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In my e-book, DIGITAL@speed, I included a brief guide to business cursing, explicating in hard language and a light-hearted tone the various ways in which deftly deployed common swear words can speed up a process.

Well, I’ll be damned! Now, the Obama Campaign has come out with another proven use of tactical swearing to improve results – the email subject line! The campaign learned that throwing out minor profanity such as “Hell yeah, I like Obamacare” got big clicks.

But they had to use the tactic sparingly. The novelty would tend to wear out and over time the results would regress to the mean.

This tracks with a DiMassimo Goldstein principle for optimizing direct response results — Test Outside The Lines.

Test Outside The Lines means that we should always question our own certainties about what is appropriate and inappropriate, what is too cool or too hot, what is on or off brand. This is the humility of the direct marketer, which leads to the boldness of the highly successful brand-driven growth leader. We are provocative, because we remain humble. We test outside the lines and often find the goldmine just beyond the edge of the map.

Damn, it feels good!

Read the full article about Obama’s digital campaign here.