Remember Donald Trump bragging about never having to do any fundraising for his campaign? Well, maybe he should have, at least to practice for the day he was broke and needed the money. You’d think after five bankruptcies he’d see it coming.
Email is a very important tool for generating donations, and most political campaigns use it.
According to AdAge, Trump said that he would begin accepting donations for his general election campaign in early May. The only problem is that an unusually high percentage of Trump’s campaign correspondence has been marked as spam, even before any email donation requests have gone out.
Nearly 8-percent of the emails were marked as spam, compared to likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s emails, of which none were deemed spam.
On Tuesday, June 21, Trump’s campaign sent what it said was its first fundraising email:
“This is the first fundraising email I have ever sent on behalf of my campaign. That’s right. The FIRST ONE.”
One day later Trump signed another email missive from the campaign, claiming that the fundraiser had broken fundraising records, apparently something his father had forecasted.
The next day, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told AdAge:
“The campaign raised $3.3 million on Tuesday and $3.4 million yesterday.”
These are impressive figures, but how much was actually donated through the emails? According to Hicks:
“Only a portion of that was via email marketing and the remainder is attributed to online donations.”
Yes, because 60-percent of those first-ever fundraiser emails never reached inboxes. 60-percent!
Email tracking firm Return Path has measured the open rate by using estimates based on its panel of 2.5 million active email users.
Most of Trump’s fundraising emails were automatically relegated to a recipient’s spam folder, and moreover, only 12-percent of recipients opened the email, while 6-percent deleted it without reading it.
The reason most of the emails ended up in spam could be because they were sent from a different domain instead of one the campaign had used in the past. According to the senior director of research at Return Path, Tom Sather:
“Since it’s a new domain he’s being penalized […] These are things that professional email marketers prepare for.”
Well, Donald Trump fired his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski on Monday June 21, the day before the fundraising emails went out.
On the other hand, Return Path’s data shows no evidence of any testing or segmentation before sending out the email campaign either.
Clinton’s campaign sent out 658 different email variations, none of which got the spam label. Trump’s campaign appears to be only segmenting by geography when promoting campaign rallies in certain regions. Finally, AdAge mentions that:
“High spam rejection rates also suggests that some email addresses in the list may have been purchased rather than generated through organic signups.”
This brings some surprising relevance to a fifth-grader’s joke which can be heard circulating on school yards:
“Trump is like spam because he’s completely artificial.”
A summary of Trump’s fundraising week can be watched here:
