Tools of the Trade: Must-use tools from the Virginia governor’s race
Readers of my weekly newsletter often mention that the “Tools of the Trade,” a section where I highlight new apps, programs, plugins and websites is their favorite part. So here’s a look at some tools of the trade we used on Ed Gillespie for Governor.
Optin Monster
Optin Monster is a plugin for your website that helps you capture visitors’ information with pop-ups, modals, and interstitials. We used it on EdForVirginia.com in the final weeks of the campaign to capture visitors names and email addresses after spending time on our site and for the exit-intent pop-up.
Results: 1.2% of visitors spending 5 or more seconds on key pages opted in as well as 0.6% of visitors demonstrating “exit intent.”
Pros: Very affordable and easy to install with their WordPress plugin. Lots of options for templates, behaviors and optimization that require no programming experience.
Cons: Wish I had learned about Optin Monster sooner.
I’m planning on using this on every website I manage going forward.
Roost Notifications
Roost offers a plugin that will encourage visitors to your website to opt-in to browser notifications from your website. Thousands of site visitors opted in to receive occasional reminders from the campaign. It’s a great way to cut through clutter on social media and email, similar to a text message, and encourage supporters to take action.
Pros: Again, very affordable and easy to set up. Great interaction and click through rates.
Cons: You’ll get some users frustrated with not understanding how they opted in or how to unsubscribe, so make sure you have good answers on both fronts.
WP Engine
WP Engine is my go-to host for WordPress sites and they are as close to set it and forget it hosting as you can get. We served hundreds of thousands of visitors across five different websites with no down time during our entire campaign.
Pros: Great technology, easy to use dashboards to set up things like SSL certificates and clearing caches. Responsive customer service when needed.
Cons: Pricing for multiple websites may mean you’re paying for traffic you don’t need, but you won’t break the bank. And you don’t want to cut corners when it comes to hosting.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is another behind-the-scenes tool you likely wouldn’t have noticed as a casual visitor to EdForVirginia.com but does a lot to improve your visit, including speeding up page load times by caching content via the CDN.
Pros: Easy to set up, affordable, and offers a great suite of controls for your website, especially if it tends to get sporadic, huge spikes in traffic.
Cons: Some advanced options you likely (and hopefully) won’t need will require the support of someone with some more experience in the systems admin world.
Leadpages
Leadpages offer some additional options for lead capture, similar to the functionality of Optin Monster, but we used Leadpages to create petition and email landing pages to engage our supporters on a range of issues and topics.
Pros: After a moderate learning curve, very easy to set up. Responsive across devices and highly customizable behavior.
Cons: Pre-built templates come with a lot of extra elements I typically didn’t need for one-off landing pages and the editor can be wonky since it’s browser-based.
ShortSwitch
ShortSwitch is the tool I use to produce custom short links for social media and text messages. A branded short link increases the click through rate, especially on text messages, because it gives the user more confidence that the message isn’t spam or another threat. We hosted our short links at ed4va.com
Pros: Easy to use and setup once you’ve got your short domain secured. Offers good customization and usage stats.
Cons: Adds an extra step to execution of your marketing strategy.
Chatfuel
Chatfuel lets you create your own Facebook Messenger chatbot to interact with supporters via your Facebook page. We used it to answer frequently asked question, help supporters complete requests for yard signs and bumper stickers, and sign up to volunteer. Most importantly, Chatfuel allows you to have ongoing conversations with those who have interacted with you at scale. Throughout the course of the campaign our Chatfuel messenger bots interacted with thousands of voters and generated tens of thousands of interactions.
Pros: Free plan available, no technical skill required and easy to integrate with your page.
Cons: There are limits to the AI’s ability to parse keywords and you risk trolls, but overall benefit outweigh the gains.
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