Winning the Fight for Attention: Meet Campaign Inbox
Written by Rachel Lourie.
Fun fact: just because your email was sent, doesn’t mean your email was received. Email deliverability is crucial to any campaign or initiative, because even the most engaging and creative content is worthless if your target never sees it.
Campaign Inbox is changing the way candidates and organizations build and send emails through their proprietary platform, which enables their clients to ensure that their message is — quite literally — getting through. Keep reading to find out what we learned from Founder & CEO Parks Bennett.
A Description of Campaign Inbox:
“Campaign Inbox is both a product and a service. Our product is an email sending platform, which might sound generic, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Most email platforms say you’ve delivered “X” percent, which really only means that means they got that amount of emails got off of their server. We take that to the next level by seeking to understand what happens to emails once they’re off our server. Do they get blocked? Put into spam? Moved to “Promotions?” Or put into the general inbox, where we want them to go? Our platform is a proprietary system that answers those questions, and then constantly optimizes to ensure success.
As with anything, technology alone can’t ensure that we’re breaking through — there’s a human element involved, which is where our service comes in. As a managed email marketing and deliverability consultancy, we have an entire team of account managers and digital marketing strategists who write copy, schedule emails, and help clients build lists. Our team is tasked with making sure audiences are engaging with the emails going out on our platform. Our goal, with both the product and service, is to build a community with subscribers. Whether its for grassroots or fundraising purposes, we are delivering more emails and getting more responses than ever before.
The Idea Behind Campaign Inbox:
“All of this began in 2016. I was working at the RNC at the time and was deployed to San Antonio to work on all things digital. I saw that there were serious deliverability issues — with people who’d signed up to receive candidate emails, who bought campaign items, and were engaging in various capacities. It wasn’t that they were bad email addresses, or that the recipients didn’t want to be messaged — the emails just weren’t getting into their inboxes. My team jumped in right away to see what we could do. Over the course of the cycle, we took inbox placement from 38% to over 90%, which was huge. We realized along the way that nobody else was focusing comprehensively on the marketing, data analytics, and tech development pieces that go into sending an email.
When Campaign Inbox got started, I brought digital and fundraising experience, and our other partners brought tech and data analytics experience, making us a well-rounded and well-suited team. Our foundation was definitely in the political space, but we quickly realized that advocacy groups and nonprofits were having similar deliverability issues, so we grew into those spaces as well. Combining proprietary and constantly-evolving technology, data analytics, and marketing helps us build a strategy, deliver more emails, build subscriber lists, improve and maintain deliverability, and hit success metrics for our clients, whether those metrics are grassroots actions or donations.”
What Users Get:
“The biggest deliverable is that our clients get a report that tracks inbox placement at each mailbox provider. We have an overall placement number, but we can also drill down into what percentage of emails were placed into Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. This is helpful because it demonstrates where we’re being successful, and it helps us figure out where we’re having issues. We report these numbers all the time to our clients. They get everything — opens, clicks, and overall deliverability, as well as that deeper dive. We also report on our clients overall data health and how that relates to engagement.”
Why Campaign Inbox Is Unique:
“Email is what we focus on. A lot of digital companies focus on emails, websites, ads, and more. We, on the other hand, spend 100% of our time on email. We know when something’s changed at a corporate level (as things like acquisitions and mergers can impact functionality), we can see trends, and most importantly, we can get ahead. When other platforms have issues with these mailbox providers, we’re already 3 steps ahead and, as a result, our clients don’t see those dips.
It’s a transparency thing — there are companies out there that can give you a report on your deliverability, but don’t give you action items to grow and improve. We have the numbers, know what to look at, understand what steps to take, and focus on how to unpack that number and grow it.”
How Parks Got Into Tech and Politics:
“I got into politics in college. I changed majors a few times, but when I landed in political science, I had a young, energetic professor who was super into politics, and he became my mentor. I eventually moved to DC for an internship and loved it. There was a special election that year in California, and I was sent out to knock on doors and make phone calls. It was my first real experience in politics, and it was so much fun. I went back to school, volunteered for campaigns, graduated in 2008, and ran state house campaigns in multiple states. I eventually landed in direct mail and telemarketing fundraising, which naturally transitioned into digital fundraising. One thing led to the next, and I ended up working for the RNC in 2016, from which Campaign Inbox was born.
Getting into tech was more by accident — I saw these major issues with deliverability, which led to discussions with people who understood the tech but not necessarily the politics. I realized that by becoming tech and data focused, I could increase the deliverability for my creative, and the wheels just started turning.”
How Tech is Shaping Politics, and the Coolest Thing in the Marketplace Today:
“It’s been wild to see the rise of SMS and peer-to-peer texting. Both parties had so much success using it in 2016 and 2018. So it’s interesting, because it’s become such a widely used strategy on both sides of the aisle, but your message is so much shorter. They’re not terribly different, emails and texting. But to me, texting just feels more personal, so when I get messages from candidates or people I don’t know it seems a little bit invasive. I’m curious as to how this sits with the general population, and how it will change as a result. Having a background in telemarketing, I’ve witnessed how regulations impacted that industry, and I’m curious as to how regulations will impact peer-to-peer texting. Like anything, the more people that campaigns are texting, the more people will start to complain. Many audiences already complain about receiving too many emails, so there’s definitely going to be complaints about texting. On the plus side, though, it enables candidates and organizations to more easily build relationships and community, which is the ultimate goal.”
At Agency Advisors, we bring new and innovative tech to candidates, causes, and the agencies that work on their behalf. This series aims to shed light on the leading-edge technologies that are creating a resounding impact within politics and advocacy.
