4 tips to engage voters in the inbox and beyond

Fun fact: political campaign tactics and B2C marketing strategies aren’t that different. Whether working a presidential campaign or creating your next email for your brand’s loyalty club members, knowing how to engage your audience is critical. Here are 4 tips that use data to improve connections with customers and political supporters.

1. Always validate your data

Whether it’s an old database or new contact info submitted on the campaign website, email validation is the first step to building successful, engaging political outreach. Why? There are a few reasons.

When collecting data on the campaign trail or in-store, spelling and syntax mistakes are pretty common. It’s even worse when a shop is noisy or your phone call connection is poor. Additionally, when submitting digital forms, it’s not uncommon a person will provide a fake email address to retrieve gated content or offers. By adding these misspelled and fake emails to your database and sending them your campaigns, deliverability rates suffer and your message reaches fewer inboxes.

How do you resolve this? Take a page from our campaign playbook: Clean your existing database first with batch validation, then continue cleaning data in real-time with an API for improved ROI. This way you have a consistently updated list that you know will deliver results.

2. Match profiles across channels

Disconnected data is the enemy of any cohesive marketing effort, but a lone email address can go a long way for your marketing team. By simply having a list of validated emails, you can understand where people spend their time online and connect profiles across social media channels.

This helps you create complete profiles that unlock new marketing channels you may not have tried before, and it saves your team time, money and resources for other initiatives.

For example, you have a few email campaigns with marginal success, but it never reaches its full potential. By using the email addresses you have in your database to connect digital profiles and append postal addresses, you can improve the personalization of your email campaigns and generate a highly targeted, relevant direct mail campaign with a special offer for customers or motivating political message for voters.

The same idea would work in the opposite manner by appending email addresses to your postal address list for a stellar email campaign.

3. Use the power of people-based marketing

While we just discussed the importance of appending emails and postal addresses to create complete profiles that improve engagement, you first need the data to personalize those offers and campaign messages. And despite people-based marketing being a B2C cornerstone, it’s actually pretty useful for political campaign efforts.

Political campaigns, like B2C brands, absolutely benefit from demographic and behavioral (or household) data, such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Presence of Children
• Marital Status
• Homeowner Status
• Income

Once you know what motivates people to support a candidate or purchase a product, it’s easy to model their behavior and tailor the message. Focusing on “the right ask” in political campaigns or the right offer in B2C marketing will always improve audience engagement. A request to canvass neighborhoods or a 20% discount on your next purchase won’t motivate a person who would rather donate $50 or receive a loyalty club membership.

4. Don’t lose any more leads

Some people may visit your campaign site or brand’s shop and never leave their info, but that’s okay! Maybe they want to do a little more research before committing to your campaign, cause, or company. That said, you don’t have to consider those leads lost. Website Visitor Identification technology can identify those anonymous visitors into deliverable emails.

Once you’re armed with deliverable emails, it’s time to reach back out! Not only will you have the email address, but with the addition of the tactics above, such as demographic or behavioral data enhancement, you can create a more relevant, motivating message with a greater chance at successfully engaging the individual.

With this information in hand, you can easily send a re-engagement email to gain their support for your campaign or encourage the individual to finish their purchase in your online shop.

Stop settling for subpar support

Attention is available in limited quantities these days, so ensuring your messaging is relevant, personalized, and engaging is a must for political campaigns and B2C marketers.

Both require the ability to reach people across platforms, connected database profiles and messaging that resonates with their biggest fans. So at the end of the day, it’s easy to see why quick easy access to accurate, insightful data is the cornerstone of successful political and B2C marketing campaigns.

Ready to start using data services like validation and append for your political campaign or B2C marketing efforts? Send a message to our team, and we’ll be happy to help you determine the best data services for your organization or campaign.