Election emails from Obama's digital team

Wired has a fascinating excerpt from Jonathan Alter's book The Center Holds. It is about the 2012 election campaign; specifically, how the Obama digital team operated.

It turned out that predicting from your gut which messages or graphics might connect with voters was a fool’s errand. Intuition gave way to test results. In direct mail, tests are slow and expensive; online, they’re fast and nearly free.

The team

conducted 240 A/B tests on their donation page. (A/B testing, used often in web design, tests different versions of the same information to see which gets the better response.) They tested everything they sent as many as eighteen times, from the salutation — “Hey” worked especially well — to the wording of fundraising appeals to the size of the donate buttons on the site.

One of the things I have noticed at the supermarket is how the magazines use yellow in their covers. The Obama team learned through their testing procedures that

yellow backgrounds generated 10 to 20 percent more email responses than white backgrounds.

The fundraising emails — more than four hundred in all — appeared hour after hour, day after day because they worked. An elaborate “More Emails Test” showed conclusively that the more fundraising emails that went out, the more money came back … simple as that.

The team concluded that ignoring the human desire not to be annoying may have been the single greatest conceptual breakthrough of the campaign. It turned out to be worth more than $100 million.

A critical moment came when Digital tested thirteen varieties of a special message from the president to the Email List, scheduled for June 26, just two days before the Supreme Court ruled on Obamacare. Among the subject lines tested were “Thankful every day,” “Do this for Michelle,” “Would love to meet you,” and “Some scary numbers.”

The winner, which netted a projected $1.5 million more than several of the runners-up, was “I will be outspent.”

“I will be the first president in modern history to be outspent in his re-election campaign, if things continue as they have so far,” the president wrote. Obama asked for $3 (more if the recipient had donated before) to fight back against more than $1 billion in ads “trashing me, you and everything we believe in.” “We can be outspent and still win. But we can’t be outspent 10 to 1 and still win,” Obama emailed, in a classic bit of hype.

Portraying himself as a victim was a winner for Obama.