Emailing Ethically
How to build an email program without scamming or spamming
During the 2022 midterm elections, Democratic campaign emails became a laughingstock. Literally:
While this wasn’t a new development in 2022, it’s definitely a trend that’s become more pronounced: Democrats sending desperate, high-pressure, and even misleading fundraising emails.
Here’s a subject line from one organization’s fundraising email:
Here’s the opening of a different fundraising email from a Democratic-aligned group — this one had the subject line “I don’t know what to say”:
Here’s yet another fundraising email subject line from a different group — this one was sent on November 7th, the day before Election Day:
These are just a tiny sample of the type of doomsday, panicked, and desperate emails that campaigns and committees sent this past election cycle.
These tactics aren’t just embarrassing and cringeworthy — they’re harmful. Email is a powerful tool for communicating, organizing, and fundraising — for many campaigns and political groups, email is their biggest source of digital revenue. It’s a critical lifeline that funds their on-the-ground work.
But tactics like the above examples undermine trust in political email, making it less likely that people will open, read, and give to important messages. It increases spam flagging and unsubscribing (which harms deliverability and tanks open rates) — most damagingly, it breeds skepticism of political email in general.
And, while these approaches may raise money in the short term, they destroy email lists and programs in the long term. Eventually, supporters are going to get tired of being scared or intimidated or tricked into giving; eventually, they’re going to start mass unsubscribing and disengaging from political email entirely.
This is a challenge that we at Middle Seat have been tackling for years: How to build a successful email program without scamming or spamming
While we’re not going to share all of our secrets here (you’ll have to hire us for that), we’ve seen success by building email programs that are centered on trust and respect.
We always keep in mind that our email list is made up of people. Not names, not addresses, but human beings. It’s easy to think of your email list as an abstract concept rather than a collection of real, live people.
And, generally speaking, people don’t like being scared, intimidated, or lied to! They don’t like being tricked into thinking a political fundraising email is actually a bill or an invoice. They don’t want to be flooded with despondent messaging that tells them that all hope is lost.
So, when you’re planning your email program, remember to treat the people on your email list with respect. Avoid tactics that mislead them, scare them, or insult their intelligence — so no fake deadlines or made-up matching gift campaigns (if you do have a legitimate fundraising goal or deadline, make sure to tell folks what your goal is for or why that deadline actually exists).
Beyond that, make sure that you’re:
Building every email around a strong theory of change.
In each email you send, explain why you’re sending that email. Lay out what action you want the recipient to take, and what the impact of that action will be (and no, “give us money so we’ll have more money” isn’t good enough!). If you’re writing an email but can’t come up with a strong theory of change, then maybe that email isn’t worth sending! You shouldn’t email for the sake of emailing; if your email truly doesn’t have a purpose that you can distill into a theory of change, maybe skip sending that message.
Making your emails interesting.
This might seem obvious but, in addition to a strong theory of change, you should base every email you write on an engaging hook. Find a salient topic or an interesting angle, then build your email around it. If you write an email that people actually enjoy reading, then they’ll be more likely to open and read your next email. You can also use a supporter survey to learn what kinds of issues your list is interested in learning more about, and you can optimize your future email calendar more around that content!
Striving for authenticity.
No matter who you’re writing emails for — a candidate, an organization, or some other entity — you should aim to write the email in a voice and style that matches that entity. You want your email to truly sound like them; to align with their other messaging and creative. So follow them on social media. Read their written statements. Listen to their speeches. Identify particular turns of phrase, and focus on what they talk about and how they talk about it. And remember that email is an informal medium — make sure your creative doesn’t sound stiff. Have some fun — crack a joke, include a meme or a gif. Again, if people like reading your emails then they’ll gladly come back for more!
Respecting their wishes.
If people want to leave your list, let them go! Make your unsubscribe link easy to find, and make your unsubscribe process as quick and easy as possible. Not only does that show respect to your supporters, but if folks have a hard time figuring out how to leave your list they may hit the “report spam” button instead (which is much more harmful to your deliverability than an unsubscribe).
Also, If someone hasn’t opened or clicked on one of your emails in a long time, consider taking them out of your regular email cadence. If someone hasn’t interacted with one of your emails in a long time, then that might mean they’re not really interested anymore — and that’s ok! Take them out of your targeting group and focus your time and energy on the people who still want to be there. Plus, if you keep emailing someone who never opens or clicks, email platforms may start thinking that you’re spamming and start sending your messages into the junk folder.
Finally, give people the option to update their information in real-time. Our best practice is to incorporate an “update your information” link in the footer of every email we send. This derives from our policy against deadnaming (and Middle Seat was the first agency in even the progressive space to develop and implement such a policy). If one of our supporters changes their name, they can immediately go in and update it, which means we won’t run the risk of deadnaming them in our subsequent emails. It’s easy to set up and goes a long way toward showing our supporters we respect them as the whole people they are.
At Middle Seat, we’ve found that you can run strong email programs without scamming or spamming — and, in fact, by respecting our client’s supporters, we’ve built long-term trust and affinity that have generated strong results year after year, cycle after cycle.
Plus, not only does our approach produce great results for our clients, it also means we can feel good about the email programs we’re running and the email creative we’re putting out there into the world.
Of course, there’s a lot more that goes into a successful email program than this — if you want to learn more, you can always reach out to us to work together.
