

Re: “Hey:” – An Analysis of the Obama/Romney Emails - bhallen
http://www.klaviyo.com/blog/2012/11/06/re-hey-an-analysis-obamaromney-emails/  

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brown9-2
Along the same topic, Mother Jones had an article last month about the inside
of the Obama campaign's tech operation (or at least as much as they felt
comfortable revealing) that was pretty intriguing:
[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/harper-reed-
obam...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/harper-reed-obama-
campaign-microtargeting?src=longreads)

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vhf
(I just noticed OP is the author, so I'll put my comment here) [edit :
correction, OP is the author's brother, sorry :]

I'm absolutely no mailing specialist, but here is my take :

Your study is quite interesting, but has it any value without you saying which
mails your read when ?

Tracking if an email has been read or not is quite simple, providing the email
is sent as HTML and the one who reads it is no privacy-nerd (noscript,
ghostery, other ways to block external ressources, highly secure mailbox
softwares, etc). What if you regularly "read" Obama's mails and not Romney's
ones ?

If I were to manage this kind of mailing campain, I'd probably put on hold for
a while email addresses who haven't read the last X mails. On the contrary, I
would go on sending mails to people reading them. Etc.

Please tell us what you did "read" and when, and what you did not.

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dpark
Don't most modern email clients block image (and other resource) downloads
until the user specifically requests them or whitelists the sender?

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s_henry_paulson
I was testing out mailchimp the other day, and I could not for the life of me
get the thing to recognize that I had read my test e-mails to my accounts,
even though I had.

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alxndr
IIRC (been over a year since I used Mailchimp) they don't do analytics on test
emails.

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malenm
Can you please fix the first graph in the post? It's very hard to interpret
'gaps' in emails sent when you have Jul-12 and Sep-12 repeated.

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engtech
Does anyone know what firms the campaigns are using for the campaign emails,
or is that not public knowledge?

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d474
You can check by inspecting the mailing headers.

The Obama campaign uses Blue State Digital to send emails. The Romney campaign
uses ExactTarget.

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drumdance
That's pretty interesting to learn. Blue State Digital's allegiance is
obvious. ExactTarget is based in Indiana, a red state.

(Though I'm sure their greatest allegiance is to green.)

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TomAnthony
Page is down. Google Cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?pws=0&q=cac...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?pws=0&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.klaviyo.com%2Fblog%2F2012%2F11%2F06%2Fre-
hey-an-analysis-obamaromney-emails%2F)

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edhallen
I'm working to get it back up, but it looks like our host will keep us down
for 30 minutes or an hour. Good sign that we need to invest in better hosting.

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danso
As the OP mentioned, ProPublica has also done an analysis of emails, which
they asked readers to send to them: <http://projects.propublica.org/emails/>

It's hard to know how sophisticated the actual targeted emails are. The PP
analysis likely didn't capture the whole universe of emails received (because
it was mostly from their readership)...and the skeptical part of me wonders:
how sophisticated are campaigns at this, really?

For one thing, a limiting factor is how much they are willing to spend to
tailor a large variance of emails. I guess from the limited knowledge I have
of campaign internals and campaign writers, knowing how to work a binary
decision tree would be a rare skill. Of course they might have a program that
abstracts this process, but you still have the core issue of writing an
intelligible email that remains intelligible (and won't be an inadvertent
embarrassment) across all variances.

Also, I wonder if open-rates have a stronger effect on the email format than
any other kind of personal information, other than gender, age, geography, and
donation history.

\--

I have no doubt that campaigns _think_ they are very sophisticated, especially
compared to what they had in the last cycle four years ago. I'm talking about
sophistication as it compares to what Facebook and Google have. That's an
unfair bar here but c'mon, that's what we should be comparing against in the
big picture.

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juddlyon
My guess is that over a billion dollars can buy you some pretty damn
sophisticated marketing. What email campaigns have more on the line than
these?

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therealarmen
Well, multi-billion dollar corporations like Google, for one.

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spindritf
I get Bluehost's "The website you were trying to reach is temporarily
unavailable."

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plorkyeran
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=opera...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=opera&q=cache:http://www.klaviyo.com/blog/2012/11/06/re-
hey-an-analysis-obamaromney-
emails/&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest)

