E-mail Sign-up Cleverness

I got a curious e-mail today from the Obama campaign. It asked me to "re-opt-in" to a list which would enable me to get first notice of who Obama had chosen as his VP nominee.  At first I thought this was a brilliant strategy to get new people to sign up for his e-mail list, and maybe that's all there is to it.

But if so, why make me opt-in again? I'm already on the list, so there must be a reason why they wanted to sub-segment their list for just this purpose. I'm not so sure what the strategy is here.

That said, the lesson here is that if you've got something really interesting to announce, you can use that as a hook to get new members to sign up. This goes along with my post last month about the demise of the newspaper as the source for late-breaking news about your organization.

Clearly the Obama campaign has decided THEY are the news source of record. This isn't a story they are going to leave to the press to report -- they have embraced the age of self-publishing.

  

Comments

[Amy Kweskin]

Really smart move on their part - it is a call to action with immediacy and makes you feel you're in-the-know.

[Joseph Burch]

They're probably going to hit those people who re-opt-in harder on the contribution side.