Trump's Email Engagement Drops After Tape Release

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Donald Trump’s subscriber complaint rate nearly tripled overnight after the release of lewd audiotapes, according to new research from Return Path. 

The email and data solutions provider analyzed emails from the company’s Consumer Network of over 2.5 million consumers to evaluate the affect of recent Trump revelations on his campaign’s email marketing metrics.

Return Path provides an interactive online tool, Email for President, which tracks and displays key insights from both Trump and Hillary Clinton’s email marketing campaigns.

Trump’s subscriber complaint rate -- emails marked as spam -- increased from 1.75% on Friday to 4.3% on Saturday after the release of the audiotapes.

The Republican nominee’s complaint rate remained high over the next week, hitting 3.4% on the day of the second debate and 3.8% on Tuesday, October 11. 

“The tape scandal could be causing the increase in complaints as people use the ‘report spam’ button to unsubscribe from Trump’s emails,” says Tom Sather, senior director of research at Return Path. “Other factors that could have caused this include subscribers receiving more email and experiencing email fatigue, or a new list injection that wasn’t opted in.”

Trump has seen significant leaps in his email subscriber list, which Sather says could point to Trump’s campaign using list rental or list purchase services to grow its email list. Trump’s email list has grown 147% since August and jumped up 60% overnight during the last week of September, according to Return Path’s analysis.

“White list rental or purchases could be the culprit for the high complaint rates, Trump’s complaint rate was under 1% until the tape scandal and debate,” says Sather. He notes that Clinton’s email marketing saw no spam complaints during this period.  

Since its peak at the end of September, Trump’s email list has shrunk 8% as a possible result of subscribers marking his emails as spam and unsubscribing. 

Conversely, Clinton has maintained a relatively stable list size, suggesting that she is not acquiring new subscribers from the Trump scandal and her recent debate performances. She has maintained a much higher email engagement rate among overlapping audiences, however, suggesting that she may have the upper hand among undecided voters.

Some 6% of email subscribers subscribe to both candidate’s email marketing campaigns, but for that overlapping audience Clinton has an open rate 44% higher than Trump.

Clinton also maintains a slight lead in email engagement overall, with an average open rate of 17% compared to Trump’s 16%.

 

2 comments about "Trump's Email Engagement Drops After Tape Release".
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  1. Douglas Ferguson from College of Charleston, October 19, 2016 at 9:26 a.m.

    Clinton has her own donor woes with the Wikileaks release of John Podesta's emails.  This, from the Daily Mail (UK):


    "Longtime Clinton fundraiser Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild was reportedly furious when she read an unflattering email about her written by Neera Tanden, the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, the think tank started by Podesta before he joined on at the campaign. 


    'I have to [see] that crazy Lade De Rothschild person,' Tanden had written in an email to Podesta, her old boss in April 2015. The next month, Rothschild hosted a $100,000 her ticket dinner to raise money for the former secretary of state."




    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3844274/Bill-having-hard-time-Chelsea-livid-Hillary-p-ed-Clinton-family-rocked-Wikileaks-donors-friends-furious-candid-aides-said-them.html

  2. Chris Peterson from Rain the Growth Agency, October 24, 2016 at 12:41 p.m.

    The complaint rate has nothing to do with the tape. They simply started pumping out insane amounts of email after the tape was released. I am not a Trump supporter but I registered on his site to see what he was up to. Since the day after the tape was released, I have received 8-10 emails from his campaign a day. 

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