It’s all up to YOU! The art of the campaign fundraising email

Photo: Jae C. Hong/AP Photo.

As the remaining presidential candidates enter the third month of primary voting, the tones of their campaigns have added a tinge of desperation. Pleas for support at rallies have become louder; digs at competitors harsher, and — most notably — voters have been besieged by fundraising emails all the more frequently.

And just as candidates hone their ground-game strategies in the primary states, they are refining their approaches to digital communication. Ahead of today’s primary election in Wisconsin, where both races are tight, Yahoo News asked three digital marketing experts to critique some sample fundraising emails.

Our test subject? Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who is currently polling ahead of frontrunner Donald Trump for tonight’s primary. Cruz has cultivated an extensive grassroots fundraising effort, pulling in $54.7 million as of February — far more than his two remaining opponents. Below is the verdict on the (apparently effective) subject lines and language of a few of the Texas senator’s campaign emails.

(no subject)

Though one would hope that a possible future president would be more explicit if he had something to email to, say, Vladimir Putin, the “no subject” subject line has emerged as a common ploy in digital marketing.

“You see this in emails happening a lot more frequently lately, where people will put ‘Fwd’ or ‘Re:’ or ‘no subject,’” Isla McKetta, a content creator at the Seattle-based marketing company Moz, told Yahoo News. “It’s an attempt to be kind of casual or off-the-cuff.”

Piquing the curiosity of a recipient can sometimes be more effective than being straightforward. According to Cathy McPhillips, a vice president at the Content Marketing Institute, emails without subject lines have an 8 percent higher open rate than emails with subject lines, typically because people associate such messages from close friends or family members. “People just want to know what it is,” McPhillips told Yahoo News.

sorry for the late note

In line with the same sort of casual outreach that President Obama made famous in his 2008 campaign, email fundraising teams are keen to maintain an aura of an intimacy between a candidate and voters. Sometimes that means purposefully keeping text all lowercase while offering an absurd apology for sending a note that most readers will not see until the morning. In other cases, it means stretching the truth to say the sender is “Ted Cruz’s iPad,” even if the message is being sent from the same standard email address attributed to other emails.

“They’re basically saying, ‘Ted is a real person, he’s not just some political robot, and he’s communicating with you one on one with these messages,’” Joe Stych, an email marketing manager at the web automation app Zapier, told Yahoo News. “If you have an editor writing something, they’ll put it in title case. If you have Ted Cruz typing away on his iPad, then he’s probably not going to correct his capitalization. I’m pretty sure the iPad would correct it for him, but we just won’t go there.”

Though this level of dishonesty might turn off those recipients still unsure about who they plan to vote for, McKetta says that diehard Cruz-heads probably wouldn’t be bothered by this tactic.

“Lots of people would be willing to suspend their disbelief enough in order to open it,” she said. “If you support a candidate enough to sign up for their emails, you care, you are involved, and you want to believe that Ted cares about you.”

(ACTION REQUIRED) Cruz Crew: Make Phone Calls for Ted

In many cases, campaigns use subject lines that stir a level of emotion or urgency, the same way a click-baity Daily Mail headline might. According to McKetta, you can often place them into a small set of categories.

“I like to think about subject lines as having six different types: direct, playful, curiosity-inducing, personalized, scarcity and call to action,” she said. “This one is definitely a call to action. It’s very specific about what it’s doing: You know if you’re part of the Cruz Crew, and you know if you want to make phone calls for Ted.”

Though McPhillips says pressing subject lines like these typically have higher open rates, Cruz’s campaign took a risk by including an all caps phrase in the subject line.

“When things seem like they’re shouty or they’re hard to read, it usually backfires because it just becomes frustrating to the viewer,” she said. McPhillips also notes that using all caps, the word ‘free’ and exclamation points are the three simplest ways to trigger spam filters, causing the message to be lost to junk-mail purgatory.

Fw: 9:16AM

This email requires some context: The full message includes an original note from Cruz with an actual voicemail attached to it, and appears to have been sent to the inbox of his wife, Heidi. She then forwarded it to some email subscribers, suggesting that at 9:16 a.m., they may have — gasp — missed an opportunity to personally speak with Cruz.

“This email is just kind of strange,” Stych said. “It appears to have a voice message from Ted Cruz that somehow ended up in Heidi Cruz’s inbox, and she decided to forward it to you. It doesn’t really make any sense, to be honest.”

Though it appears Cruz’s email managers were aiming to hit the same vague and personal sweet spot as a “no subject” line, Stych says that sometimes an imprecise subject line like this one can backfire. Using “Fw” ahead of the message is a way to establish a more intimate connection with recipients, but according to McPhillips, that method is considered a shady tactic among email marketers.

“They’re using a lot of techniques that are on the list of the top five things you shouldn’t do in a subject line,” she said. “But because their goal is to get people to open it and spend five dollars, they’re doing whatever it takes.”

FWD: [3] missed emails

In this particular subject line, the Cruz campaign has tweaked its forwarding tactic so that the abbreviation is in all caps, and now has a ‘D.’ The difference in the two isn’t sloppiness, according to Synch; it’s likely a way to test which marker is more effective.

“The forward with the ‘D’ and the forward without the ‘D’ is probably A/B testing to see which one is more opened,” he said. “They’re just trying to see which one works better.”

When it comes to alerting recipients that they’ve missed three emails, couching the “3” in brackets to make it appear as if their email provider is trying to get their attention, McKetta says that Cruz’s team has once again walked into spammy territory. But it’s possible that, with the help of their own analytics, they have also have weighed the cost and benefits of this.

“Email is very audience-specific, and it’s really hard to say without researching into Ted Cruz’s audience whether this would turn off subscribers,” McKetta said. “I’m sure that his campaign team has done that kind of research. But I would definitely be watching the unsubscribe rate after subject lines like this.”

Ultimately, according to McPhillips, whether a politician offends an email subscriber may have less to do with the message and more to do with an individual’s attention span.

“We have emails coming to us all day long from so many forces,” she said. “It is nice to see emails that are short and sweet: Here’s what we need, here’s why, and here’s a link. But then again, if I just had these in my inbox and not lined up in a row, I may not have been this critical.”