It's hard to know how sophisticated the actual targeted emails are. The PP analysis likely didn't capture the whole universe of emails received (because it was mostly from their readership)...and the skeptical part of me wonders: how sophisticated are campaigns at this, really?
For one thing, a limiting factor is how much they are willing to spend to tailor a large variance of emails. I guess from the limited knowledge I have of campaign internals and campaign writers, knowing how to work a binary decision tree would be a rare skill. Of course they might have a program that abstracts this process, but you still have the core issue of writing an intelligible email that remains intelligible (and won't be an inadvertent embarrassment) across all variances.
Also, I wonder if open-rates have a stronger effect on the email format than any other kind of personal information, other than gender, age, geography, and donation history.
--
I have no doubt that campaigns think they are very sophisticated, especially compared to what they had in the last cycle four years ago. I'm talking about sophistication as it compares to what Facebook and Google have. That's an unfair bar here but c'mon, that's what we should be comparing against in the big picture.
This point about Google and Facebook is interesting, not least because Google has certainly had numerous people join the campaigns. My guess would actually be that the level of testing by the campaigns (just based on the small subset of data that PP has) is incredible and much, much better than either of the tech giants - regarding email.
As a benchmark, the most analytically savvy paper mailers / marketers of the last 20 years could arguably be Capital One. They did elaborate testing that involved not running TV ads in markets for years at a time, tons of different message styles, frequencies, etc - all because optimizing these results was worth so much to them.
In short, if getting email right means millions of dollars, then there's a premium on getting it right - just as there is for Google for nailing search testing.
I think this is a good point about how the campaigns do have virtually of the resources to put together a sophisticated emailing system...but it may not be a question of pure resources, but of logistics and ingenuity.
Here are two things that I think we can assume:
1) The campaigns have enough data to draw a good guess of who/what you are like, even without you giving anything more than your location, gender and age. This was true at least a decade ago when campaigns (and other third-parties) had access to databases such as subscriber data.
2) The campaigns have the resources to tie this data to individual identities, even if you haven't explicitly done it yourself when signing up for a newsletter. The matching won't be 100% accurate, but the campaigns can be reasonably sure that you are this particular Jane Doe at this address who is 28-32 years old, who subscribes to Rolling Stone and Harper's, and who drives a 2-door sedan.
Then what?
There has to be a middleman who can use this granular data to write a coherent message that leverages the insights from the data...using a model that makes many permutations across the most common combinations of characteristics.
This is similar to how Google can tailor search results for "what's a good movie" for a near infinite combination of user characteristics...but producing discrete databits (search results) is a different problem than producing a coherent fundraising letter.
And while money/resources/desire may not be an obstacle, the question is logistics and other practical concerns that divide the data from the content producers. There are many industries (such as the medical community) in which money and brains are no factor and yet have unsophisticated ways of dealing with information.
It's hard to know how sophisticated the actual targeted emails are. The PP analysis likely didn't capture the whole universe of emails received (because it was mostly from their readership)...and the skeptical part of me wonders: how sophisticated are campaigns at this, really?
For one thing, a limiting factor is how much they are willing to spend to tailor a large variance of emails. I guess from the limited knowledge I have of campaign internals and campaign writers, knowing how to work a binary decision tree would be a rare skill. Of course they might have a program that abstracts this process, but you still have the core issue of writing an intelligible email that remains intelligible (and won't be an inadvertent embarrassment) across all variances.
Also, I wonder if open-rates have a stronger effect on the email format than any other kind of personal information, other than gender, age, geography, and donation history.
--
I have no doubt that campaigns think they are very sophisticated, especially compared to what they had in the last cycle four years ago. I'm talking about sophistication as it compares to what Facebook and Google have. That's an unfair bar here but c'mon, that's what we should be comparing against in the big picture.