Hyper Local Political Advertising
A few months ago, we helped a local political campaign maximize the exposure of their candidates by targeting their party members on multiple channels. This marketing campaign aimed to direct voters to the candidates' website to sign up for email and SMS alerts to increase voter turnout on election day. Spoiler alert: Our candidate won by a landslide.
The first step is obtaining a quality list, and we have several sources for obtaining voter information and their propensity to vote on specific issues.
It is vital to have up-to-date and quality information. Nothing is more embarrassing than calling someone the wrong name; having an error on your list essentially is the same mistake. Starting with a high-quality list makes scrubbing the list for accuracy easier, faster, and less expensive.
We check all our addresses against the National Change Of Address database. The "NCOA" is a service provided by the US Postal service that ensures a mailing address is current. When sending marketing or political mailings, the NCOA increases the chance the postcard or envelope arrives at the right destination and to the right individual. The process of cleaning the mail list also reduces postage and lets the list owner update the contact information on the list.
Incorporating USPS Informed Delivery Service
We incorporated the USPS Informed delivery service with the direct mail piece, which sends an email with a color copy to participants on our list.
The direct mail piece had a one hundred percent breakthrough rate because everyone on our mail list got the message. The Informed delivery only had about a 17% breakthrough rate because not everyone on our list signed up for informed delivery. So this gives us two methods to convince our audience to visit the political campaign's website and sign up for "Get Out To Vote" alerts.
Incorporating IP Targeting
Although our response rate was pretty good, adding the informed delivery to the campaign helped boost the response, but we still needed more signups. While stretching the marketing budget, we targeted our audience with Display ads on local and national news sites to accomplish this goal. We achieved this by combining our quality physical address list and targeted IP addresses based on those addresses. So, in other words, everyone in our audience got our mail piece; everyone in our audience saw some display ad at around the same time. We were able to run the display ads right up to election day and even change the ad creative at the last minute.
Another significant benefit of the hyper-local campaign is segmenting our voter sets between those who converted and received notifications and those who did not—using the IP targeting method combined with retargeting pixels on the campaign website made this easy. It allowed us to reach 100% of the total audience regardless of if they engaged or not.
For a political candidate, the two most important factors to deliver a win are Brand/Name recognition, exposure, and voter turnout. Our Hyper-Local Political Marketing campaign successfully achieved these objectives by strategically combining several marketing methods. Direct Mail, Email, and IP Targeted Display Advertising.
