Email remains the undisputed king — unrivaled in its power to raise money and inspire action from your supporters.

But countless dollars are wasted every year by campaigns who abuse email by sending messages to recipients who haven’t opted in.

If you’ve spent hours scraping email addresses off websites, gathering party email files, and purchasing lists, I want you to keep in mind one very important thing.

When you blast out emails to people who don’t know you and who never signed-up to be on your list, you’ll suffer an incredibly high spam rate.

No big deal, right? Wrong.

First, you’ll get booted from your email service provider, forcing you into less reputable platforms. Now when you send emails, they’ll never arrive in inboxes.

Why?

Because the second thing that will happen is the major email providers will remember your reputation as a spammer. Your emails won’t even have a chance at hitting your recipients’ spam folders. They’ll be blocked at the server level.

When all is said and done, you’ll have cost yourself a lot of time and money for nothing. Emails won’t be delivered or opened, and your reputation online will be tarnished, making it impossible to build a successful email fundraising machine.

The solution?

Invest in growing opt-in emails lists. We work with candidates who have 1,000 opt-in recipients who can run circles around lists of 10,000 or more. That’s because the opt-in list reaches supporters who actually care.

Here are easy ways to start growing your opt-in list:

• Add email sign-up forms to every page of your website.
• Circulate polls, petitions, and surveys on social media which collect name, email, and ZIP code.
• Invest in Google AdWords and Facebook Advertising linking to landing pages that collect email information.

Don’t get sucked into thinking the only thing that matters is the size of your list. That’s just the first step. Your ultimate success hinges on open-rates, click-through-rates, and dollars raised.