Email Still a Critical Fundraising Tool

Email intelligence firm Return Path posted a collection of very interesting email fundraising data points in infographic form for the 2012 presidential race. Are all those emails you are receiving every day from Mitt Romney's and Barack Obama's digital teams working?We do know that email fundraising is still far more successful than Twitter fundraising or Facebook fundraising. Political fundraisers know this and are sending supporters multiple solicitations per day, sometimes as many as 5 or 6. Are we seeing donor burnout?Here are my big take-aways from the email fundraising infographic:

• Obama's email list is 500% bigger than Romney's. 5x is a big difference.

• 50% of Romney's email goes straight into recipients' spam folder versis 32% for Obama.  What is the story here? Could be one for the conspiracy theorist as Obama's recipients are 16 times more likely to tag an Obama as a spammer than a Romney recipient. This difference could also be based on the quality of email prospecting lists purchased each campaign.

• Romney's email recipients are more likely to open their campaign email and forward their email to a friend. 6% of Romney's email is forwarded to a friend. Only 0.04% of Obama's email is sent on.

• I think this is very interesting, 15% of Obama recipients give the email fundraising solicitations label these messages as "Priority" in Gmail's inbox verses Romney's 5%. I am far more politically active than most Americans and especially interested in political fundraising of all type, but... I can't imagine making any fundraising solicitation a "priority" over my work email. My guess is that this stat shows that Romney's supporters are far busier than Obama supporters.