election:

Obama vs. Romney: An analysis of the infamous e-mail campaigns

If you’re like me, you’ve probably been swamped in campaign e-mails over the last few weeks. (We even spotted some good unintentional fanfic from the Obama subject lines.) The campaigns are doing some incredibly interesting things with the format, but man, do they get overwhelming sometimes. E-mail marketing company Klaviyo was equally interested, and they found a couple of interesting things:

• one There was a nearly two-month gap where Romney’s camp didn’t send e-mails. Obama sent e-mails nearly the entire time between June and November. Both campaigns ramped up in the last few weeks.
• two One in seven Obama e-mails used one-word subject lines, something which Romney never did. Obama also relied heavily on subject lines which ended with colons (i.e. “This Matters:”) — something which weirded out Klaviyo’s Ed Hallen.
• three Romney’s camp was more likely to send e-mails from with name lines of people other than the presidential candidate, his VP candidate, or his spouse. Nearly half of all Obama camp e-mails, on the other hand, came from “Barack Obama” himself. But we all know Obama was too busy running the country to actually send all of those himself. 

From a marketing perspective, these campaigns will be watched closely because they’re doing fairly innovative things with the format. On the other hand, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m gonna be glad not to get so many e-mails.

— Ernie @ ShortFormBlog

Barack Obama campaign e-mails, I will miss you.