Why Candidates Should Never Use Gmail as Their Campaign Email
As a candidate for elected office you’ll need a distinct email address for your campaign.
A lot of candidates attempt to do this by creating a free Gmail account.
Yes that works, but its not the best way to go.
When you decide to run for office you should purchase a website domain name for your campaign, as I previously detailed.
Having your own personalized domain name is an important part of branding your campaign and your candidacy.
It also helps Google and other search engines easily find you and send those looking up your name to your website.
Once you have that personalized domain, you should then create an email that is tied to the domain name you are using.
The email address alone gives legitimacy to your platform and provides you name ID in a very subtle way.
Yes, your name can be in your email, but there’s also something working against you in the minds of the voters when you send email or reply to them with @gmail behind your name.
A gmail address makes you appear to be doing things on the cheap.
Candidates who do things on the cheap are for the most part not serious candidates.
Having an email coming from your personalized campaign domain shows you are a serious candidate.
And it doesn’t cost very much to set up, so there’s really no reason for you not to have an email tied to your own domain.
There is however one really big reason why you shouldn’t be using Gmail or any other free email service for your campaign.
You won’t be able to send out mass emails to the voters using Gmail or other free email services.
Many people use free email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Rocketmail, and so forth.
These free email providers want their users to have the best experience possible with their products.
A good email experience means they will work hard to weed out and eliminate spam.
(M)any free web email domains like aol.com, yahoo.com, mac.com, rocketmail.com, ymail.com, and .ru have updated their email protocols to be more strict about bulk email marketing.
Their policies prevent spam and email scams, but here’s what it means for you. Any mail sent through a platform like MailChimp with a From email address at those domains will be rejected by most receiving servers.
When a free provider sees the same message coming in from a Gmail account to a large group of its users, it’s going to flag that message as spam.
If that happens your winning message won’t be getting through to the voters on your list.
Not only that, since these free providers are on the look out for spammers, they don’t want to encourage them either.
And while Gmail does technically allow users to send out mass messages, it does limit the amount of messages any account can send out in one day.
In a campaign I was running a while back, the candidate sent one message to over 11,000 voters with email addresses.
10,500 wouldn’t have been able to go out if we’d been sending from a Gmail account. That’d be quite ineffective.
Candidate Take-Aways
1. Get a personalized website domain for your campaign.
2. Set up a campaign email that’s tied to that domain.
3. Get a list of targeted voters with emails from your data vendor.
4. Clean the list for bad addresses, spam traps, and honey pots.
5. Send them your winning message.
6. Always comply with the law.
7. Don’t get labeled or blacklisted as a spammer.