Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re sitting back (or leaned in if you’re watching the 49’ers game), have a beverage in your right hand, your feet up, and you’ve got the AC at your favorite temperature. Today’s newsletter is a 10+ page dive into 2 presidential candidate’s donation funnels.
This past week I spent the week in Austin, TX, with Mary Berry (remember her from our Limited Supply episode?). Her manufacturing company, Cosmos Labs, hosted a PR trip with 6 founders and 6 really talented editors. We got to tour the factory, make our own shimmer sticks, and trade stories and notes. One of my favorite discoveries was The Beauty Loop, a beauty-industry insider email. There’s only one other paid industry newsletter I know if in beverage, but I love when I find good ones like this.
I have to admit… Austin is one of my favorite cities to go to. The people in Austin are incredible, the food is great, and the atmosphere is always pleasant. It feels like the perfect mix of San Diego and New York City. But before we get into today’s newsletter…
Moiz and I dropped another fun episode of Limited Supply. We talked about some questionable DTC valuations, the importance of sustainable brand building, whether or not True Classic should go public, our opinions on Rent the Runway, Stitch Fix, Nuuly, and other DTC clothing rental businesses and a whole lot more. We also talked about some really important changes being instated by Google and Yahoo related to email marketing. Every brand I know is scrambling to figure this out so you might want to tune in. This episode was super fun to record and there were a lot of great nuggets from the ep. Just search “Limited Supply” wherever you listen to your podcasts.
A few weeks ago, I put together a research report that Tatari funded, and we learned a lot from CMOs who plan to spend over $500,000 this year on advertising. Inside the report, you can expect initiatives that brands are doubling down on, the top ad strategies to achieve 2024 goals (hint, it includes leveraging TV), the biggest challenges brands are facing, how TV fits into a holistic, omnichannel strategy, and more. You can read the full report on this link (no email opt-in required)!
Okay, now let’s get into today’s newsletter!
Before I get started, I just wanted to say that this newsletter is not an endorsement of any one political candidate. I’m just a man who loves marketing and I thought that it would be fun to write another email about presidential campaigns and figuring out what you can take from this as learnings for yourself. We aren’t here to talk politics, you’re here to see how you can make more money.
Personally, I always think that it’s interesting that presidential candidates don’t hire the best growth agencies in the world to help with their marketing strategy and CRO. Instead, these candidates often work with politically focused marketing agencies who are great at communicating the values and building “the brand,” but they don’t necessarily apply all of the best practices that other digitally native companies (like anyone who’s crushing it in DTC or SaaS) would. I know this because I’ve been hired by these political marketing agencies as a consultant before, and it’s safe to say there’s a lot of performance marketing tactics some of these candidates could benefit from. In fact, the man who led a lot of Trump’s digital efforts in the election he won, didn’t even come from a political marketing background; he was just a ruthless digital marketer.
As I shared in last week’s newsletter, there will be $10-16 billion dollars in new spend on politically related ads/initiatives this year. Most of the spend will happen on TV and radio but there will also be billions of dollars spent on digital/social this year as well.
Just like selling a product, these candidates are trying to sell themselves and their mission for their presidency to get consumers (i.e voters) on board. They also directly advertise to solicit donations to their individual campaigns which they then re-invest into more marketing to fuel growth. Although each of the candidates have their own websites and marketing strategies, I thought that the two candidates to talk about as examples should be Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Again, this is not an endorsement of either, just a digital marketing breakdown to understand different levers around branding, positioning and CRO (conversion rate optimization).
Alright, let’s dive in:
Website and Landing Pages:
As many of you know, I have been doing landing page teardowns recently and love to roast companies who could do a better job with their UI/UX design and CRO. Let’s do it for both of these candidates.
Here’s where things got interesting. Again, the two websites that I looked at were joebiden.com and donaldjtrump.com. I started my review with a quick search on SimilarWeb to better understand the traffic that these two sites were getting. Keep in mind SimilarWeb is generally under-reporting traffic numbers; I’d say usually by 20-40% but it’s hard to really know by how much.
Here are the stats you need to know:
JoeBiden.com is ranked 213,314 worldwide, and 39,293 in the US
His site is ranked 675 in the category of “Government (in the United States)”
The site received 298.7K visits in December of 2023
The site had a 63.39% bounce rate
1.85 pages per visit
And an average visit duration of 55 seconds.
According to Ahrefs, Biden’s website has a domain authority of 80 with 252,000 backlinks and 21,000 linking websites.
