[We've added a new section to our Politickr feature that collects all of the emails sent out by the candidates. This makes it very easy to compare candidates' email campaigns, and archives emails for later use. Here, Michael Whitney, who created Politickr, grades the candidates' email campaigns.]

Email messages are the hallmark of online communications. Forgetting about Facebook applications and video mashups, email is the one tried and true avenue to communicate with constituents or customers. But if your inbox is as cluttered as mine, you know that it can take a lot to open an email from a presidential candidate who in all likelihood is asking you for money. So how close attention do the campaigns pay to making it easy to read their emails? TechPresident has already extensively covered the campaigns' use of email, from Hillary's handwritten notes to stripped-down, BlackBerry-style messages from the candidates. I took a closer look at the mechanics of each campaign's email program and graded their performance based on accepted standards of email marketing.

(Want to play with this chart yourself? Here's a text-based spreadsheet.)

The campaigns that fared the best in this matrix: Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney, who all met 5 of the 8 criteria. On the flip side, Joe Biden, Mike Gravel, Duncan Hunter, Dennis Kucinich, and Tom Tancredo all met 2 or fewer of these criteria.

There were two outliers. Since I started tracking each campaign's emails on October 2, 2007, Tom Tancredo's campaign has not sent me a single message, which I found rather surprising. And Duncan Hunter's campaign felt the need to send press release after press release, often obviously cut-and-pasted from Microsoft Word, with Word-specific formatting still embedded in the emails, often making them unreadable when forwarded on. Hunter's campaign does not appear to have a coherent email strategy, relying on information overload, seemingly without a filter to decide if it's worth sending. (Example: this was the subject line of a November 7 email from the Hunter campaign: MISSOURI REPUBLICAN ASSEMBLY ENDORSES DUNCAN HUNTER FOR PRESIDENT. Come on, Duncan, really? On a side note, the images in one Hunter email were hosted on the website of Mesquite High School Class of '83.)

My Methodology

I evaluated presidential campaigns' email messages and used Campaign Monitor's "Email Design Guidelines for 2006" as the basis for the above chart.

1. Never use images for important content like headlines, links and any calls to action.
2. Use alt text for all images for a better experience [with images turned off]
3. Always add the height and width to the image to ensure that the blank placeholder image doesn't throw your design out.
4. Add a text-based link to a web version of your design at the top of your email.
5. Ensure your most compelling content is at the top (and preferably to the left).
6. Ask your subscriber to add your From address to their address book at every opportunity.
7. Ensure that your emails are sent from the same email address
8. Send emails from a 'real person' and not a generic moniker.

(I supplemented this with input from the Progressive Exchange email community, as well as best practices learned from my own experience in email marketing and online activism.):

Explaining the Criteria

No images for important info: Did the campaign compensate for image blocking in email content? Almost every major email client's default setting is to turn off images - and one study suggests that up to 30% of email recipients don't even realize they're missing images that they can't see. So if a campaign relies on images for important info - like to take action or to contribute - there is a good chance that many people won't see what's there. The safest way to deal with this issue is to use text for this important information. On a larger scale, it is my belief that it is unwise to rely on a single image or patchwork of images for an entire email design. For instance, McCain sent an email this week that was a single image with no other text explanation. Follow that link, and you'll see what is seen by anyone with images turned off. I also failed campaigns in this category when their links to contribute in the email are only images with no accompanying text - Fred Thompson and John Edwards are guilty here, among others.

4 Thumbs Up: Gravel, Huckabee, Obama, Paul
9 Thumbs Down: Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Giuliani, McCain, Richardson, Romney, Thompson
2 Plain Text Exempt: Hunter, Kucinich

Using alt text for images: In the event that a user does have images turned off, the alt text should tell the story. Each image should have its own, unique alt text that explains what the image is, or what you want the recipient to do with the image. (E.g., "Image: a boy with a dog;" "Image: Click here to take action.") In my study, I found that campaigns has varying success here. All of Mitt Romney's emails have a header with the alt text, "Banner 6.11.07," which clearly is meant to help the eCampaigns staff figure out which banner to use, but not to explain to recipients what the image is. One Chris Dodd email had alt text leftover from a previous email. For more on images in emails, read M&R Strategic Services' study, "Do Images Help or Hurt?" (PDF)

7 Thumbs Up: Clinton, Dodd, Huckabee, Obama, Richardson, Romney, Thompson
6 Thumbs Down: Biden, Edwards, Giuliani, Gravel, McCain, Paul
2 Plain Text Exempt: Hunter, Kucinich

Adding image height and width: In the event that an HTML email uses images either in its design or to support text, it is imperative that each image's height and width is specified, or else the entire email design can be destroyed. It won't make necessarily make emails unreadable, but it is certainly an unnecessary distraction.

