Tuesday Tip: The One Good Way to Use Someone Else's Email List
Instead of spamming, dangle bait and see who bites
Virtuous circle: ©iStock/jntvisual. Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Epolitics.com.
Launched in 2006, Epolitics is written and edited by Colin Delany, who has helped nonprofits and political campaigns use digital tools in effective and creative ways since the days of the dot-com boom. He is also a frequent speaker and trainer and the author of How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections. Contact him at cpd@epolitics.com.
Welcome, new readers! If you missed them, check out Sunday’s collection of 39 excellent stories about digital politics and advocacy and the last Tuesday Tip, explaining why Democrats and progressive should promote stories from Fox News and its ilk when it’s to their advantage. On with the show.
Tuesday Tip: The One Good Way to Use Someone Else’s Email or Text List
David Hogg is still spamming me — and he’s definitely not alone. Democratic primary candidates have been adding me to their lists in numbers since mid-summer, but Republicans have joined their ranks in force in the last few weeks.
People have been buying and selling political lists for ages, at least since direct mail and phone solicitation came on the scene. But with just about every political campaign of any scale creating an email or text-message list, the number of spreadsheets circulating for cash or friendship these days must be ridiculous.
Sometimes a candidate brings a legacy list from a previous career or campaign, but more often the campaign or consultants pay for one. Naturally, many buyers upload the list post haste and start spamming away. Equally unsurprising: I find many of their appeals in my spam filter, not my inbox. I can actually trace a bunch of Republican signups over the years back to Newt Gingrich’s list, which I joined in maybe 2010 to keep an eye on it. The current conservative wave includes organizations and campaigns alike, and several of them seem to be connected to the same sender. Buy once, spam repeatedly!
We’ve covered several reasons why you SHOULDN’T email people out of the blue before. Recipients tend not to open unsolicited messages, dragging down the performance of the entire list. Victims also tend to mark them as spam, which can put the hurt on a campaign as well. A surprisingly small number of spam complaints can cripple an email-fundraising operation, at least until it makes enough changes to get out of “spam jail”. I assume similar factors apply to text-message appeals as well.
But I know a way to use a list that landed in your lap without abusing it. I covered the tactic in last spring’s training on effective and ethical list-building (shout-out to sponsor Civic Shout), and it’s also in my digital-campaigning ebook:
I do know of ONE good way to put someone else’s list to work, ethically and often effectively: instead of using it to spam people, you could upload it to Facebook (and some other platforms) as a “custom audience”. Facebook et al will match your list to users’ email addresses or mobile numbers to what it has on file and then allow you to target ads specifically at those people. That way, THEY can decide whether they want to bite or not.
You can also create lookalike audiences to target people similar to your donors or activists across everything Facebook knows about us, which is not creepy at all:
[L]ookalike targeting [typically] uses a custom audience as the basis for outreach to “similar” people, with the assumption that they’re more likely to be interested in your issues than a random sampling of the population (you can choose the “lookalike percentage” — how closely the new people resemble the ones on your list — during setup). When you upload your supporter list and choose lookalike targeting for recruiting ads, you can turn a small list into a bigger community in a short time.
You might upload a list of your own donors and use lookalike targeting to try to expand your fundraising base. As more people sign up, you can feed their information into the system and further refine your targeting. You’ll create a circle virtuous in more ways than one: ever-improving and completely opt-in.
Communicators can create custom and lookalike audiences from other sources besides spreadsheets, including people who’ve engaged with a particular piece of content on Facebook or who’ve gone to a defined place on a website. The latter can connect you with people who land on your donation page but who don’t make it all the way to the thank-you page, for example.
Whatever the source of a list, the basic concept is the same. Dangle bait in front of an audience, see who bites, and target more people who look like them.
For more, check out the list-building training or drop me a line to chat. Next tip next week, Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.
– cpd