Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), the cloud communications platform, has announced the results of a new study conducted to analyze the efficacy of emails sent by United States presidential campaigns to reach their targeted audiences, the company said.
The report “How Political Campaigns Can Ensure Their Email Messages Hit Home” studied the patterns, tactics and frequency of emails sent by the presidential campaigns and to what extent they actually reached their recipients. The report also outlined best practice recommendations to reach recipients via email who have consented to receive communications from the campaigns.
Twilio submitted a newly created email address to 26 Democratic presidential campaigns and the incumbent president in July 2019 to subscribe to the campaigns´ communications and analyzed the activity over the course of 30 days.
Findings included:
Less than 4% of all the messages received from all of the campaigns landed in the primary tab of the test account. The primary tab in an email Gmail account is the first thing a recipient sees upon opening Gmail in a web browser.
21% of all the messages our test account received landed in the spam folder, one in five recipients is potentially not receiving messages from candidates which hampers awareness, fundraising and organization efforts of the campaigns.
Nearly 75% of the messages received by Twilio´s test account landed in the promotions folder. The promotions folder is meant to capture and store commercial and promotional content. Gmail´s algorithms determined that most of the political email messages sent by the campaigns should be sorted in the promotional tab.
Additionally, almost half of the campaigns either lacked a Domain Messaging Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) record or failed a DMARC check by the receiving domains, thus leaving their brands and messages more open to spoofing and phishing attacks. Email authentication is a strong data point in the overall reputation logic used by email platforms. The lack of authentication can impact whether an email gets delivered at all, or whether it gets placed in a spam folder or not. Basic email authentication can make it more difficult for bad actors to spoof the campaign´s domain or email address that it uses to communicate with potential voters. Authentication also protects recipients by decreasing the ability of bad actors to spoof the campaign´s domain and trick recipients into disclosing personally identifiable information (PII) which leads to identity theft and other forms of cyber crime.
Based on the report´s findings, best practices for more effective email practices by presidential campaigns to reach prospective voters who have given their consent include:
Limit the use of “friendly from” address, or aliases, as they can be confusing and misleading. If multiple “friendly from” addresses are necessary, be consistent in both tone and voice.
Don´t flood the recipient´s email boxes all the time. Persuadable and prospective voters will tune out a campaign in a hurry if they feel they are being inundated with emails. Campaigns can easily give recipients a menu to choose from as to how often they want to hear from a campaign and in what format, i.e., daily updates, weekly updates, a newsletter, etc.
Cut down on the screaming subject lines in capital letters. It makes the emails look less genuine. People associate these tactics with unsolicited commercial email (UCE) and are more likely to ignore the emails.
Keep the subject lines short, limited to around 40 characters. Most people view their emails on their phones where the space for subject lines is limited. Long subject lines will simply be cut off without delivering the intended message.
Keep email and communications secure, both to protect the campaign and to protect the information of its supporters.
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