The Scottish Referendum has gripped the media over the last month and we wanted to see how email had been used by the Yes and No campaigns. In early 2013, we ran some analysis on email volumes of the Obama and Romney presidential campaigns and found a correlation between the volume of email sent and the performance of each candidate in the polls. While much has been said about the email strategies employed by the Obama campaign, these strategies led to vastly higher volume being sent by his team and this coincided with his moving ahead in the polls and eventually winning the election.
To find out how email is being used to win votes in the Scottish Referendum, we looked at email data from ReturnPath Inbox Insight originating from the main proponents on each side:
Yes: yesscotland.net
No: bettertogether.net
This was overlaid with polling data – we used the latest poll on a given date and mixes polls from 7 different sources with equal weighting.
Starting in July, the Yes camp started to massively out-mail the No camp. They also started catching up in the polls. The chart isn’t a perfect correlation, but it seems suggestive at first glance. The grey area is the cumulative difference in sent volume between the two camps. Lots of grey means that Yes is out-mailing No. The blue line is the poll difference between the two camps and a high value means that Yes is ahead. The Yes camp has also clearly learned a lot from the Obama campaign. They’re using short, sharp “click-baity” subject lines such as:
Here they come, FNAMEFNAME you must read this
Wow!
Fool me once
No campaign got £1m today
The No camp is much more traditional:Now’s the time to do your bit
If you do one thing today for the campaign open this email
Do you work in the NHS or have a background in health? Join NHS Together today!
The green dotted line shows the difference in Open Rates between the Yes and No campaigns – looking at the relative email volumes, the poll and the open rates it’s clear that 1st July marked an important milestone in the Yes campaign’s email program as this is when their send volume dramatically ramped up, their open rates fell and they started edging forward in the polls.The most recent email data available is already 10 days old and a lot has happened in the last week, but based on this data, if we looked only at email we’d be predicting a Yes win. It looks like the Yes campaign has learned lessons from the Obama campaign and is taking the lead and I believe the outcome will be closer than today’s polls and odds suggest, so much so that I have wagered £40 on a Yes win based on this insight. It will be interesting to see which mainstream political party puts email at the forefront of its campaign strategy in the run up to the next General Election in 2015.
Last updated: Oct 17, 2016 Dela Quist
