Political Email Marketing

You don't need to wait to start building an email list of supporters, and you don't need a website form to start gathering email addresses. If you have early fundraisers, us a signup sheet for people to get on your list. Once you have a list of initial names and email addresses of people who have affirmatively expressed interest in being notified about your political campaign. This would be your close friends and family. Most email marketing services allow users to import (add) new recipients manually.

When you manually import new subscribers, you will usually be asked to note where/how these people signed up to your list.

After the subscribers are imported, they will generally be sent a confirmation message for them to prove they want to be on the email list. A Confirmed Opt-In list means you have proof someone opted-in, which means fewer unsubscribe requests and far fewer spam complaints.

Purchased email lists, co-registration subscribers and anyone else who has not come directly to you and signed up to your list should NEVER be emailed!

The CAN-SPAM Act, signed into law in December, 2003, established the first national standards for sending commercial e-mail. Political spam e-mail, such as e-mail sent from or on behalf of a candidate for public office, or in support of a political issue or initiative, does not fall under the legal requirements of commercial e-mail spam under CAN-SPAM.

So, does this mean that you can rent a list of voter e-mail addresses and send messages to them?

Well, you could. As a political candidate, you may well be protected by the First Amendment. However, we don't recommend sending campaign e-mail to anyone who has not affirmatively asked for it. Spam generally consists of bogus and offensive products. Unsolicited political spam is probably as just unwelcome to an average voter.

Join our political candidate training site designed to help you to create your online political campaign and to use the web to build support, donations and votes. As a subscriber you will gain immediate access to our exclusive members-only content.

Check out our political email training module!

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