As the ground hardens and leaves turn, the lights in the campaign war room have flickered on.
With just over a year from the 2018 midterm elections, strategists are re-visiting the drawing board looking to sharpen their existing tools and make decisions on new solutions to help pave the path to victory next fall.
While the toolbox to choose from has rapidly evolved in years past, email will remain at the heart of voter communication and outreach strategy for the majority of political and advocacy campaigns this cycle.
For its proven ability to drive record fundraising numbers to its cost-effective role as a familiar and regular voice of the candidate or cause, emails to “the list” are a necessary fundamental for the modern campaign.
However, well documented in the industry are the challenges that coincide with leveraging email as the lifeblood of communication between a campaign and its stakeholders. Here are a few you may have run up against:
- Limited Voter Intelligence: when building an email list organically through online forms such as petitions or other action items, the information gathered on the individual is usually limited to the basics (name, address, email) to avoid discouraging conversions amongst supporters. Such limited data sets restrict a campaign’s ability to connect on a more personal level with the voters on their list.
- Stale Data: often like-minded political campaigns will share or rent their email lists out from previous cycles, although unless someone from that campaign has been actively nurturing and cleansing the list in the off-cycle, it’s likely the campaign acquiring the list will be working off stale data.
- Inaccurate 3rd Party Data: email lists purchased from list brokers are often modeled with 3rd party data such as economic insights, interests, and purchase history to help make informed predictions of the candidates and causes voters comprising that list may support. This strategy has been proven high-risk, as Deloitte recently conducted a study that found only 29% of consumers found their 3rd party data profiles to be more than 50% accurate. Audience segmentation and message development informed by such poor data quality can seriously jeopardize the credibility of the campaign.
Each of the above challenges hinder the process of creating a well-segmented email list meant for message relevancy and personalization (critically important during campaign season when voters’ inboxes are flooded with sensationalized political messaging and fundraising asks, resulting in low attention spans and high drop-off rates.)
At Resonate, we offer a data-driven solution that quickly solves for these challenges by allowing campaigns to analyze and segment every voter opening their emails, at an individual-level, with the most accurate and complete set of persuasive insights.
Here’s how it’s done:
By embedding a simple Resonate pixel in an email to your list, our proprietary voter models will generate up to 7,000 unique attributes on each individual that opens your email. You can then quickly filter by a single or combination of those attributes to segment your audience by the most important voter insights relevant to your campaign goals. Attributes can include:
- Hopes, Fears, Values and Motivations: when driving online fundraising efforts, the most effective and proven solution is speaking to the values and motivations that influence an individual’s decision to give. Whether it’s protecting one’s family, financial stability, sense of patriotism or community, we understand what is truly moving voters to donate and support the cause or candidate.
Pro-tip: when informing stakeholders about the opposition’s platform, contrast their agenda with these values and ideologies that are central to your audience’s belief system.
- Policy Positions and Candidate Platform Support: while many issues are debated throughout the lifecycle of a campaign, it’s important for campaigns to identify and analyze how different issues play differently with individuals on their list. Tailoring policy and platform communications around these issues is key to 1:1 engagement and going beyond basic party line messaging.
Pro-tip: leverage the fact that many voters are single-issue voters to your advantage. Segment your email list audience by the issues individuals are most likely to vote on and double down on those messages. Don’t waste time repeatedly emailing a known transportation voter who avoids social issues about your detailed social advocacy plan.
- Donor and Voter Propensity, Demographics, Economics: combine deep-level values and political and advocacy data with core individual-level insights such as household income, likelihood to donate, and life stage to effectively connect the campaign’s agenda with the day-to-day issues faced by the supporters receiving your emails.
Pro-tip: segment out fundraising emails by income levels, life stage, and donor propensity to ensure appropriate asks and a personalized approach to online giving.
The Resonate Methodology: Resonate conducts traditional long-form research, maintaining more than 200k active surveys fielded four to six times per year. We combine that data with anonymized contextual, real-time analysis of some 15 billion mobile and online events per day. Using A.I. and advanced predictive modelling algorithms, we are able to profile over 7,000 demographic, behavioral, media consumption, voter, psychographic and core values attributes for 200+ million US adults – at the individual level.
If you’re interested in executing the most customized and influential email strategy to help propel you past the competition and to the 2018 winner’s circle, contact Resonate today to get started.
