Bernie Sanders’ election campaign team is pulling off a rather original email on-boarding strategy. The way his team used email at the start of his ongoing presidential candidate race proved to be unsuccessful when asking volunteers to make phone calls in order to gather support for Bernie. We’ll call this a ‘big request’ for the sake of our argument.
However, when Bernie's team of volunteers (or 'slacktivists' as he likes to call them) were asked instead for a ‘small request’, to gather at a local place for campaign updates, the response was overwhelming.
Zack Exley, adviser of Sanders told POLITICO:
"We could email a million people who said they wanted to volunteer, and we would get just dozens actually making calls.”
They found however that email could fill seats at events known as ‘barnstorms’ - organizing rallies where Sanders' digital staffers update supporters on the campaign’s strategy in cities across the country like Stockton, California, and Kansas City. And those in-person gatherings provided fertile ground for recruitment.
The technique employed by Bernie’s team is known as ‘foot in the door’, and consists of getting someone to agree to a small, seemingly trivial request before asking them what you initially intended.
Scientists call it ‘successive approximations’ and explain that when someone agrees to a small request, that creates a bond between the two. When the big request is then made, the person who previously agreed to the small request will feel obliged to comply to it. An example might be: "Can I borrow the car to go to the shop?" followed by "Can I borrow the car for the weekend?"
What Bernie’s team did was to get proof as to why it’s vital for marketers to on-board new email subscribers. On-boarding should work like getting your ‘foot in the door’ to establish a bond between the sender and the receiver. When it comes to email, the aim of on-boarding is to provide a warm welcome, timely guidance and motivation to subscribers who enter the database and are new to the email lifecycle.
A recent blog by Litmus shed light on the most common types of email subscribers, and surprisingly one of the three most common types was new subscribers who haven’t yet received any emails. This is where senders have to make a good first impression and establish a bond with those they’re emailing.
A small request can be as simple as asking a user to confirm their email address, leading to a big request like asking a user to become a paying customer.
Unfortunately, there simply isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ solution when it comes to on-boarding new subscribers. Clients will have to trial and test, learn and deploy, and ask their subscribers questions that are pertinent to their activities.
If the foot-in-the-door technique works for Bernie Sanders, why wouldn’t it work for you?
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