I'm kind of disgruntled right now with the Obama VP e-mail and text message campaign.  It now seems like a bait and switch scheme to me. (more…)

People that work in online politics know that a massive email list is the most valuable asset you can have.  A big email list equals fundraising clout and influence.

Yesterday, the Barack Obama campaign announced that they would be revealing his pick for Vice President to supporters via email and text.  The campaign is urging supporters to sign up to receive an email alert to be the “first to know” who the pick is, moments after the decision is made. 

Frankly, the language is a bit vague, as it could be read to mean he will announce his VP exclusively via email and text or simply that they will send an email out as they announce the pick on television or elsewhere, which would be nothing new. 

Regardless, this is a brilliant and novel list building stunt.  The story immediately jumped to the front page of sites like Digg and word of the special VP announcement list is undoubtedly spreading via email and text.  Indeed, after signing up for the list on both text and email you are encouraged to tell your friends and family about the exclusively opportunity to be the first to know about the pick (screen shot below - click for full size). 

I can guarantee you this stunt will help Obama build his list by reaching people who normally wouldn’t sign up for a political list.  A really smart move. 

About a week ago, I wrote a blog entry on my newfound paranoia and fear of cell phone spam.  Fortunately, I have had time to relax, breathe, and find a totally new fear.  "Vishing" is a term that is the combination of the words "voice" and "phishing."  In case you are unfamiliar, phishing is basically an attempt to illegally and fraudulently acquire sensitive details, such as usernames, passwords and credit card information, by masquerading as an upright entity in an electronic communication.  Vishing takes this idea to the next level, an annoying and scary level.

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It finally happened to me; I was hit with my first spam message via my cell phone.  I was foolish enough to believe that spam stopped with email, but luckily I was prepared for this eventuality and deleted the message without opening it.  This is my first word of advice for anyone who receives one of these dastardly messages.  Merely opening the message may result in charges being sent to your cell phone.

Text message spam has grown to amounts of 1.1 billion last year, according to recent reports.  The cell phone spam problem has been something that has engulfed countries such as China and South Korea for years now (sigh…they are always ahead of us in technology!).  According to the CAN-SPAM Act passed in 2003, this should be illegal, but I have my doubts as to how many of these spammers are going to be caught.  However, after some exhaustive research, I have come up with a five-point plan for combating requests for purchases of fake stocks and penis pumps. (more…)

Last May I wrote a post about how offices on Capitol Hill deal with the barage of emails they constantly receive. Regulatory bodies and similar organizations also must handle similar flows of e-mails. Despite this, it is very important for our country's democratic nature that individuals' voices are heard. Further, some regulatory bodies are legally required to process public feedback during a comment and review period before a change is made. So what can a Congressional office (or a similar organization) do when it receives tens of thousands of e-mails from constituents the day before a key vote? (more…)

My post yesterday about the use of images in email got me thinking about what the best days or times are for doing bulk email sends. There really isn’t one answer, as each list is unique and finding the best times is a matter of trial and error. But I’ll take a shot at providing some general guidelines.

Based on my own experiences and everything I’ve read, for business to business emails (or any list that consists mostly of work addresses) the best days are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

The rationale for this is pretty simple. Most people don’t check their business email accounts on Saturdays or Sundays. On Mondays people tend to be in heavy delete mode, as they try to clear all the email that has accumulated over the weekend. On Fridays, people tend to be less focused, as they look forward to the weekend. Friday is also an extremely popular day of the week to take off, meaning your email could end up not being seen until Monday.

In terms of time for business-focused email, it is best to send email out during normal business hours. If you send your email before or after work hours, there is a good chance folks won’t see the email as they try to clear their email queue first thing in the morning and go into delete mode. Assuming you are trying to reach a US audience, I think between 12:00 and 4:00 EST is the best time, as you’ll catch people at work in all time zones.

For business to consumer emails (or any list made up mostly of personal email accounts), the situation is more fluid. Some studies show that these audiences tend to be more responsive to emails sent after work hours and on Fridays and weekends, as this is when people tend to check personal email accounts.

It makes sense - lots of people with desk jobs might not check their personal email accounts during the day and others don’t even really use email in their jobs. Just as importantly, business to consumer email tends to be about action. You want users to buy something or enter your contest or whatever. Most people are more comfortable performing those type of activities on their personal computers during their off hours.

My sense though is that there is more room for error for business to consumer emails in terms of time/date. In my experience, volume to personal accounts is lower and spam tends to be less of a problem. So I don’t think people get as delete happy as they do with their corporate email accounts.

Ultimately though, every list is different. Email Labs suggests looking at when people register for your list and trying to send during the days/time you get the most sign ups. But the best way to figure out when to send is through trial and error. Try sending out messages on different days at different times and see when you get the best open and click through rates. This will allow you to figure out your own best practices for your list.

We’ve written a bit here about how some of the Presidential campaigns this cycle have embraced stripped down emails that don’t include a lot of images or fancy formatting. In that previous post, the focus was on how this format can make emails seem more personal, and not on the technical reasons to avoid using a lot of images. Josh Levy’s post yesterday about John McCain’s email mistakes inspired me to look at the issue from a more technical perspective.

The most compelling reason to limit the use of images in HTML emails is that tons of people are never going to see them. Some people actively turn off images. Others don’t see them because their email programs turn them off by default (Campaign Monitor has a great chart showing a breakdown). Some people work at companies that block images in emails to save bandwidth/stop porn. And yet more people are accessing email on cell phones that can’t read images. I have yet to see a percentage I trust completely, but it is estimated that somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of email users block at least some images in HTML emails. That is a lot.

