What sifting through political emails tells us
It’s difficult to measure a PR email marketing campaign. In politics, emails go out daily, and results can be even tougher to track. Here’s lessons learned from February-March of 2016.
If you’ve ever signed up to get a political candidate’s email, your inbox has likely filled with updates, donation requests and rallying cries.
Are there trends in political-campaign email marketing? What can communication pros learn from their emails? To find out, my team created a fake Gmail account and signed up for email from every candidate in the presidential primaries. We analyzed emails from February 19 through March 18. We pulled data using code from Austin Walter’s blog.
The presidential candidates were Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz (dropped out on May 3), John Kasich (dropped out on May 4), Marco Rubio (dropped out March 16), Ben Carson (dropped out March 2), and Jeb Bush (dropped out February 20).
We received 338 emails: Seventy-five from Hillary Clinton, 66 from Bernie Sanders, 10 from Donald Trump, 56 from Ted Cruz, 45 from John Kasich, 83 from Marco Rubio, none from Ben Carson, and five from Jeb Bush.
Here’s what we learned:
1. Political candidates want to be your friend.
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