AAPC Approved: 5 Exclusive Political Texting Strategies

Take a look at the "5 Things to Know About Texting" session featured at the 2021 AAPC Digital Conference to learn how to succeed in the upcoming campaign registry season 

On July 29th, RumbleUp founder and CEO Thomas Peters hosted a session at the 2021 AAPC Digital Politics Conference, where he explained how political texting has become a widely used tool in the campaign space, but it’s no secret that many are still learning how to use it effectively. Also, with the campaign registry coming up, it is imperative to continue texting successfully this year, next year, and into the future. 

Want to know how you can do that? Simply follow these five political texting tips straight from the industry experts. 

1) Political Texting Delivery Rates

Delivery rates are always being brought up with peer-to-peer (P2P) texting, and for good reason. Ensuring your texts actually go through will not only save you from spending money on undelivered texts, but with the campaign registry coming, delivery rate matters more than ever for your political texting campaign. 

Your texting platform should be reliably delivering messages to good cell phone numbers to increase your credibility and save you money. Accidentally texting landlines and inoperable phones will impact your credibility score with the campaign registry. It's not only important to have a good data set, it's important to have good targeting. 

Good texting platforms will have the toolset to clean your data, help you with your targeting efforts, help you get your messages delivered, and provide transparent data when they are not. If your current vendor isn’t providing these tools, you should be asking questions.

2) Real Conversation Is Key for Effective Political Texting

Texting is a two way personal channel. When texting, you want to act just as you would treat knocking on someone's door. Having a genuine two way conversation with future persuadables, volunteers, donors, and voters gives you opportunities to make solid connections and gain their support early on. 

When political texting and collecting data, it's extremely important to use a platform that has tags allowing you to work the first party data into your CRM so you can follow up with people appropriately. 

Another great trend being observed is putting someone in charge of the political texting channel. No matter how big or small a campaign is, someone should own this channel and make sure it's fully utilized. In this day and age, that person should be someone on the grassroots side or someone on the digital team that is very engaged in your texting program and very focused on ensuring genuine conversation is happening with supporters. 

3) Compile A Political Texting Opt-in Text List

You have a golden opportunity right now while peer-to-peer texting is still running in a relatively safe grey area to start creating an opt-in texting funnel. If you are not opt-in texting, you need to be. To help you with this, we created a separate platform called Switchboard which is exclusively for opt-in texting. 

Switchboard has an integration with RumbleUp so that when you've identified someone who is engaged with you while P2P texting, you can invite that person to join you on Switchboard using pre-scripted legal approved language. 

4) Send Videos During Political Texting

The future is video. Time has shown every digital channel that when text and video go head to head, video wins hands down. In the 2020 cycle, we rolled out Enhanced Video Texting and it quickly became our most useful product. It allows you to send high quality, made-for-TV videos with clear audio and closed captions to any device. Being able to use this tool gives you the opportunity to have an immersive storytelling experience that only video can do. 

With other services, texts with videos get sent that don’t include captions and have audio that only works on a particular phone network. This all means that 30%-60% of your audio files will not work when people receive them. These videos tend to have terrible video quality as well. This backfires because instead of delivering a great experience, you're sending a horrible one. So, if you're going to spend the extra money on political texting videos, you want to make sure they are of excellent quality to make it worth your while. 

Video texting also has better delivery than plain SMS text messages, and it has a more favorable response from peer-to-peer audiences. It's something that's interesting and doesn't require them to click through a link, so it creates the engagement that people are looking for. If you couple these with a compelling message or a question you’ll really be able to set the stage for compelling conversations to happen. 

5) Track Political Texting Links

Being able to track the links you send is a vital part of your engagement data collection. Having access to this at an individual level is so helpful because you can know exactly which people clicked your link inside a message, no matter how big the audience is that you sent it to. Even if the contact didn't make a donation, sign up, or reply to your message you can now know who to follow up with.

This tool can also be used to optimize political texting copy and responses. You can compare data to see which messages resonate more with your audience and get better click throughs so that you can curate your content based on these results to get higher completions and engagement in the future. 

Bottom Line

Political texting is the gateway to success for any candidate in an election. By harnessing the power of the best digital communication tools and engaging in one-on-one conversations with supporters, you will stand out from the crowd. With a significantly higher open rate compared to emails, SMS marketing ensures that your message is seen and acted upon, providing a direct and effective way to connect with your audience.

Interested in getting started with P2P texting for political outreach? Sign up at rumbleup.com, text us at 833-530-4400, or reach out to our sales team at sales@rumbleup.com to talk about how texting can best work for you.

Also, text “AAPC” to 833-245-2534 with any questions you have and you will receive a special offer!