Re: Urgent: We only have until midnight to meet our fundraising deadline and deal a decisive blow to our opponent! If you donate before midnight you’ll get a 3X match on your money!
We’re all getting political fundraising emails like this now. One moment of enthusiasm in which we give our email to some candidate or cause can lead to torrent of emails that can last for months. And their tone is almost always a little clingy, a little desperate, a little manipulative. That’s not by accident.
Only about a fifth of political emails ever get opened. That’s why campaigns and email consultants go to such trouble to entice the recipient to click.
A new study by Princeton researchers shows that political campaigns at all levels and on both sides of the aisle often use a common set of misleading content and design tactics to get you to open their emails and hit the donate button.
After using a bot to sign up, the researchers received and analyzed more than 100,000 political emails from 800 senders, from December 2019 through all of 2020. The sample includes all the presidential candidates and numerous Congressional candidates.
“We found six tactics that senders use to manipulate recipients into opening emails,” the researchers report in their study. “The typical sender used at least one manipulative tactic in about 43% of their emails. Most senders—99%—use them at least occasionally.”
The Princeton researchers identified six common tricks, from arbitrary deadlines to exaggerated, dramatic subject lines. The main reason for employing these tactics? They actually work. Their manipulative nature can turn your inbox into a mess of spammy, dramatic pleas for your attention. While many us might be immune to such ploys by now, those with less digital literacy can be susceptible to these tricks.
