4Q Email Guidance for your Digital Campaigns

With the Midterms right around the corner, now is a perfect time to fine tune your digital strategy. Below are some quick tips to get your digital campaigns going.

Send to those high open rate subscribers

Sending the same email to all subscribers mixes your message in with those who want to hear it, and those who may put off opening the email. If your open rate is not high enough, this could drag down your engagement metrics in the future. Send separate emails to those highly engaged subscribers, and send it before you send to your larger list.

Watch your subject lines

#govoteonthursdayat8am may not be the best subject line. Keep it short, 3 words are best and personalize it as well to get higher engagement. Mobile phones have small screens, so you won’t get a lot of text out of your subject line before it gets cut off.

Keep track of your audience

If I had a dollar every time a candidate emailed me to vote in their state primary, I would have tacos. Make sure to target your audience to those who can participate. Asking someone to go out and vote in a primary in a state they do not live, is a message that just looks bad and could increase your spam rate.

3 images or less

Keep the number of images low, this helps with Google’s inbox filtering as they use this as part of their algorithms to determine which label to apply and helps the email to load for those on the go mobile users.

Time to Send

Everyone sends at the top of every hour, or 15 minutes before or after. Those times could cause delays in getting your email to the users inbox and cause a “traffic jam” at your subscribers email servers. We see the highest open rates from 9PM-11PM EST on Tuesday with 9PM-11PM on Wednesday of each week. Everyone looks at their phone before they go to bed and clearing out an inbox to start the day fresh. We looked at this data from over 3 million data points, and we were shocked at the numbers too.

 

New Updates – August

We have been busy listening to all your feedback going into the upcoming November election. From updates to our Universe Search, to more integrations, and more integrations to go!

Action Network Integration

We had one of our new campaigns ask if we could build an integration with Action Network. They have a well defined API for us to work with and their Directory of Technology has been great to work with to help answer our questions. We can now sync your contacts from Action Network into Campaign Deputy. This includes Tags, if they are a part of an Action Network list. We also pull over events, so for those states that require disclosures of Events we have you covered.

Campaign Page

As part of the Action Network integration, we didn’t have a place for you to update your API Key(s), so we built a new Account Settings page to show you all the candidate information associated with your account. If you click on your name in the upper-right portion of the screen, you can access this new page and see which account you are logged into for our multi-account users. This page will also be the home for our future Zapier integration and more to come!

Universe Search

We have added more fields to our Universe Search. Action Network tags, Zip Code, Linked Attribution searching, Contribution Date. As part of our maintenance, we will be able to add details about emails actions as well.

Attribution Codes

As more campaigns import their previous data, we get a lot of attribution codes on one account. We are adding Cycle and an Archive flag to better handle these. The Universe Search is using our new Attribution Auto Suggest, we will be moving more of the system to use the Auto Suggest instead of drop downs.

Stripe Charges

If you have a contribution page with us, you will have access to a “Merchant Charges” report. We will show the most recent charges, but you can export any date range you would like. If you select a large date range please be patient, Stripe only allows us to pull 100 records at a time. We see most exports taking less than a minute.

Other Bug Fixes

  • You can now use a decimal place when doing a contribution search in the Universe Search.
  • Anonymous contributions are now showing on the contribution report.
  • Added Thank You Note Sent to contributions.

Upcoming Maintenance

We bought a new server months ago and now we just have to move our database to this new server.

Campaign Deputy will be down for maintenance from 9PM EST-11PM EST on Sunday, August 26th. Contributions, and Forms will not be affected. Contribution alerts will be delayed during this time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apple Email Security Updates

Email is constantly changing, and Apple recently made updates to their email service for emails hosted at the @mac.com, @me.com and @icloud.com email addresses.

Email security wasn’t well defined back in 1982, and allowed anyone to impersonate sending an email. An standard called DMARC stopped that and allows email providers to apply the most strict control. Apple chooses which servers are allowed to send emails from their domain, any other server will now be marked as spam, no exception.

Attempting to send an email from @mac.com, @me.com and @icloud.com outside of Apple Mail will immediately be marked as spam.

Apple Mail isn’t the first provider to do this, Gmail did this in 2016 and Yahoo in 2014. These changes help to limit the amount of spam from these domains and prevent phishing attacks.

If you want to send event invitations from an the hosts email address, it is now best to have them BCC their invitee list to give you the best chance to prevent you from being flagged with DMARC.