On the other hand:
DonaldJTrump.com is ranked 44,765 globally
9,288 in the US
And 583 in his category rank (which is News and Media publishing)
Trump’s website had 1.8M visits in December of 2023
With a 63.57%
1.82 pages per visit
And an average site visit duration of 1 minute and 7 seconds.
Trump’s website also has a domain authority ranking of 80
But it has 4.1M backlinks and 23K linking websites.
So, the quick math is that Trump is getting roughly 6X more traffic to his website right now, visitors are staying 21% longer, and visiting roughly the same number of pages before exiting.
Who knows if this correlates to the polls or votes, but it was an interesting thing to see. The numbers are also pretty consistent on social media, as Trump has about 3x the following of Biden across all platforms.
Website/LP Design:
For this section, I would encourage you to open a new tab and look through the site as I break it down as well. For context, I’m doing this on desktop because there’s a higher average donation from desktop users.
For JoeBiden dot com:
I would say that JoeBiden.com looks like it was designed by a very hipster, Brooklyn-based design agency. It’s definitely good looking, but I don’t think it’s designed for CRO. It lacks content, a proper user journey/funnel, and doesn’t feel strong.
Your site needs to match the emotions of those who face the problem they are here to hopefully solve — if you’re unable to feel relatable to that problem with context and content on your site, it makes trusting your product as the solution, even harder.
First impression:
On desktop, when you first load the website, you are greeted with a static CTA to donate that fills 85% of the screen.
You see a picture of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris which is good.
The CTA reads: Donate to show that you’re with Joe and Kamala.
The popup has buttons to encourage $10, $25, $75, $150 or $250 donations. If you click to donate you are sent to a relatively unbranded payment page, hosted by Act Blue, the fundraising tool used by the Democratic party, as opposed to WinRed, the same for the Republican party.
This is the first missed opportunity. The payment page should reinforce what visitors are donating towards. They should keep the blue and red branding, and add a lot more social proof. A simple “Join 500,000+ donors who support Joe and Kamala” would help a lot.
Even adding some testimonials of past donors as well sharing encouraging stories of why they donated or are supporting their campaign. They should also add details about where these funds are going and how they will be used.
One thing I like is that when you click the $10 button to donate on the home screen, it prompts you by saying “Make the most impact by donating $25.” The upsells and downsells (the alternate up-sell if you decline the first one), are used a lot in political campaigns. You shouldn’t ever feel shameful for adding upsells in your buying or post-purchase journey.
This is a fantastic upsell but it’s not dynamic. For example, if I press the $75 button, it should re-adjust and say “Make the most impact by donating $150” always nudging the visitor to step up one level in spend. I would also remind donors of some of the core campaign values that these dollars are going toward on the payment page. Right now it just feels a little bland and uninspiring. They are asking for money but I don’t know exactly what these dollars are going towards.
I would also consider adding a subscription option. Make your contribution go further by subscribing to monthly or quarterly donations.
Okay, that’s enough for the donation page, now back to the site.
If you close the pop-up to donate, you return to the home page.
On the home page, there are two navbar level CTAs: Shop and Donate.
What about values or mission, or campaign commitments? I think it’s a big wasted opportunity not to have more educational resources about both Joe and Kamala on the site. Show me their past achievements and future vision. Tell me why I should vote for them this year. It’s a waste of their site traffic not to spend more time on education.
Under that, they have an email subscribe box. This is great as they want to build their email list. I’m not sure what the goal CVR is for a political campaign, but with an eCommerce site you should be around 6-12%. If you’re lower than that, then you need better popups.
When I think about the world’s greatest pop-up, I think about the Jolie water report (also, what a timeless page design by Sharma Brands). It prompts people to enter their email and zip code, and delivers immediate value that impacts their everyday life. In this case, political candidates are making moves on issues that impact everyone’s life in some way. Why isn’t there more information being collected as first-party data, and delivering content that speaks to how this candidate’s policies will impact what happens in my own zip code? Seems like a huge missing opportunity, and demonstrates very limited creative thinking.
One area to improve: I think the email subscribe box should follow visitors around and pop-up again once they browse 2 pages. Assuming that the average pages per session is 1.85 pages, if someone gets to 2, they’re likely in a higher intent percentile, and a valuable record to add to the CRM.
