Fireside21

This is the eighth entry in our series of 21 Tips for Email Outreach.

If you have a meeting with prominent figure in your district, such as a business leader or advocacy group head, ask for their permission to include them in your newsletter list. 

Then, create a tag in Fireside Email for VIPs and flag them with that tag as well as tags for relevant issues.

Plan specific outreach for each targeted VIP list.  Use language recognizing their stature in the community, for example: “Considering your role as a leader on education in the 8^th district, I thought it important to share my thoughts on the proposed legislation with you…  I hope you’ll take a moment to answer this survey…”

Encourage your VIPs to share your news and your surveys with their colleagues and communities.

This is the seventh entry in our series of 21 Tips for Email Outreach.

Sending a newsletter that’s a wrap-up of the week’s or month’s news is great, but a more effective approach is to email your subscribers in advance of big votes and events.  Take advantage of public debate to draw readers to your website, solicit their opinions, and subscribe them to your email list.

Buying an email list is fast and cheap, but you’ll get better results in the long-term from an organic approach to building your list of opt-in subscribers.  Constituents who have signed up for your newsletter, who expect it and know what to expect, are more likely to read it and feel engaged by it.  Not only that, these are the constituents you’ll be able to email during black-out periods, so it’s an important list to build.

Develop trust by asking readers for their opinions.  And thank them for their responses!

Your subject line is the single most important factor in determining whether or not your email gets opened. You only have so much space (about 50 characters for most email readers), so every word should be carefully considered. Here are some do’s and don’ts for email subject lines.

Don’t: Include the Congressman’s name (it’s already in the “From” address)
Do: Choose a topic. Your newsletter might be about more than one thing, but try to narrow your focus and pick the most salient or relevant of those issues for your subject line.

Don’t: Include the date or week (emails are time-stamped!)
Do: Think like a reporter and write a good lede. The subject line is your front page headline. Make it stand out.

Don’t: include the newsletter’s name (it’s likely repeated in the masthead)
Do: Ask a leading question or make a call to action. Make the newsletter about your constituent – your reader – and engage them directly in your subject line. “How will the new health care legislation affect you?” “Share your opinion on last night’s address” “What’s your take on carbon trading? Tell your Congressman!”

Don’t miss Congressman Jared Polis’ new web site, complete with a green screen welcome video. Beam me up, Congressman!

Here’s another tip for growing your opt-in lists.  Ask all of your co-workers in both DC and district offices to include a link to one of the following in their email signatures:

• Email newsletter sign-up form
• Focused issue-based questionnaire (good for LAs)
• The week’s featured legislative survey (a great technique, but it requires frequent updating)

This is the second entry in our series of 21 Tips for Email Outreach.

Take advantage surveys; they are the easiest and most effective way to build your opt-in list and reduce email traffic to your office.

The issue pages are some of the most trafficked sections of congressional pages and the perfect place for surveys. Create one for each of your issues pages and start building your opt-in lists and target audiences.

And here’s some more information on creating surveys.

Representative Maxine Waters shows off the web’s best features on her recently launched web page:

Congratulations to Congressman Cao on his recently launched website:

This is the second entry in our series of 21 Tips for Email Outreach.

In one database you’ve got your newsletter subscribers, in another your CMS contacts, maybe a block of data sitting on a hard drive and email lists from a dozen different sources in just as many places. It’s time to get it together, and it won’t be as painful as you think.

Sync all your data in Fireside Email™ and take full advantage of that mass of information without risk of sending duplicate emails to your constituents. And you can still use our tagging system to build different audiences, so you’ll lose none of the specificity of targeted email lists.

In fact, if you really want to streamline things, bring all your data under one roof with Fireside CRM™, a comprehensive system for handling the constant flow of congressional mail, email, and casework.

And here’s some information on importing email lists.