What Marketers Can Learn from Barack Obama's Email Campaign

I sign up for newsletters and follow content creators a lot, and I unsubscribe a lot too.

Unsubscribing is not driven by email frequency. Some people send me a lot of email, yet I don’t unsubscribe from their list.

This is because I enjoy reading their emails. With some other lists, I unsubscribed with a lot fewer emails.

Most marketers think sending too many emails will drive people to unsubscribe from the list. This perception is built by marketers who are not well-versed in email marketing.

Barack Obama’s email campaign teaches us that the opposite is true.

The Obama campaign and 18 email writers

In the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama’s digital team had 18 email writers who were sending lots of emails per day to the same list.

Emails had various angles to appeal to the recipients for funding. The emails varied from a casual angle to matching donations to promoting a lottery to have dinner with Obama for any amount of donation.

They sent emails frequently and raised almost 690 million dollars from their emails. 

This was only possible because they were aggressive in their email frequency and approach. They kept testing different email types to see effectiveness.

What actually drives unsubscribes

When it comes to frequent promotional emails, marketers talk about unsubscribe rate as the number one risk for not doing it.

But they don’t think about why people unsubscribe from a list.

People don’t unsubscribe because of email frequency. People unsubscribe because emails are not relevant.

If people get value from your email, they will keep reading it. It is like the episodes of your favourite TV show.

The serendipity argument

The most important argument for sending more email is that we don’t know when someone is ready to buy.

We can send an email and hope for conversion. If someone has a problem that our product can solve, they will be ready to buy.

Or if a friend recommends the reader to use something similar to our product, that is a moment they can buy our product.

But if we send infrequent or no emails at all to stay on top of their mind, we will miss that moment of sale.

What frequency actually does to a list

When someone receives four emails per day and still doesn’t unsubscribe, they are signalling that they approve receiving so many emails.

That prospect likes our email content and is ready to buy our products.

That is more useful than having a lot of subscribers whom you are not sending enough emails and promotions and testing their receptiveness. 

The practical test most people never run

Most wisdom about email frequency is not tested.

Marketers never run a test campaign to check how many emails will drive their subscribers away from their list.

Marketers who send more emails due to the need or type of campaign are almost always surprised to see that more emails mean more revenue.

The unsubscribe rate can slightly go up, but that is offset by the higher revenue and margin.

The one condition that makes this work

The number one condition to make this work is to send emails that have value in them.

If the emails are mediocre, that will definitely drive the unsubscribe rate. People don’t want to read emails that don’t entertain or provide value or help them become a better version of themselves.

So before you think about frequency, think about whether what you're sending is worth sending. If not, fix the content.

If content is great, don’t worry about frequency.

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