Turns out the Obama Campaign direct marketing and analytics team learned what we’ve learned many times over, that “the casual tone” often works best.
Whether you’re thinking in terms of “direct response,” “click-thru,” or “engagement,” camouflage — looking like something else that would naturally appear in the context and typically invite engagement, like a note from a friend in the email inbox — is typically a highly effective tactic.
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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.
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We who email naturally worry about unsubscribers. We limit how much email we send for fear of wearing out patience and in the confident expectation of diminishing returns. That’s probably a good thing.
But there is evidence to suggest that, at least for certain brands, there is a better approach to optimizing email success. It comes down to sending as much as possible, while testing for diminishing returns. The Obama email team did this and found that, for them, there was no limit.
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Why do we under-test?
Here are some lessons from the winning Obama Campaign, via Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
I love this article because it neatly demonstrates what all marketers who use direct response tactics should know, but typically don’t. It gives some great examples of what marketers using direct response tactics should do, but overwhelmingly don’t. And it shows the results, including the large sums of money that most marketers leave on the table.
Their marketing crime: under-testing.
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