Friday, February 29, 2008

Biz Talk: "Why the presidential candidates flunked the email test"

http://www.imediaconnection.com/printpage/printpage.aspx?id=18458
In any venture, whether it be business, politics, government, whatever, the proper use of marketing tools is essential. Email is probably the single best way to reach out to nearly everyone on the planet who is wired into the Internet.

Marketers know this, but do they know how to maximize their potential returns (ROI) utilizing this high-powered marketing tool? It seems like the marketing teams for the U.S. presidential candidates could use a few basic pointers.

For those of you interested in learning how to improve your return on investment in marketing (SOHOs, private business owners, small, medium, even big-business readers here), take a look at this independent study which takes standard business e-mail marketing tactics as a benchmark and compares the email campaigns of Obama, Clinton, Romney, McCain, Edwards and Huckabee to see how they measure up.

All of the candidates fail to make the grade.

Don't be a failure in your email marketing campaigns. Take a few minutes to read this article (set to printer friendly page to reduce your click-thru time) and see if you can improve your own returns.

I love you!

Cam

11 comments:

  1. I will have to come back and look at this. I know our friend Paula can benefit from reading this piece.

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  2. Obama reached over a million contributors this week... in the article it stated he was at approx 400,000, so the info may be a little old. (if you consider a week or so old ;) I am on Obama's email list and I have felt they have a very good email campaign. Short.. to the point.. plus valuable information. I receive something every couple of days.

    I don't know personally about the others... I am only interested in hearing from Obama.

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  3. I get email several times/week from Obama's people.

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  4. I get email from Obama too. I may be getting a bit narrow minded during this campaign, but after looking at our other candidates, he is the only one I am interested in hearing from. And I don't know about anyone else, but I automatically knew that just clicking on the "donate" button didn't automatically deduct from my account or from my credit card. What it did do was direct me to the other facets of the web site so that I was able to navigate to blogs, issue information, history, etc, etc. Maybe not the best way to lay out an email, but he has reached his goal of one million people to own a piece of this campaign.

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  5. It's a channel of communication that will even grow larger over time...

    Thanks for the link!!!

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  6. I don't know much about any of this, but i suppose it's an important tool for campaigning.

    On the other hand, i hate junk email almost as much as regular junk mail.

    If you are not one of my personal correspondents or unless i ask for information, i'd prefer NO email in my in box.
    I don't think i'm easily marketable... i switch away from most commercials, i rip ad brochures out of the papers and magazines, and i recycle or delete junk mail.... without opening.

    Hmmmm....
    I wonder what's new and exciting out there....

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  7. Nancy - What kind of information do the candidates send out? Would you forward me one that you found particularly interesting? I'm curious to see what they want to share with the electorate. Thanks.

    Jen - I get a ton of spam myself.

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  8. Thanks, PC. I got it. Interesting to see something like this for the first time.

    This gave me an idea.... I wonder what it would be like to sign up for everyone's email, get one of each, and then blog about them (and let the comments fly...) now THAT might make for a very very interesting blog!

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  9. Sounds good... I'd like to see that. It was getting a tad heated over here in your blog world the other day...
    all Political....... I was glad to see the fiesty conversation amongst all of you. I decided to keep my mouth shut..... Didn't want to get all worked up.;)

    Hope you are having a good morning. BTW.... is it called Leap Day over there too?

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  10. PC - It was all heated up, yes.

    It is called "uru u doshi", or "leap year". There doesn't seem to be a specific name for this day we had yesterday.

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