A while back we were lucky enough to attend a talk by Amelia Showalter, the woman who led the digital side of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. Not only was it the first US re-election campaign to use Facebook and Twitter as promotional tools, but the online campaigns alone generated a massive $500,000,000.

Amelia was very open and honest in her talk, leading to plenty of valuable insights and takeaways for running email campaigns. One of the best things about the web is that it creates more of a level playing field, so whether you’re launching your first business or helping a US president get re-elected, you’re starting with the same basic tools and principles.

Obama’s re-election campaign presented more challenges than the first time around; he had already been president for a considerable time, the West was in the midst of a huge economic downturn, and people just weren’t as excited as with the initial election. Therefore there was more pressure on the team to raise donations and build support than previously.

Here's how the team tackled one of the world's biggest email marketing challenges and what they learned along the way.

The last step can be the most important

Making an optional task the last part of a process is more likely to see an acceptance from the user because they’re already in the mindset of completing tasks.

What they did: Made the last step in the website donation process “Now save your payment information.”

What you can do: If you ask your users to do anything on your website, whether it’s leaving a comment, registering, buying products, or anything else, you can use that to your advantage. Make the last step social sharing, subscribing to your newsletter, saving a discount code, or any other goal, to boost success rates.

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Team up

Teamwork can be a valuable way of improving your emails, no matter how small your company is.

What they did: Worked on emails as a team process where possible: a range of voices leads to better content & analysis.

What you can do: If you’re a team of one, get honest input from someone who fits a typical customer profile, or even actual customers if possible. If you’re not an ideas person, ask someone who is; most people are happy to chat in exchange for a beer, or you could check out LinkedIn groups to garner advice online.

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Keep it simple

Your recipients should be able to understand what your email is about and know what the next step is within a second.

What they did: Emails were plain text, four to five lines long, and contained one link.

What you can do: How simple your email is will depend largely on what type of email it is and your audience. If you have a strongly visual recipient base, imagery will draw them more than plain text. However, stripping emails back to their very basics is a very useful exercise because it lets you concentrate on the specifics of the message you’re sending and how you’re coming across. Try to create an email no more than two sentences long that gets your idea across; even if you don’t send it, it’s a great technique to practise as it will naturally help you stay focused.

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Make it personal

There's nothing worse in your inbox than an email that seems totally irrelevant and generic.

What they did: After testing, they found that using the recipient’s name in the subject line produced the highest open rate (and was highly successful when cross-tested with their best email drafts).

What you can do: It’s easy to automatically include the recipient’s name in the subject line, so it’s worth testing directly yourself if you require customer names as part of your subscription process.

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Utilise data

If you have subscribers whose needs and budgets vary wildly, you can accommodate that automatically through your emails.

What they did: Segmented their subscriber base based on the amount each person had previously donated and previous spending habits. They then asked for donations slightly above that number. So, for example, a single parent with small historical contributions might be asked for $10 via email; a big corporation $10,000.

What you can do: Recreate this concept with the products you choose to offer customers and the discounts you give them. Personalising spend and likely products for each recipient makes them more likely to buy and more likely to feel like your offerings meet their needs.

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Don’t guess what works

Amelia says, “Don’t trust your gut instinct, conventional wisdom, or long-term best practice advice – they’re usually wrong. You’re not your audience – you’re more aware of everything than they are.”

What they did: Even the experts employed by the team couldn’t predict which emails would be the most successful and which the least. So they eliminated every bit of guesswork by creating a testing process that ensured tests, changes and conclusions were drawn from real data, not opinion.

What you can do: As tempting as it is, stay away from case studies and figures, and focus your efforts on doing instead of reading.

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Be aware of the novelty factor

We’ve talked about the novelty factor before, but Amelia’s team experimented with an extreme.

What they did: Added ‘ugly yellow highlighting’ to important text within their emails, expecting their success rate to drop. In fact, it increased – but only temporarily – due to the novelty factor.

What you can do: Be wary of reaching conclusions too soon when you make a change to your emails. Test every element multiple times to draw the most accurate conclusions. Keep your emails fresh by introducing new layouts, images, fonts, and colours.

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Keep organised

Juggling emails along with all your other promotional tools can be difficult unless you have a long-term strategy to stay organised and focused.

What they did: The team created a testing calendar which included the key points of the emails they sent and a tests column to mark which factors were being assessed.

What you can do: Create a simple spreadsheet to do the same so you know when you plan to send emails, what they’re about, and what works. Include figures from your reports for at-a-glance data.

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Use your own results to keep improving

For best results, forget the competition and set your own benchmarks for success.

What they did: Compared the results of each email against their other emails rather than competitors or industry figures.

What you can do: Exactly the same. No two sets of subscribers are the same, and there are no hard and fast rules. It’s great to get ideas and make decisions about what to test from looking elsewhere, but your own real-world findings are the most important for building success.

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Small changes lead to big successes

Amelia believes that the secret to successful email marketing is creating a series of small changes that add up over time.

What they did: Tested tiny changes, and used them to flywheel their success. For example, their testing revealed that photos of Michelle Obama saw better results than photos of Barack Obama, so they focused on using her image more. The campaign generated around $500 million online, and improvements from testing were responsible for about $200 million of that.

What you can do: Never stop testing. It’s easy to send an email out and tick it off as job done, but you’ll see real improvements over a long period of time with analysis and testing.

Amelia’s team created a series of emails that varied dramatically. At the beginning, the emails were generating as little as $5,000 towards Obama’s re-election campaign. Once the team began testing, logging results, and utilising improvement strategies, they started logging revenue as high as $2.5 million per email they sent out.

What are your top tips for better emails? Let us know in the comments!