Tips for Crafting Political Emails
With inboxes increasingly inundated with email, it's critical that you craft your political email messages to cut through the noise. If you receive a lot of political emails, you'll see some creative subject lines and sender names - for example, mass emails crafted to look like they were sent from a candidate's personal iPhone. It's corny, but it works. The more personal the email, the more effective it's likely to be. Successful campaign emails also have a singular focus - driving registrations for an event, fundraising, recruiting volunteers, etc. Your email messages should be compelling and concise, and steer recipients to take a specific action (e.g. "Click here to volunteer"), linking directly to the relevant parts of your website.
Here are the open and click statistics for political campaign emails (as reported by MailChimp):
- Average open rate: 22.94%
- Average click rate: 2.37%
- Average hard bounce: 0.28%
- Average soft bounce: 0.41%
- Average unsubscribe rate: 0.21%
You can compare your own email campaigns to the numbers above to get a sense of how you're doing. Be sure to only send to recipients who've specifically opted in to receive your messages (rather than purchasing lists from third parties). Additionally, if you send to a list too frequently, people will tune out - so be sure that you're not hammering your lists.
It is absolutely imperative that you have permission to email your recipients, otherwise it's considered spam (which is illegal). Each separate email in violation of the law is subject to penalties of up to $43,792. The high bounce rate (and any spam complaints from recipients) will negatively affect your ability to send legitimate mail as well. If you have an outdated opt-in list (meaning that the recipients have all given you permission to email them, but it's been a while since the list has been used), you can clean it through a service like Emailable, Neverbounce, or Bouncer. They will be able to catch most of the invalid email addresses to reduce your bounce rate and keep you in good graces with your bulk mail provider.About
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