• by Jess Nelson , June 10, 2016

Hillary Clinton's ascendance as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee might be partly due to her successful email marketing campaign, new data from Alto Mail reveals. 

Clinton made history this week as the first woman to ever clinch the nomination of a major political party, but her path to the general election has been plagued with controversy over her use of a private email server as Secretary of State.

Yet -- and perhaps ironically so -- email has been a major asset for Clinton’s campaign, according to a study released this week by Alto Mail. 

In a survey of 800 Alto Mail and AOL email users, 59% of respondents confirmed donating to Clinton’s campaign as a result of her email marketing. In contrast, only 19% of Donald Trump supporters were influenced to donate to his campaign by an email message.

In addition, Alto Mail’s study ranked Clinton in the lead with email subscription numbers, with 46% of respondents subscribing to Clinton’s campaigns. In contrast-, 39% of respondents subscribed to Bernie Sanders’ campaign and 19% subscribed to Trump’s email messages.

Return Path, a data solutions and email provider, offers a differing view on the varying subscription numbers of the email campaigns of presidential candidates.

Return Path’s Consumer Network of over 2 million subscriber emails points to Sanders’ subscriber list outnumbering Clinton’s by more than 20%. That being said, Clinton had a higher email engagement rate among overlapping audiences according to the study. 

Email marketing technology provider Campaign Monitor also highlighted the success of Clinton’s email prowess, particularly in the realm of digital design, in a months-long study of the email marketing campaigns of Clinton, Sanders, Cruz and Trump. 

“Hillary has been the only candidate to break the mold and use lots of imagery — including stylized header images and animated GIFs,” says Andrew King, sales engineer, and Roz Hodgekiss, customer success manager at Campaign Monitor.