In this episode of What’s Up This Week, host Jay Schwedelson discusses the upcoming presidential primaries and marketing tactics used in political campaigns. He shares insights into the massive volume of political text messages and emails sent to voters, as well as innovative and aggressive strategies used such as emojis that may influence marketing best practices in the future.
Main Discussion Points:
– 15 billion political text messages were sent leading up to the 2022 midterm elections, about 50 texts for every phone in the US
– Over 50% of donations for presidential candidates come from email marketing efforts
– Political marketers use aggressive and spammy tactics because they work to get engagement and donations
– Jay signs up for text and email updates from all political parties and PACs to observe innovative marketing tactics
– Emojis in email marketing grew from political email campaigns testing new strategies
– Political marketers are testing using emojis in email from names, which may expand to business marketing
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Transcript
Foreign. Welcome back to what's up this Week.
Excited to share what is going on this week and keep in mind we still do our Ask Us Anything a little later this week and then our 10 minute episode towards the end of the week where we share the latest tips and tactics. So make sure to check that all out. But what is going on this week?
Well, this week the primaries and the caucuses get kicked off of the presidential campaign and I have zero interest in talking politics. I just won't do that. It is mind numbing. It is the worst. Right. Won't go there.
But from a marketing standpoint, you got to pay attention to what's going on because it is incredibly important and stuff that we can learn from because it's unhinged, it's out of control. Political marketing is beyond the wild, wild west. It's just wild, period.
So before I get into some of the interesting parts about it, I wanted to share a stat or two that I saw this week that kind of blew my mind related to the political marketing that's going on. Because that is this week.
So here's some wild stuff and I'm really looking at primarily text messaging and email marketing because those are the two biggest channels. There's a lot of social media marketing too, but text message and email marketing, SMS messaging and email marketing are just so important.
It doesn't matter which political party you like or candidate you like. It doesn't matter. All the candidates and all the parties are equally completely wild in the market. They do.
So it doesn't matter who you like or don't like. It does. Doesn't matter. So to give you an idea, leading into the last midterm election, there were more than 50, 15 billion. That's a B.
15 billion political texts were sent out according to Robo Killer, which is a blocking service to give you an idea of how many that is. That's about 50 messages for every single phone in the country. That is bananas. And you feel it too.
You know, you're like, yeah, well I think I got 400 of them, not 50. Right. So the SMS stuff is just wild.
And on the email side, according to Bloomberg, and this is why we get so many of these political emails, in the last presidential election campaign, over 50% of all the donations came in from email marketing efforts. So the problem is for us, the recipients, it works. It works.
Now we got to put on our marketing hat for a second, say, okay, I got to put aside how annoying all these things are. And by the way, what I do is I Sign up for everything. I sign up for people in every party. I sign up for local candidates, federal elections.
I sign up for all the PACs. I sign up for it all because. And there's a reason I do this. It's not because I just like getting garbage.
No, I do that because if you think about your inbox for a second, your email marketing, right, these political emails, they don't care. They're going to be the most aggressive, the most wild, and going to seem like the spammiest stuff you've ever gotten.
There's nothing political email marketing won't test or try to get that thing open and the donations going and the interactions going. There's nothing they won't do. And this may sound really sad and pathetic, but it's true.
A lot of the tactics that we use as marketers originate from political marketing because it's so unhinged that they try every everything on earth and then they double down on the stuff that works. So I love signing up for all this stuff because I want to see what chaos they're trying. And a great example of that is emojis.
If you rewind, you know, years ago now, a lot of marketers, of course, business marketers, consumer marketers, we're all using emojis and our email marketing all over the place, and it's working. But it started with political email marketing campaigns.
They are the ones who originally, years ago, said, hey, I could put this little graphical symbol in there and maybe get people to see it and get people to respond. And they went bananas with it. Which is why now you see in the political email campaigns that you get, they're all over the place.
So trying to look at the marketing in these political campaigns saying, what are they doing? What am I going to probably be thinking about a year, two years from now? Because it is ahead of the game.
And one of the tactics that we're seeing that I'm seeing that I think is super interesting, which right now seems annoying, but probably in a year or two, we're probably all going to be trying. It is using emojis in the from name. This is something you really don't see from a lot of marketers right now.
But a lot of the political campaigns are testing this and you're seeing it more and more. So when you send out your email campaign, you have your from address. That's the actual email address you send from.
But then you also have your from name, which is also your friendly from or your alias. It's the words that, that you change Your from address to so it shows up in your inbox. It could be whatever you want.
So a lot of political marketers now are testing putting an emoji, some sort of graphical symbol as part of their from name alias.
And that's a really interesting tactic that I think if it works, we're going to see that bleed into business and consumer marketing in the next year to two years. So I'm a big fan of looking at all this, seeing what I can get out of it. It's super annoying. It's only going to get worse. It's going to get wild.
Our inboxes, our phone, social media, we're going to be inundated. But it is what it is. So that is really what is going on this week. Two other things I wanted to mention.
One is we've been working a lot on updating subject line.com if you haven't checked that out, that is one of our free sites where you can go and check your subject line. It also rewrites your subject line using AI. It is 100% free. We've checked 15 million subject lines.
So you can go to subjectline.com and check that out. And also we're releasing a lot of episodes, a lot of cool stuff on this podcast.
. And lastly, if you want the:Drop me a DM on LinkedIn and I will send you that calendar right away. I hope you are well. I hope your inboxes and your phones don't get flooded with political garbage, but they will and talk to you soon. You did it.
You made it to the end. Nice, but the party's not over.
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