Beneath that email sub box, they have a polished campaign video. It’s beautifully shot and very well edited. That said, I’d be curious to see a heatmap and some backend data about how many people actually watch the full video. To be safe, they should have some supporting copy on the site for visitors who would rather read than watch the full 2 minute piece.
And that’s it!
After you scroll past the video, you get the footer.
There you are prompted to shop or donate again.
Overall I think a lot more information and social proof could be added to the site.
Give visitors more reason to browse and stay. Right now they have one video and a CTA to shop or donate. It seems like this is not the best use of the strong paid and organic traffic that they are getting today. That said, this is just one man’s point of view!
For DonaldJTrump dot com:
Trump’s site is structured in a similar way.
When you open the site, you quickly get hit with a pop-up of Trump’s campaign messaging, his logo/name large and legible, and copy that leans more toward evoking emotion out of the site visitor. Trump’s pop-up only covers about 15% of the page, versus the full screen, and my guess is they A/B tested their way into that size. The CTA in the pop-up is also “Contribute” versus “Donate” — which is just an interesting way to phrase the CTA, making the site visitor feel a part of the journey versus like a transactional aid to it.
When you exit out of the popup and get to the home page, you will see that you have more options to browse the website and its content.
An interesting note is the fonts, branding, and design used here is very basic (read: accessible). It may be a limitation of the site platform they use, Campaign Nucleus, but I imagine it’s intentional and out-performs any fancy design, for his audience.
When you land on the site, you see two CTAs in the hero section, compared to zero on the Biden site. I don’t think either is the correct answer; I’m a fan of 1 clear CTA in the hero section. If I’m thinking about this like a landing page, I would also add that he’s missing social proof here, both in terms of statistics he could attribute to his presidency, but also in terms of how many donors have contributed to the campaign or some similar stat. It’s strange to me that both Trump and Biden lack a lot of social proof.
If it were up to me, I would try to get quotes that match site visitors dynamically, based on where they are coming to the website from. For example, if someone gets to the website in New York, they see a different hero section than if they came from Texas. Granted, real election spending hasn’t started yet, but I hope this is something we see.
Mission, News, Agenda47, Issues, events, Join, Contribute, Shop.
Some folks reviewing the site may think this is too much; I fully disagree. This is exactly what Biden is missing on his own website — context and content that reaffirms the visitor that their concern is heard and being addressed. The other benefit of a lot of content, is you have a more chances of finding a way to relate to someone.
I’m sure that having this content is part of the reason why the average visitor stays 21% longer. There’s simply more to see and browse on the website.
On the home page, you have the same banner header with two CTAs: Contribute or Volunteer. Beneath that, you have the same email subscribe box.
On Trump’s site, he only asks for your email and zip code in the home screen sub box. Once you fill that out, you’re taken to a page to continue filling out the form to volunteer. Seems like a wasted opportunity to try and gather some more zero-party data of the person who just put their email in, or even their phone number to get them on the SMS list.
On Trump’s site, when you click to contribute, you are sent to a more sophisticated payment page. There is a large photo of Trump standing in front of the American flag and there’s more copy that incentivizes you to make the donation. Trump’s donation page leads with a mission statement. He also has an option for a subscription that has strongly worded copy that communicates what you are contributing toward.
The donation page is essentially an advertorial (sponsored editorial piece) that leads into donation CTA (think of this like the Shop Section of a LP). Ok, now a couple things I liked here that I thought were creative:
- Trump gives you the option to cover the processing fees. The copy around the check box says, “I would like to cover the processing fee so 100% of my donation goes to Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee.” This is genius. Again, like using the word “Contribute” as the CTA, this copy is very much written as, “Come and do this with us.”
- The next checkbox offers you to turn your donation into a subscription. This is the upsell. The copy next to the checkbox doesn’t say anything about a subscription, except near the end where it says “Can I count on your sustained support?” Below that it says in small black text, “Make this a monthly recurring donation,” which is what the checkbox in that section is agreeing to.
- The third checkbox offers you to repeat your donation one more time, not as a subscription but just once more. This is the downsell. The copy next to this button is also phrased as a quote from Trump himself asking you to help the campaign. In small black text below, it reads, “Donate an additional $X automatically on 1/31.” The value of X is whatever the chosen donation amount earlier in the page is.
From the standpoint of generating revenue per session, all of this is incredible work. As a brand, I would be a lot more clear in the copy of what is a subscription or what is a recurring payment. That lack of clarity makes it easy to drive up chargebacks and customer service tickets.
