How do the UK political parties compare on email?

The TFM&A website has an interesting write-up of what happens when you give your email address to different political parties.

One slight caveat I’d add for when you read it (and it’s well worth reading) – without seeing the performance data for emails, for all that you can apply good rules of thumb, it is hard to judge for sure which emails are effective and which is not. For example, one Lib Dem email is marked down for not having images, and there are many people who do email communications intensively who swear by the value of images – but there are also those who swear by the value of ‘plain’ emails which contain short text that gets to the point. (The decreasing use of images in the Obama campaign emails over his two Presidential campaigns are a good example of this.)

As a result, I wouldn’t put too much weight on the overall scores myself, but seeing the difference in volumes and topics between the parties is certainly interesting:

Like most marketing departments, these political parties are hammering their databases pretty hard, so to make sure this project doesn’t suffer from too much creep I am focusing on the messages from one two-week period: August 14 – August 27.

Over those 14 days I received nine emails in total. There is no way of knowing if the political parties are segmenting the data they have based on information I offered up, but my personal email definitely exists on their databases somewhere.

Those nine emails came in far from an even split. The Liberal Democrats and UKIP bothered my inbox four times each, the Conservatives once and Labour not at all.

I will be running this project again in a few months to see if this frequency changes at all. At this point though it seems like the parties with the most to prove are pushing hardest.