Trump solicits donations via emails
With the tap of the “send” button one day last week, Donald Trump collected $3 million in campaign contributions — as much as he did in the entire month of May.
WASHINGTON — The billionaire running for president seeks to persuade millions of Americans to give him money.
With the simple tap of the “send” button one day last week, Donald Trump collected $3 million in campaign contributions — as much as he did in the entire month of May. He had asked for donations of $10 or more, with the promise of adding $2 million of his own money.
That one-day haul from Trump’s first fundraising appeal is early evidence of the digital magic it takes to fill campaign coffers Bernie Sanders-style, from millions of people, each giving a few bucks.
The presumptive Republican nominee must make the case that he needs money, after months of boasting he can pay his own way. And his campaign also is failing in what could be called “the art of the email.” One analysis found 74 percent of his first fundraising requests landed in spam folders.
Still, if Trump can reap millions of dollars from each pitch, it could help him solve an urgent problem: He’s being crushed by Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s well-honed finance machine, which pulled in 10 times as much as he did last month. Campaign money pays for the advertising and employees needed to find, persuade and turn out voters on Election Day.
Trump’s national finance chairman Steven Mnuchin said the campaign was “overwhelmed” by reaction to the first online fundraising appeal.
“This is now going to become a daily effort,” Mnuchin said.
Since that initial email, the Trump campaign has sent at least five additional solicitations. In an email Monday, son Eric Trump wrote that “donors like you helped us to raise $11 million in just a few days.”
“That’s why we set another Trump-sized goal” of raising $10 million by Thursday, the last day of the month, Eric Trump wrote.
Trump’s partnership with the Republican National Committee also pays special attention to the small donors who typically give online. They have a joint account called the Trump Make America Great Again Committee that has sent two dozen emails in the past month.
As successful as Trump’s first fundraising email seems to have been, Tom Sather, senior director of research at the email data solutions firm Return Path, said the candidate could have done better. The firm measures emails much the way Nielsen measures television viewership, by extrapolating from a large panel of study participants.
Just 8 percent of the email recipients opened them, according to Return Path’s analysis. The campaign’s stunningly high spam rate of 74 percent reflects a lack of email marketing sophistication, Sather said. For example, the campaign switched domain names recently, tripping up spam filters, and Trump might be buying email lists of people who don’t want to hear from him.
By contrast, Clinton’s spam rate on fundraising emails is typically about 5.7 percent, and her rate at which people open the emails holds steady at about 14 percent, Sather said.
“It will be interesting to see how he gets better at this, or if he continues to flounder,” Sather said. “There is an art and a science involved.”