Text message marketing is the single most effective channel to set your political campaign apart from the competition. With the right SMS marketing strategy, you can drive new supporters, increase voter turnout, quintuple donations, and engage mass amounts of people in real-time. However, without a solid strategy for writing political text messages, you could miss out on key votes, donations, and grassroots support. Below, we share five tips to write winning political text messages.
Best Practices for Writing Political Text Messages
1. Use MMS Messaging
Traditional SMS messages can only contain up to 160 characters, while MMS messages enable you to add more features such as images, GIFs, videos, audio files, and subject lines. With Tatango, you can send up to 5,000 characters in MMS messages, which gives you plenty of room to update your supporters and explain your position on key issues. Regardless of which form of messaging you use, tell your subscribers why you’re messaging them and how they can support your efforts in every message.
Supercharge your results: Tatango’s message preview helps you make any adjustments needed to deliver an effective and concise message within the character length.
2. Personalize Your Text Messages
An impressive 54% of consumers say they are more likely to take action if a text message is personalized. In a political setting, it’s vital for supporters to feel a personal connection to their candidate, so the more you can personalize a political text message, the better. Craft text messages that includes a subscriber’s name or city when possible to let your supporters know that you care about them and their region.
Supercharge your results: If you’re running a nationwide mobile messaging campaign, it’s critical that you send messages based on each subscriber’s timezone. With Tatango timezone automations, you can make sure not to upset your constituents by waking them up in the middle of the night with a text—no matter which timezone a mobile subscriber is in.
3. Create a Sense of Urgency
Elections are time-sensitive, so it’s essential to create a sense of urgency in your text messages. By talking about important issues, letting voters know about upcoming timelines, and inviting voters to help you reach to your fundraising goals, you can capture voter attention and inspire your subscribers to act.
Supercharge your results: With Tatango’s merge tags, you can dynamically insert a subscriber’s first name, email address, state, city, zip code, or even custom subscriber data into your political text messages.
4. Include a Clear Call to Action
We recommend that you always add a call to action in every political text message. The best calls to action are those designed around your campaign’s key goals: attend an event, donate, volunteer, and vote. Make it clear which action you want subscribers to take after reading your text message. Instead of cluttering messages with lots of different call to actions, choose just one to focus on.
Supercharge your results: With Tatango’s SMS marketing software, you can segment subscribers based on demographics such as gender, age, income, marital status, and more. You can also segment by location data to message subscribers based on zip code, timezone, city, and state. This makes your campaigns hyperlocal, which is helpful for fundraising, voter turnout, and inspiring previous donors to donate again.
5. Identify who is sending the messages
Especially during election seasons, voters could receive dozens of political text messages from various candidates. It’s always a good idea to identify your candidate or party in every political text message that you send. This helps your subscribers recognize a text from you right away, making it more likely they will open your text and take action.
Supercharge your results: With Tatango’s subscriber data collection, you can create a messaging workflow to request additional information about your subscribers such as birthdate, zip code and email address. You can even create your own custom data requests—perfect for political text messaging.
Rock the Vote with Political Text Messaging
Ready to send winning political text messages? Tatango has been the industry leader for the past 13 years, helping some of the biggest names in politics win elections. Contact us today.
