Does this bring in money or votes? Newsletter 3
Welcome to the third installment of “Does this bring in money or votes?” -- a newsletter brought to you by your very own DNC Mobilization team! I’m Esteban Fernandez, our digital ads manager, and I’m here to talk to you all about (digital) ads.
Feature:
We are just a few months away from celebrating one year since the Mobilization Team decided to bring its digital ads program in-house. As the first-ever DNC digital ads manager, I’m thrilled to share a bit about our approach and some of the accomplishments we are extremely proud of!
But first, how about a quiz? Based on the chart below, can you guess when we took our program in-house?
If you guessed May 2019, you are correct! Moving an entire program in-house had no shortage of bumps on the road. Luckily we got a bit of help from the folks at Chong+Koster and extensive buy-in from the DNC’s senior leadership, and in the end, the results speak for themselves. During the second half of 2019, we were able to drop our CPA by 62%, increase monthly immediate revenue by 65%, and add an average of 248% more emails to our list.
It’s all about Ecosystems
Now, you’re probably wondering how we pulled this off? Well, it all starts with the Mobilization Team’s unique structure. Instead of dividing up our programs into walled-off verticals, we created an ecosystem in which all programs from direct mail to social to ads collaborate to not only build cohesive messages but also exchange performance insights and lift up one another.
This structure has changed the way we handle ad ops and media planning. Whereas most email acquisition ad programs are primarily concerned with keeping their cost per acquisition (CPA) low and their immediate return on ad spend (ROAS) high, there is usually little insight into how those new subscribers perform in the email program. We leveraged our direct integration with our email and analytics teams and built a Long Term Value (LTV) model that layers email fundraising metrics onto our daily ads reporting to make more data-driven decisions on where to allocate our media spend.
By heavily scaling on those campaigns and platforms with the highest paybacks and cutting down on those with softer results, I’m thrilled to share that our investments are projected to have an ROI of over 140% by Election Day!
When Direct Mail and Digital Collide
Outside of online fundraising, our ads program has also tapped into our Direct Marketing team’s fundraising efforts. Last fall we did quite a bit of testing around delivering online ads to donors who predominantly donate through direct mail.
Here are a few samples of our direct mail lift ads!
We were both shocked and thrilled by some of the results we saw! Across several tests, we saw an 80% lift in donations from those high value direct mail donors who saw our ads online. This translated into about $80-$100k in donation lift in just one month! Needless to say, these lift campaigns have become part of our program, and we’ll continue working with our Direct Marketing team to seek ways to improve them.
We still have quite a bit of work ahead of us, but the past year has shown us that through cross-program collaboration we can make the right investments, lift other programs, and put ourselves in the best position to elect Democrats up and down the ballot, which in the end, is the only thing that matters.
Job opportunities:
We’re in the market for a marketing and membership assistant!
Marketing and Membership Assistant
🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵
Closing:
Thanks for being here! If you’d like to chat more about ads, feel free to email me at ads@dnc.org. As always, please send this along to any and all of your friends in the Democratic digital space and keep an eye out for our next edition!
Happy Wednesday,
Esteban Fernandez