Speaking anecdotally, I’m a lot less likely to see images in email than I did a year ago. At work we upgraded recently to Outlook 2007 which has images blocked by default. I never changed the setting and now follow the process of opting in to see images based on whether I trust the sender. I use Gmail for my personal email and follow the same procedure. (You really should check out that chart breaking down default settings for major email clients.)

So what to do. Stop using images altogether? Use them sparingly? Although a bit old, the useful Campaign Monitor blog provides a great guide to email design. Here are their six tips on how to send emails that actually gets to the recipient in a readable format:

1. Never use images for important content like headlines, links and any calls to action.
2. Use alt text for all images for a better experience in Gmail and always add the height and width to the image to ensure that the blank placeholder image doesn’t throw your design out.
3. Add a text-based link to a web version of your design at the top of your email.
4. Ensure your most compelling content is at the top (and preferably to the left).
5. Test your design in a preview pane, full screen and with images turned on and off before you send it.
6. Ask your subscriber to add your From address to their address book at every opportunity.

Anyone that has sent bulk emails out knows that it is a really stressful thing. Even if you do your job perfectly (no typos, valid web links, good HTML, etc.), your email is going to be garbled for at least a small percentage of people who have weird settings or are using funky email clients (Hello Lotus Notes). And those small percentage of people will inevitably complain to your boss’ best friend from high school and you’ll hear about it.

Given the high probability for mistakes, email is really a format where you need to keep things simple. If you have to use images, design the email so that it will degrade gracefully if images are turned off. The emails we design that use images typically look like an online version of letter head, with a single header image. If you keep it simple, you’ll get yelled out less for supposed mistakes and your click through rates will increase since more people will be able to actually see the content of your message.

Note: I just saw this post from Michael Whitney at Tech President that looks at the use of email by Presidential candidates and expands on Campaign Monitor’s tips. Great minds. Give it a read, as it goes into things in a bit more depth than my post.

Nancy Scola over at TechPresident has the scoop on the latest attempt by a Presidential campaign to personalize mass emails. Basically, “Barack Obama” sent a “personal” email message out to his list yesterday about Hillary’s cash advantage. I am a member of Obama’s list and got the message. Then a few hours later Obama’s message was forwarded to me by some stranger in Leawood, KS with a personal note encouraging me to donate more cash. This same person from Leawood, KS also emailed Nancy, and the “from” address on the email was the same generic info@barackobama.com address that “Barack” emails me from personally. Basically, I think the Obama campaign has built some tools into their site that makes it easy for the most active members of their list to send mass emails to the least active.

This is just the latest iteration of a trend this cycle: impersonal mass emails that have been carefully doctored to look like personal notes. These stripped down emails have some common characteristics:

• They are usually from someone high up in the campaign who would never email you personally.
• They do not include any pictures or graphics and very little formatting (bolding, italics, etc.). So it looks likes something the sender could plausibly put together themselves.
• They include typical email subject lines like “FW” and “RE” that make it look like the sender just spontaneously decided to forward me something from Outlook.
• The text is the same press-office crafted spin you read in every campaign email.

Basically they are made to look like the work/pleasure emails we all get everyday from our friends, clients and co-workers, but are really the same old same old.

Part of me likes this trend. Theoretically, I prefer to receive text emails w/o all the formatting and pretty pictures.   I’m also confident these are working pretty well, based on Obama’s fundraising numbers.

But mostly I think these carefully crafted emails are just cynical and somewhat troubling. I think Nancy summed it up pretty well:

It’s worrying to me that the lesson that we thought we learned from 2004 — that people respond to personalized politics — is being so loosely interpreted to in 2008 in a way that seems to imply that people won’t know the difference between actual connections between real-live people and bulk emails from people who may as well be fake. There’s no difference between this email and one obviously written by the Obama press shop.

What do you think? Am I overreacting or does this tactic strike you are pretty cynical as well?

I was on Capitol Hill Monday morning attending the "Ready-Made Constituent Relationships: A Look at How Technology Empowers and Enables Effective Constituent Relationship Management" presentation hosted by George Washington University's Institute for Politics & The Internet (IPDI).

While the presentation covered a broad range of constituent services, the main focus was e-mail, which is a more efficient medium of communication than snail mail. The panelists emphasized that a constituent that sends an e-mail uses virtually immediate communication, but most of the time a staff will respond weeks later, if at all, using a regular letter.  Why can't a constituent get a reply much sooner?  One of the answers is interesting.  There is a strong aversion to responding to constituent e-mail with e-mail from Capitol Hill. (more…)

Over the years I’ve signed up for every online political mailing list known to man as part of my job, so it was no surprise that I got an email this morning from the Brownback campaign about his candidacy for President. But I was surprised at how poorly executed the email was.

Here is a rundown of the major issues:

(1) The “from” address of the email is brownbackforPresident@cfourstrategies.com. I have no idea what cfourstrategies.com is and half of me now thinks the email is fake. When sending this sort of official correspondence, it has to come from an email address running off the official campaign URL - brownback.com in this case. Otherwise I’m going to assume it is a scam.

(2) The request for money calls in the email link to this page, which also isn’t on brownback.com. In and of itself, that is ok. Lots of campaigns host their donation pages on third party sites. But when the email doesn’t come from the official campaign URL, alarm bells go off again. The suspicion is made worse by the fact that nowhere in the entire email is there a link to the main campaign website. That is a pretty shocking omission. And the donation form itself only has a link to the Brownback site at the very bottom of the page. At worst, this is making me think this email is fake again. At best, I’m thinking this is a campaign solely focused on getting my money (no conversation here).

(3) When you actually do visit brownback.com, you are redirected to some long URl hosted off the domain t-worx.com. The resulting site looks official, but I half think it is a fake too since it is not running from the main campaign URL - brownback.com.

When you combine all these problems together, you end up with an email/web program that seems more like a Paypal scam than official campaign correspondence.