Don’t want to make a donation and you’d rather bounce from this page? Trump hits you with an exit intent pop-up that says “Wait, before you go!” in order to make one last attempt to communicate why he needs your support. I like this move and think more brands should be using exit-intent popups.
Now back to the home page:
Below “The Maga Movement” section, Trump has a shop section content block.
Unlike Biden, he actually shows a sample of items that you can buy on the home page.
Beneath that section, Trump has another content block that communicates his campaign values around:
Economic prosperity for all
Secure America’s borders
Restore public safety
Etc.
He adds more content to share what he’s about and what you can expect from his presidency.
He has roughly 1.8M visitors going to his site each month. Yes, they might want to donate, but they also probably want to learn about what he’s up to with his campaign. Including this content seems like a no-brainer when you are running for office with this kind of traffic coming to your page.
Beneath this section is more educational content. He has a series of videos that describe “Agenda 47” aka his agenda if he was elected. These videos are short and to the point. They also have supporting text descriptions underneath for site visitors who want to quickly glance and read. His team doesn’t sleep on the opportunity of content.
The last thing to make note of with content, is his team puts up 3-5 pieces of content on his site as articles, with unique links. They treat it like their own version of a news publication, writing headlines they know will have dark social sharing rewards — meaning it’ll end up in group chats, forums, etc. I’m always a fan of brands who use their blog as their own form of a press center.
It’s Sunday night and I don’t have time to review every page on his website. This email is already 10+ pages long.
In general, Trump seems to be applying more best practices when it comes to site design, educational content, and CRO. It’s unclear who is managing his digital efforts this year but it’ll be interesting to see the evolution of the campaign. I am specifically curious to see how the candidates leverage AI in their campaign efforts.
Both sites were interesting to see and study for various reasons. As the campaigns progress, if there is anything that I find interesting, I’ll be sure to share it with you all here. Until then, let’s move on to some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
Postscript — The best-in-class platform for SMS marketing, trusted by 13,000+ Shopify merchants.
You’ve most likely heard me talk about Postscript in this newsletter or on Limited Supply, and it’s because they have been, are, and continue to be a company entirely dedicated on innovating in SMS by 1% every day. There are a number of companies that allow brands to build an SMS list, and send texts out, but Postscript is always the most innovative, buttoned up in their releases, and compliance focused option.
While SMS hasn’t been innovated on in a while, these are 3 things that I personally love where Postscript shows their innovation:
- Onsite Opt In: This new feature developed by Postscript allows users to legally opt-into your SMS list without leaving the browser. Normally you have to go into iMessage to confirm or reply “Y”... not anymore. You can try it out on Caraway’s site using your cell phone.
- Cashback: Instead of offering a % off up front, on the first order, and off the top of the gross amount of the order, offer someone to get cashback. On the Promix Nutrition website, they offer $15 as cashback for you, instead of dollars off the first order. This can likely convert better than a % off offer.
- SMS Sales: Postscript has a team of former retail associates in Arizona who act as your Shopify store associate. For example, go to Immi Ramen’s website, put your number in the pop up, add a product to the cart, and then leave. You’ll get a text from a real human being who will go back and forth with you, answering questions, countering objections, and helping you get toward the checkout of the order. It’s fascinating.
If SMS is not a part of your gameplan, book a call with their incredible team on this link. If nothing else, you’ll get a ton of tips around a good SMS launch strategy, how much incremental revenue you could generate, and reasons it’ll benefit your business.
If SMS is a part of your brand already, and you want to get the benefits of Postscript’s platform or their better pricing, book a call on this link to see how you can benefit from Postscript. Let them know you want the Sharma red carpet treatment!
That's all for this week!
Wow, today was a long email. Moiz and I went through this in greater detail on this week’s upcoming Limited Supply episode. If you have tips on how the podcast can be structured in a more beneficial way to what you do, please don’t hesitate to reply here and let me know! I get all the replies personally and love hearing from everyone.
Tonight’s Sunday night, so I hope you’re watching football, getting relaxed for a good 9 hour sleep tonight, and feeling ready for the week. It feels like over the last week, everything just leveled up a gear. We went from first gear to second gear — do you agree?
Have an incredible upcoming week. I’ll see you next Sunday, and I’m going to go extremely deep on email. We just started running email for a handful of brands, and it’s been eye-opening to see some of the more revenue-focused tactics we’ve implemented, and their impact. I think everyone should be doing it.
Get your 9 hours of sleep and I’ll see you next week!