The Opportunity

Email is an ideal medium for advocacy because persuasion requires repetition and calls-to-action require reminders.

In fact, email is so important as an up-selling tool that consumer marketers allocate up to one-third of their online budgets to email campaigns. That makes sense, since email is more popular than searching, surfing, or any other web—based activity. More than 95% of American internet users have an email account.

Email alerts and newsletters are particularly useful for motivating further volunteerism from existing members. Think of your email subscribers as a virtual Social Action Team - ready and willing to respond to your calls-to-action. Intuitively, you already know that if you need help, it's much easier to call upon an existing volunteer than it is to identify, recruit, train, and inspire a new volunteer. The general rule of thumb is that it costs five times as much to find, educate, and convert a new volunteer than it does to motivate an existing volunteer.

So, email advocacy is critically important for cost efficiently achieving your social action goals.

In this chapter, as you'd expect, you'll learn how to get the highest response rates from email campaigns sent to your subscriber list. But, as you might not expect, you'll also learn how to substantially increase the size of your mailing list beyond what's possible from standard registrations at your own website, via techniques such as co-registration, newsletter sponsorships, and exit pop-ups.