Last night former State Senator Mike Dunleavy won the GOP nomination for Governor in Alaska. He came out on top in a competitive race with the help of a GOTV peer-to-peer push.
On election day, Dunleavy’s campaign sent out 10,684 messages and won by 18,963 votes.
They targeted an audience who had a history of typically voting for the Republican candidate, but didn’t always turn out to the polls. This is a perfect group to send a reminder text to get out and vote.
They then paired this audience with a message that was crafted to appeal to these type of people. As a result, it wasn’t surprising to see the high level of engagement and positive responses they did.
Dunleavy’s campaign also seized the opportunity to utilize another key advantage of peer-to-peer texting; growing your opt-in list.
P2P texting allows you to text people who have not previously opted into receiving texts from you because each message is being sent one at a time by a real person. This opens up the opportunity to reach an audience of people that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to reach using traditional mass-texting platforms that require the recipient to have opted-in to receive texts from you.
Dunleavy’s campaign recognized this, and when a recipient would reply positively to their initial message, one of their volunteer agents would send them a response asking if they would like to receive future updates from the campaign.
Since the recipient had already responded positively, it was the perfect opportunity to ask if they would like to be contacted again. The recipient simply needed to reply back “YES” and they can then be added to the campaign’s opt-in list.
Asking people to opt-in as a response to a positive reply is much more effective than asking people to opt-in with the first cold send. By asking for an opt-in with the second or third message, you’re able to establish a connection with the recipient and give them the chance to get to know who they’re talking to. Then based on how the conversation goes, you can be sure you’re only asking people to opt-in who you know already support your candidate or cause, which means there is a much higher chance of them replying “YES.”
In the end, Dunleavy and his team ran an excellent P2P campaign and we are looking forward to helping them win again in November.
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