume of emails received by a typical subscriber.
Also, Santorum’s farewell email is counted with the others his campaign sent in the most recent week of analysis in order to be discussed in this post.
More on the GOP Candidates’ Use of Email:
1) Infographic: “2012 Election Email Strategies in the Republican Race”
2) Blog: “GOP Candidates Email Fast and Furious Around Super Tuesday”
3) Blog: “GOP Email Throwdown: Content Varies as Much as the Candidates”
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