Clinton campaign rebuilds from a digital meltdown

Hillary Rodham Clinton wound down her political operation in 2008 with 2.5 million email addresses in her campaign database. Seven years later, when campaign officials turned on the lights in April, they were stunned to find fewer than 100,000 still worked.

Campaign aides learned the bad news in much the same way a reunion organizer trying to reconnect with old friends might, albeit on a much larger scale: an in-box clogged with bounce-back messages on the day Clinton announced her campaign and sent messages to supporters. The huge attrition of valuable data is not unique to Clinton -- a typical email list will lose 1 in 5 subscribers each year, said Jordan Cohen, chief marketing officer for Fluent, which specializes in email list acquisition. But it created one of the first big challenges for the campaign’s growing digital team and sparked a response that illustrates the high priority campaigns now place on acquiring digital data.