Many political campaigns, organizations, and advocacy groups turn to SMS marketing to effectively communicate with their supporters. Text messaging provides many benefits to political campaigns, such as raising fundraising, increasing voter turnout, and being able to communicate directly with supporters in real time. In fact, many political campaigns that use Tatango’s SMS marketing software see an average ROI of $5 for every $1 spent on SMS marketing.
In order to send text messages to their constituents, political candidates and organizations must use political texting software. This blog post highlights some of the text messaging software features that are most important for political campaigns. Check with the provider you’re considering partnering with to see if they offer these features so they can support you in winning your next election.
11 Benefits of Political Texting Software
Below are 11 ways that political texting software can help your campaign raise donations, increase voter turnout, communicate in real-time with constituents, and win elections.
1. Messaging Workflows
Messaging workflows help you design your text messages with all the essential parameters you need to communicate directly with your subscribers. Instead of manually texting supporters—or sending them emails that go unopened—with one click, you can send mass text messages to millions of subscribers. Tatango’s political texting software can send 100,000 messages per minute—that’s 6 million texts per hour!
Choose between SMS messages or MMS messages (which can include up to 5,000 characters of text as well as eye-catching images, gifs, and videos). By choosing whether you want to schedule your messages in advance or send text messages urgent immediately, you can get important information out to your followers before they hear the news from anyone else.
2. Subscriber Segmenting
Segmenting your SMS subscriber list will give your campaign a competitive edge! The more information you know about your subscribers, the more you can segment your list, create distribution lists, and increase donations. Text messaging segmentation helps you improve communication with your supporters so you send them text messages about the issues that matter most to them.
Additionally, you can segment based on subscribers who donate, versus those who don’t, and create unique text messages for those two audiences.
3. Subscriber Analytics
Subscriber analytics gives your campaign much-needed insight to better understand what matters most to your supporter base. An analytics dashboard should be simple to use and provide graphing tools so you can identify and track supporter behavior trends. Knowledge is power, and being able to analyze supporter information will help your campaign stay in the race.
4. Subscriber Profiles
Your text messaging software should provide subscriber profiles for every individual on your list. Subscriber profiles hold the individual supporter information used to segment your list, analyze your list, and create custom campaigns for each audience type. You can dive into which phone numbers open, click on, and reply to your messages, along with other actionable data.
5. Merge Tags
Merge tags are essential for personalizing your SMS messages. They allow you to dynamically add custom information like a subscriber’s name, city, or state. Personalization is proven to be more effective than sending generic messages. With merge tags, sending mass texts with a personal touch is easier than ever.
6. Developer APIs
Developer APIs are available in robust political fundraising software. A developer API allows developers to integrate texting software with any other software your campaign is using. Software integrations provide more efficient communication workflows and more in-depth data to help you gain a greater understanding of the health of your campaign.
7. Messaging Automation
Messaging automation is a great way to increase your SMS marketing efficiency while creating a great experience for your supporters. For example, you can create an automation that’s triggered when a new subscriber joins the list, so they receive a specific series of messages. You can also create an automation that automatically sends a personalized thank you message to a subscriber who donates to your campaign. With text messaging automation, it’s possible to set up a campaign and let it run on its own.
8. Messaging Analytics
In addition to tracking subscriber analytics within text messaging software, your campaign can also analyze the messages you send. For example, if you send a selfie video of your candidate asking subscribers to donate, versus a message that only contains text, you can discover which political text message performs best and use that data for future texting. Use messaging analytics to get the most out of your SMS marketing investment.
9. Mobile Messaging API
With powerful text messaging software, your campaign can use a mobile messaging API to integrate SMS, MMS, and RCS messaging into any existing software or application. Additionally, with this feature, your campaign can use two-way messaging and obtain even better data.
10. Administrative Controls
Text messaging software also provides your political campaign with administrative controls. Your campaign can access the account anytime, gather data, make changes to subscriber profiles, messaging workflows, and messaging automation. Partnering with software built to give you complete control is vital. Political campaigns often require last-minute changes to messaging, and it’s critical to ensure a member of your staff has access to the text messaging software controls so you can send text messages when it matters most in a tight race—or prior to important fundraising deadlines.
11. Integrations
Text messaging software will typically provide a library of integration partners. Integrations are established partnerships with other software that will easily allow you to link the technologies together. For example, if your organization utilizes WinRed or ActBlue as your political fundraising software, you can integrate with your text messaging software to create a more streamlined donation process for your campaign and supporters.
Learn More About Tatango
The Tatango text messaging platform offers all the features discussed here and much more! In addition to providing our political clients with a robust SMS marketing platform for over 13 years, we pair each client with a partner success manager to ensure that you have an industry expert by your side.
To learn more about our SMS marketing solution, we invite you to schedule time to talk with one of our political texting software experts.
