Stupid Political Watch: Waaay Behind the Curve

One of the great ironies of e-mail marketing is how vilified for-profit businesses have been in the spam debate over the years when non-profits and politicians are some of the worst offenders.

Case in point: a dummy address I set up during the presidential primaries last year and registered for e-mail communications from every single viable candidate.

As reported here before, the address is getting a lot of unsolicited political e-mail representing the full spectrum of American political ideology.

What’s arguably just as troubling, though, is the profound ignorance of best practices in other aspects of their mailings.

For example, I received a message from Emily DeRose recently with the subject line “20, 500 and 3.”

I had no idea who the heck Emily DeRose was and certainly had no idea what the subject line referred to.

Turns out Emily DeRose is the communications director for the Democratic Governors Association and the subject line referred to what the group considers a distasteful scenario: “20 Republican governors. 500 conservative donors. A private resort in Texas. 3 days to finalize their comeback strategy.”

First, I have reason to believe that the DGA obtained that address from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. So the group is spamming, and doing so under a name in the “from” line that it is unlikely recognizable to most Democrats.

Multiple studies have shown that people decide whether or not to open an e-mail based on who is in the subject line and whether previous interactions with the sender have been valuable. The only reason I opened the message was that I get article ideas from opening spam.

The DGA’s list is no doubt underperforming and there’s no excuse for the lack of basic e-mail knowledge displayed in its messages. A Google search for “email best practices” in quotes so only pages with exact phrase were counted brought back 19,600 results.

And not to let conservatives off the hook, I received an e-mail recently from former ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton urging me to join United Against a Nuclear Iran. At least I knew who Bolton was, but I never registered for messages from his group.

The footer of Bolton’s message said: “We support responsible and ethical email marketing practices. Please know that we respect your right to be purged from this marketing campaign. Removal from this email distribution list is automatically enforced by our email delivery system. Please click here to start the process for email deletion.”

The footer continued: “This correspondence may be a newsletter, press release, solicitation or advertisement. We encourage and support best practices in responsible e-mail marketing.”

Message to United Against a Nuclear Iran’s e-mail manager: If you feel the need to proclaim that you support e-mail best practices, you probably don’t.