In politics, the value of an email address is difficult to quantify

Posted July 5th, 2008 at 8:38 PM in Politics, Technology

One of the most popular strategies for selling something online involves the use of an opt-in email list. Rather than pay to send somebody to a page where they have two choices — buy product or don’t buy product — you give them a third option: sign up for more information. You can incentivize signups in many ways (e.g., “free 10-page information pack sent instantly to your email,” or “sign up to receive a coupon for 10% off”), and you get to contact anybody who signs up by email a theoretically unlimited number of times.

Conventional wisdom is that it takes 7 “asks” to get a “yes” from an average customer buying an average product. I don’t know where that number came from, but it’s still true that an email opt-in is worth money to a seller. And most sellers can quantify exactly how much a new email address is worth to them by taking their profit on a sale and multiplying it by the likelihood that somebody will buy their product after receiving their series of automatically generated emails. For instance, I’ve run marketing projects where I’ve assumed the value of an email address to be about $1. But I was selling crap and making crap money, so that number can get significantly higher.

In politics, it’s harder to quantify the value of an email address. Barack Obama’s proprietary social networking web site has about 1 million members, his online donor rolls have swelled to over 1.5 million, and the total size of his email list is unknown (GOP tech guru Patrick Ruffini thinks it’s 4 to 8 million). What we do know is that only a small fraction of supporters on a candidate’s email list will ever make a donation. Whether we’re talking 1% or 15% depends on a lot of variables for which there aren’t obvious controls, but Obama’s ratio of email list recipient to donor is almost certainly higher than any candidate on his level. Read the rest of this entry »

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Lessons for candidates from Fourth of July parades

Posted July 5th, 2008 at 7:28 PM in Politics

Independence Day might be a day off for the vast majority of Americans, but political candidates and their employees work harder on the Fourth of July than almost any other day of the year. In 2006, I participated in 6 parades, if memory serves. It was physically strenuous but fun. And although I’m not usually one to say that “visibility” is worth much sweat off a campaign’s brow, the Fourth of July is an important exception. Read the rest of this entry »

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Coming soon

Posted July 5th, 2008 at 5:41 AM in Journalism, Politics, Technology

Sorry for the delay. For more about me, go here.

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