The John McCain campaign has been pilloried time and time again when it comes to their email strategy. The emails are overly long, unclear, and designed as if they were a piece of direct mail. But, as a public service to all campaigns and organizations looking to execute solid online organzing, I thought it would be illustrative to point out exactly what makes an email successful.

Here’s an email sent on Monday from the Clinton campaign:

This email, my dear friends, is the work of a fine craftsman at the top of his/her game. The execution is flawless, and I let it sit in my inbox for several days just so that I could quickly come back to it and admire its brilliance. Advocacy emails simply don’t get better than this.

A Clear Ask For Action

Within three seconds of opening this email, it’s clear why you have received this email, and it’s clear what you’re being asked to do: The primaries in Oregon and Kentucky are tomorrow and you need to help the campaign by making calls. Simple and clear.

Structurally, there are six areas that catch the eye, and they all help hammer the message home:

1. The clickable graphic on the right
2. The three bolded lines, sprinkled evenly throughout the text
3. The two lines of links, each standing by itself in its own paragraph

All six areas emphasize calling Oregon and Kentucky. They ask nothing more, nothing less. If a person reading this was ever going to make calls for Clinton, this email would have gotten them to do so.

Full Use of Screen Real Estate

The software, devices, and websites we use to read our email come in all shapes and sizes. And because of that, considerations have to be made for viewing window size when formatting an email. While many tech-savvy users have adopted Gmail as the tool of their choice, which provides plenty of vertical screen real estate, the reality is that most email gets read in the smaller “preview” windows found in Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and the like.

The email as formatted above, with the clickable graphic on top and the links at the middle and bottom, guarantee that the readers will always have a target to click on, no matter how small their reading window is and no matter what part of the email they’re reading. And clicks are good, because they translate into action.

Simple Guidelines Backed by Empirical Data

So some simple rules to live by:

• Choose a clear message and a clear action. If you can’t keep it simple, don’t send the email.
• Limit messages to 5 to 7 paragraphs.
• A clickable rectangular graphic aligned to the right of the opening paragraphs will always get the most clicks.
• Do not embed links in a larger paragraph. Allow them to stand alone with whitespace above and below.
• Use formatting like bold, underline, and italics sparingly, and only to drive the main point.

These best practices weren’t pulled from the sky. They weren’t determined by gut instincts, and certainly not by direct mail specialists. Instead, they were culled from years of empirical testing and hard data.

For example in the technique known as A/B testing, one batch of email would be sent without a top right graphic, and another batch would be sent with it included. When the batches with the graphic were clicked on more often, the best practice was established.

The funny thing is, none of this is particularly new. The Left had established these practices by 2004, from the combined experiences of MoveOn.org, the Dean campaign, and the Kerry campaign. Campaigns and organizations on both sides should be actively testing all their messages even today, gathering more data that should continue to refine and maybe even redefine best practices. Please don’t send emails that look like this.