Over the last few cycles, a variety of vendors have made a play for low-budget campaigns’ mail budgets. On both sides of the aisle, self service was the name of the game here.
While the margins were smaller with this business, the idea was that the candidate or campaign could move up the budget ladder and eventually become a bigger spender. Now, another firm, Kinetic Campaigns, is looking to make a play for these campaigns on the left, albeit with a new buzz word: transparency.
“It’s very important when you’re putting together a campaign to start thinking about what your budget looks like — and so what we wanted to do is lay out in very clear terms: this is the cost for mail.
“And so when a campaign is thinking through: ‘What’s my budget for doing mail? What’s my budget for doing digital? What’s my budget for doing X, Y or Z?’ Our clear pricing allows them to budget effectively and to be more successful by running a smarter campaign,” Barry Klein, co-founder of Kinetic Campaigns, told C&E.
Klein outlined how the firm’s low-budget service works: “The idea is we have a consultation with our client campaigns. We then provide a form for them to fill out where we walk them through potential headlines, copy, images and all the details that need to go into a mail piece. And then we put together a custom mail piece for them with a three-day turnaround.”
This service is not meant to take the place of higher-value campaigns, which Klein notes require more time to service.
“There’s a use case for the more expensive mail pricing that calls for you being on conference calls, campaign meetings, debate prep and the like,” said Klein. “And in those instances, that’s where you have to charge for that. Kinetic mail kit is a lower-cost offering for those instances on down-ballot races where they don’t need you on conference calls all the time.”
In other words, the play is custom design at a lower price point. What down-ballot campaigns need, he said, “is award-winning designed mail that understands best practices and can put it into place based on the client’s local understanding.
“So it’s not meant to provide a solution for a red-to-blue race or something like that. It’s meant to provide the kind of support that a down-ballot race needs when they’re like, ‘I need to put together a really good piece of mail without breaking the bank.'”