Sometimes an email will show “on behalf of domain.com” to work around this limitation with DMARC because the email address is actually written like the below address. Email clients make the format more human readable by showing the “on behalf of” separately. The resources link below has more detailed information about this and why you can’t remove it from Gmail, Yahoo, or Apple Mail.

personalemail=yahoo.com@send.mydomain.com

Resources

How Apple’s DMARC Changes Affect Email Senders

Gmail DMARC Update 2017

Why do some emails show “on behalf”

 

 

The Dos and Don’ts of Digital Campaigns

With both Political and Non-profit campaigns, running an effective digital campaign requires knowledge of a lot of areas to have a good digital presence. Here is a list of the Dos and Don’ts of Digital Campaigns.

Don’t

  • Run your email marketing through an @gmail address. Google limits you to 500 messages a day, once reached, you are done for 24 hours. If you need to send out an announcement or call to action, you’re limited to the first 500 supporters in your list.
  • Use BCC to send out email campaigns. This limits personalization and with one mistake, suddenly your entire email list may be in the hands of hundreds of other people.
  • Use the cheapest Web Host for your site. Running a website requires expertise, and having a slow website or one that has downtime could cost you critical donations. We have had to help so many people when these cheap options fail and the support tickets go on for days while a website is down.
  • Use or share username and passwords with your campaign staff.
  • Don’t use an insecure website and accept payments or contributions on the site. This is against against Payment Card Industry (PCI) regulation and increases your liability.
  • Forget to register a domain name.
  • Don’t import an old email list. Every email provider can detect this and will block your emails. This hurts your email repuation. Once it’s gone, it’s hard to recover.

Do

  • Find an email marketing provider to use for your campaign, this requires a domain name.
  • Use an email hosting provider, so that your campaign can respond using your campaign’s brand/domain.
  • Use an SSL certificate to secure your website, this protects anyone’s information when they give a contribution or signup for your email list.
  • Find a good hosting provider with good support options.
  • Personalize your email messages.

 

At Campaign Deputy, we provider email marketing, email hosting, web hosting and a SSL certificate all as part of every package we offer. We monitor everything 24×7 which includes email and phone support. Contact us today to learn more!

 

Fundraising CRM Uses

A Fundraising CRM helps to keep your data organized so that you don’t lose leads, or pledges, while trying to raise the most for your cause.

Pledges

Pledges are the “sales leads” of fundraising with two types, pledge to give, and pledge to raise. Both are critical to fundraising and with our built in pledge tracking, you can keep track of these pledges for both types. Using the build in pledge tracking, you can keep track of the due date, the liklehood of of the pledge, and send email reminders to the person who pledges to your organization. This is a great feature for both political campaigns and non-profits.

Call Time

Everyone gets the same email “Please give X to my Y to help my cause”. Our email inboxes are flooded with these requests. To stand out, call time is the difference. Using our call time manager, there is no more shuffling stacks of paper, you have all the information you need to make a call, connect, take notes, and add pledges all from the same screen. We have some users who spend 4+ hours on just this one page in Campaign Deputy!

2017 Year End Review

Since our launch in July, we have had an amazing year. We continue to expand in both size and feature set for CampaignDeputy.

Over 30 new features added.

We continue to build out features that campaigns are asking for to help make their campaign successful. Some large features added in 2017 was printed call sheets, person import, call time pledge emails, web site tracking, email and click tracking.

Three electronic filing systems completed.

We built CampaignDeputy to handle the various needs of each states electronic filing system. In 2017 we built out electronic filing for Arkansas, Kentucky and the FEC. For 2018 we look forward to continuing to add and will be expanding to Florida, Alabama and Ohio.

Over 700,000 Emails Sent

We sent 778,677 emails through our platform with three dedicated IPs. Email open rates ranged from 10% to 35%. We continue to monitor sending reputation to make sure each campaign maintains a high open and delivery rate.

Over $250,000 processed

Through our online contribution forms, we processed over $250,000. we continue to learn the best way to host contribution forms, and learned useful user behavior we can apply to 2018 now.

In four datacenters

As we continue to expand, we have turned on additional datacenters with multiple providers. When we first launched we started with just one. With the importance of having our contribution forms available 24×7 we increased the number of servers and spread them throughout the East and Mid-west for more reliance.