How Clinton's Fundraising Mail Is Seeking Response

Direct mail is still one of the most powerful fundraising tools in the campaign marketing kit, and it is instructive to see how major candidates are using various mail response rate drivers to gather donations for 2016 races. A recent DirectMarketingIQ video from its research director, Paul Bobnak, analyzes how Hillary Clinton's campaign kickoff mail seeks to score with supporters by touching key direct mail marketing bases. Her piece starts with a slightly oversize No. 12 envelope with the well-known Clinton name prominently displayed and a personalized teaser ("First name, this is our moment. Are you with me?"), which both engages directly and induces guilt, one of marketing's proven response triggers. Inside is a letter with quick-read short paragraphs that focus on Us versus Them arguments, a bumper sticker premium, and a reply form that leaves space for the recipient to write lines to Clinton about issues of personal concern, another direct connection with the candidate. Clinton also uses her H logo with the arrow to point the reader's attention to a four-color photo of her well-known, smiling face as she asks for response. To see a sample of the actual mail piece, go to http://www.directmarketingiq.com/item/hillary-clinton-s-campaign-kickoff-mail-follows-all-the-rules

Acquiring Political E-mails for Best Response, Dollars

Political campaigns and nonprofit causes are always seeking to acquire new "good" e-mail addresses to grow and sustain their lists. Campaign marketers should be interested then in a two-part study provided by Jesse Bacon to epolitics.com. Bacon, of PowerThru Consulting, looked at an environmental cause client's data to tease out which e-mails by acquisition route offered the best performance in terms of cost-effective response. He compared three common ways that political and advocacy campaigns acquire e-mails: 1) paid acquisition; 2) online advertising, including social media (in this case study, Bacon focused on Facebook ads); and 3) list exchanges with like-minded groups. He found that e-mails from swaps led performance in terms of open rates, click rates and click-to-open ratios. Paid acquisition came in second, and e-mails from Facebook ads came in last in opens and clicks, although they still performed above industry average and so were a potentially viable way to build an e-mail list because of Facebook's low cost. The next part of his analysis looked at how those same e-mail acquisition groups performed in terms of fundraising dollars over an 18-month period. Here list exchanges really shone, contributing 45% of new members but 66% of all funds raised. Facebook was the bottom performer, accounting for 22% of the new members but only 10% of funds raised. When it comes to donation per member by acquisition source, Bacon found that swaps and acquisitions both performed about the same in terms of the average gift (between $19 and $20), while the Facebook members were less generous, with an average gift just over $15. For more detail, go to http://www.epolitics.com/2014/07/22/email-acquisition-performance-part-2-who-pays-the-bills/