UP TO SIX EMAILS A DAY FROM CLINTON; CONTINUING SPAM ISSUES FOR TRUMP
By John Landsman, Director of Strategy and Analytics
With both 2016 party conventions now history, each side claimed victory and launched road trips. Clinton and running mate Kaine took a honeymoon bus tour of Trump-leaning districts in rustbelt Pennsylvania and Ohio. Trump went to Colorado, vowing “No more Mr. Nice Guy.” Here’s how their email programs looked last week.
It was Hillary’s convention, and she also owned the email channel, as she has all along. During convention week, Clinton deployed 316 email campaigns, achieving an 87% inbox deliverability, and read rates averaging 14.1%. The email cadence was furious. Individuals subscribing to Clinton email could have received as many as six messages on each of Monday and Thursday, five on Wednesday, four on Tuesday and two on Friday. Many of these emails came from Hillary, but some also came “from” highly visible surrogates; i.e., (in order received) Bill Clinton, Michele Obama, Madeleine Albright, Cory Booker, Tim Kaine and Barack Obama. Most of these messages deployed to relatively large audiences (four of the six to 1.9M or more), and all but Kaine’s drove read rates exceeding 20%.
By comparison, Trump’s email program reflected its usual light volume — and mostly heavy hand. After resting its own domains for spam issues, the campaign reintroduced limited activity to one of those domains last week, with twenty campaigns to small audiences, showing an inbox deliverability of 93% and an average read rate of 21.6%. These were mostly directed at driving attendance at Trump rallies in specific locations; e.g., “Join Gov. Mike Pence in Lima, OH on Friday” (Inbox = 94%; Read rate = 21.7%); “Join us in Davenport, IA on Thursday” (Inbox = 96%; Read rate = 16.0%). The more widely deployed email campaigns were still being sent through the gopteam.gop domain (see last week’s Nugget), with 23 campaigns showing an inbox deliverability of only 36%, and an average read rate of 12.0%. Examples:
The Vice Presidential Picks: In addition to their respective convention week email coverage, it’s interesting to examine how the two campaigns used email to support their VP selection announcements.
- In announcing the Pence selection, Trump sent a single email on July 15th, (Subj. – “My VP”) to just under 2M people. Its inbox deliverablilty was 26%, and it drove a 12.3% read rate. This message contained a single short paragraph naming Pence as the selection, followed by the Trump mantra, “Together we will make America great again.”
- Clinton’s roll-out of the Keane selection began on July 23rd, with a message from Hillary (Subj. “Welcome Tim Keane.”) to 10.1M people, with a 14.6% read rate. The message included glowing detail on Keane’s background and qualities. Also on July 23rd, similar messages were sent to comparably sized audiences from Barack Obama (15.6% read rate) and Tim Keane himself (22.1% read rate). Joe Biden sent another such message on July 24th (14.5% read rate). These messages achieved an inbox deliverability in the range of 87-94%.
For better or worse, we can look forward to three more months of this amusement. We’ll keep watching.
