Purchased Email Address Lists Work

August 28, 2008 · Filed Under Web Strategy 

I hate to disagree with Patrick Ruffini. After all, he has been playing on the web a whole lot longer than I have and to compare my online experiences with his would be pretty absurd.  But while Patrick has been playing on the web, I’ve been playing on the streets, running the nuts and bolts of state legislative and US Senate campaigns. He probably has no clue what that’s like.

Here’s what I learned:

People get sick of seeing political television ads during CSI commercial breaks.

People get sick of us filling their mailboxes with political junk mail.

People get sick of us calling them during dinner.

Does that mean we should stop?  I’m hoping right now that my opponents are saying yes.

Ruffini discusses the complaints generated by purchased email addresses, but tell me when’s the last time you’ve done anything politically that didn’t generate complaints. Have you ever run a phone bank?

A large part of politics is annoyance and you better believe that I annoy the crap out of IDed voters until they get out to vote. I’ll call them five times a day and send someone to their home to drag them out. That’s how you win.

The same is true with emails.  Patrick argues that purchased email address lists are SPAM and should not be used.  If that’s the case, my question to Patrick is – what about voter lists?  Should we just stop mailing and calling voters too?

Patrick is right in that organic lists are more effective. It really doesn’t take a genius to figure out that someone is more likely to open up an email if they actually signed up to receive it.  I’m a hell of a lot more likely to eat a corndog if I bought it.

In an ideal world every voter would do their civic duty, educate themselves about candidates, and get out and vote.  But we don’t live in an ideal world and voters are becoming more and more apathetic. We can’t just wait and expect voters to magically find our website and sign up for our emails, so how do we get them to sign up?  How do we deliver the “hey look at me and sign up for my email” message?

Sure, we could rely on word of mouth and viral forwarding, but unless you have a button that makes your opponent start singing “bomb bomb Iran” on command, I would recommend a more proactive response. Try prospecting - delivering a specific message to a target audience in an attempt to capture a list of supporters.

We do it all the time with fundraising.  We buy a list from say…The Minutemen. We send them an illegal immigration targeted fundraising mail package, wait for a return, build our house file, and keep hitting them up every few weeks for more cash.

We do the same with email lists.  During the heat of the immigration battle, we rented a list of 40,000 voters for Senator DeMint.  We emailed them an immigration survey and asked them to forward it to their friends. Within three days we had 7,200 new organic emails.

People may be interested in your campaign, but if you don’t tell them it’s there, they are never going to support you or sign up for your emails. Emails are becoming as important as direct mail, phone calls, and even television ads, but unless you have a voter-matched email list to target your voters, you will never really introduce your web campaign and grow your organic list.

That is…unless you have a rock star candidate like Barack Obama. But when’s the last time you had one of those? Until you find one, go get yourself a purchased voter-matched email address list. Hollar at me. I can help you out.

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Comments

One Response to “Purchased Email Address Lists Work”

  1. Vinny Minchillo on August 29th, 2008 3:45 am

    I don’t know that people necessarily hate political ads during CSI. They hate CRAPPY political ads running during CSI.

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