The POWER Of Email – Overloading The US Capitol Switchboard.

This is an older story from early in my career. I was contracted with a political activist/lobbyist organization based in California as a marketing consultant. I helped them grow their “active” member database from 70,000 members to just over 800,000 in a couple of years.

This was in the very early days of social media, (Think Friendster/MySpace), and email was the primary channel that we generally used to reach out on different ‘calls to action’ and to provide current information on the hot topics of the day. We utilized blogs and topic-specific stand-alone websites primarily, kind of the early versions of what today’s landing pages function as.

There once was a major hot topic, it was regarding very controversial legislation. All the news networks were constantly discussing the issue.

Over a month, we ran steady email campaigns to spread the organization’s perspective and point of view on this pending legislation with a call of action to get the reader to share and distribute the information to their own “personal circles”. (This was Before social media, remember?)

Then came the central action time. The 10 days before the big vote on this legislation, we ran daily campaigns, emails with targeted personalization and localization to reinforce the content, which helped make the copy very personal to each reader.

The Call to Action: To have each person make a personal phone call to the United States Congress asking to speak to their local elected representative and give to them their personal opinion on the pending legislation.

The campaign went so well, that our call to action “literally” caused the shutdown of the US Capitol Switchboard for 7 working days straight due to the massive amount of phone calls incoming.

Shut Down. No calls could get through. None. This was the result of hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously making phone calls throughout the entire day. Day after Day. This fact made all the news outlets stand up and take notice, and suffice it to say the legislators also got the point that the organization was trying to make.

This shows the true power that good marketing can have, and done properly the ability to achieve your goal is never unreachable.

Oh, and remember, even today, email is king when done properly. Build up your personas with as much detailed information as possible. Use this information wisely to personalize and use segmentation to target locally. Today, we have more incredible and powerful abilities to reach out to people utilizing all the different social media channels. Marketing has never been more fun, and more challenging.

Yeah, good memory.