6 Thumbs Up: Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Huckabee, Romney, Thompson
7 Thumbs Down: Biden, Giuliani, Gravel, McCain, Obama, Paul, Richardson

2 Plain Text Exempt: Hunter, Kucinich

Text-based link to a web version: It is not unusual for an email message to end up garbled in your inbox, be it a result of image blocking or just a poor email client. It's always a good idea to give recipients some other way to view your message, and the industry standard is to include an unobtrusive text-based link to view the email at a URL. Much to my surprise, very few campaigns adopted this method, and the only campaign that consistently includes a link to a web-based version, Mitt Romney, has the link colored white so you cannot read the sentence.

2 Thumbs Up: McCain, Romney
13 Thumbs Down: Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Giuliani, Gravel, Huckabee, Hunter, Kucinich, Obama, Paul, Richardson, Thompson

Most compelling content on top: This is a no-brainer, right? Think again. For whatever reason, not every campaign seems to understand just how valuable the real estate is 'above-the-fold,' or what a user sees without scrolling. M&R Strategic Services has a new study that shows a significant drop in click-through rates (PDF) of content below the fold. That campaigns would not maximize every pixel of email real estate is mind-boggling. Fred Thompson's weekly updates do not use space wisely, and Duncan Hunter's bizarre emails do not fit this criteria either.

13 Thumbs Up: Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Giuliani, Gravel, Huckabee, Kucinich, McCain, Obama, Paul, Richardson, Romney
2 Thumbs Down: Hunter, Thompson

Ask subscriber to add your From address to their address book: In the age of spam and other unsolicited email, 'white-lists' and address books help users know that they're receiving only email that they want. Of course, this assumes the campaigns sends email from the same address, which, I found out, was a big assumption. The only candidate to ask recipients to add the email address was John Edwards.

1 Thumb Up: Edwards
14 Thumbs Down: Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Giuliani, Gravel, Huckabee, Hunter, Kucinich, McCain, Obama, Paul, Richardson, Romney, Thompson

Send emails from the same email address: The failure of campaigns to send emails from the same address was the most surprising finding in my study. No matter what name you make the email appear to come from, you should use the same physical email address as the sender and/or reply-to. There are so many reasons to maintain consistency here: whitelists, known senders, filters and rules in email clients, and on and on. By not using the same address, the campaigns resign themselves to those messages getting lost in spam and other traps, and I would not be surprised to see results from the campaigns that show messages sent from different addresses fare more poorly. The argument against using the same email address usually is about wanting recipients to be able to feel like they're communicating with a real person, and that replies can be read by the person who 'sends' the email. Unfortunately, if 30% of people don't know they're not seeing images in an email, an even higher percentage pays no attention to which address the campaign uses. Stick with info@yourcampaign.com, for everyone's sake.

9 Thumbs Up: Clinton, Edwards, Giuliani, Huckabee, Kucinich, Obama, Richardson, Romney, Thompson
6 Thumbs Down: Biden, Dodd, Gravel, Hunter, McCain, Paul

Send emails from a 'real person': Though not essential, it does help to have messages come from a 'real person' and not a generic campaign entity, even if it's not the candidate. Most campaigns opt to use the campaign manager (Biden, Clinton, McCain, Obama, ) as the sender, and some defer to the Internet director. Either way, it's best to avoid "Official Gravel 2008 Update" and "Romney for President." We know that campaigns aren't run by faceless drones, let's bring some life into this emails!

11 Thumbs Up: Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Giuliani, Huckabee, McCain, Obama, Richardson, Romney, Thompson
4 Thumbs Down: Gravel, Hunter, Kucinich, Paul

Michael Whitney works for a labor rights nonprofit, but any views and opinions in this post are his alone, and cannot be attributed to anyone else. He regularly blogs at his website, MichaelWhitney.net.