"Hey, I will be outspent." from Barack Obama

Today’s subject of our class was Viral Marketing, the Viral Marketing. It sounds like spiral or moral, isn’t it? Anyway, the word Viral is derived from Virus, and Viral Marketing means that if you launch an advertisement or some information about your product on the internet, then it could be spread to a numerous number of people by someone who likes your product or even don’t care of anything about it but only for fun.

It is obvious that almost every person has their own smartphone these days, and they also are really into the social media, which is I am addicted to as well. Like I said on previous post, companies started to use social media as a channel of their advertisement. Therefore, it has been approved that it's a new-brilliant way of marketing. But before we got used to social media, what kind of online communication method did we get used to do? Do you forget what was it? It is the Email. We are still using email of course, but do we use it as often as we did before? I suppose it’s probably more decreased than even remained.

But here is an unbelievable case of email marketing which happened to Barack Obama elected US President during 2012 US Presidential Race. 

This is one of the most interesting things that Obama campaign team did during the race. They made a webpage for their supporters, so supporters could feel much more closer to Obama actually. It made them act like viruses spread from one to another. In fact, people started get together through that webpage and even went out to conduct a campaign themselves. In short, that was a powerful and strong webpage for the campaign team, and they gathered email address of their supporters by letting people fill in the sign up form to enter the webpage.

Even though Obama got a number of his supporters' email address, it is absolutely hard to make them fund for him voluntarily. Among Obama's fund, however, almost $700 million was raised by email. How did they make it?

The answers are quite simple. Obama's email marketing strategies are targeting, testing, creative, and subject lines. Well, one of Obama's analysts said, "We did extensive A-B testing not just on the subject lines and the amount of money we would ask people for". The campaign team would test hundreds of drafts and subject lines before picking the best one. "When we saw something that really moved the dial, we would adopt it", says the campaign's email director who oversaw a staff of 20 writers.

And Obama's the other email strategy is 'send more, raise more'. Why? Because sending email actually means an opportunity to donate or fund. Sending volumes of email doesn't mean win the elections, but donations do.