Donald Trump launched a huge fundraising push in June, reportedly raising a significant amount of money. But Campaigns and Elections reports today that it came at a cost:
Late last month, the campaign emailed its entire list for the first time with a fundraising pitch. That email made headlines for reaching Icelandic, Australian, British and Scottish legislators and its high spam rate. Nearly four-in-five emails were caught by spam filters, according to Return Path. “Almost 60 percent of the fundraiser emails from Trump never reached inboxes.”
Since that time, industry estimates have the Trump campaign sending between 30-50 million emails, at times with miserable results.
Adestra, a U.K.-based email service platform, confirmed to C&E that within the last 48 hours it suspended service to Paramount Communication Group, the Beltway-based company working directly with Trump’s digital team who was reselling the platform's services.
Trump, who is famously dismissive of data other than polls that are good for him, burned his email list and email delivery provider in an attempt to inflate his fundraising totals. While this is unlikely to cripple his campaign it will put a significant crimp in his ability to raise money for the remaining four months.
Major email providers like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo sort email by user behavior. When much of a domain’s bulk mail is ignored or marked as spam providers will preemptively route messages to bulk and spam folders. Commercial emailers take a lot of care to keep their lists clean and increase interactions with their emails to avoid being trapped in spam folders. Once a domain or ip has damaged its reputation it takes many months of careful work to rebuild it.
Donald Trump has only four months left. Given June’s activity most email providers will be very reluctant to take his business, which means he will have to use less reputable providers, pay a premium for email delivery and cope with miserable delivery rates. Email marketing is the primary channel for small dollar political fundraising. Trump’s small dollar fundraising will be handicapped for the rest of the campaign.