Email marketing is a very effective way to grow your business and send out a company newsletter or updates. Sending e-mail is less expensive than most other forms of contact. E-mail marketing has demonstrated to be flourishing for those that do it correctly.

Now that you have decided to do email marketing, just how do you go about getting your e-mail list. Do you grow or build your list or should you go out and buy a list.

The quick and easy thing to do, would be just to go out and buy a list and have an instant list of e-mails all ready to go. Sounds easy, but I would avoid this method. There are plenty of people ready and willing to sell you a list of e-mails. These folks that sell e-mail list, will tell you that you are the only person that is getting this e-mail and it is guaranteed to be opt-in or even double opt-in. Don't believe it. Good list are hard to get and unless you know for certain the person responding is expecting an e-mail from you, don't buy it.

I hope I have made the first method clear, don't buy a list. Now there can be other methods to using an existing list, such as renting a list. The main thing to understand here, you never get to see the email, the list owner is sending an email for you. You basicly pay a rental fee for using the list. The owner will send your information out for a fee on your behalf.

How to Build your own list?

There are many proven methods to building your own list. It does take work and patience in this process.

1. PPC - Paid search advertising is a method where you place an online ad in Google, MSN or Yahoo for example. As people click your ad, they can sign up to receive more information. This can be an expensive method. You can use some type of free item or giveaway to invite your guest to sign up. For example, you could give a free E-book, discount, how to information, trial offer etc... to someone that as a reward for responding.

2. Newsletter - If you already have an existing product and website, you should be using some type of newsletter signup on every page on your site. The key goal here, is to make it very visible and easy to signup. Look at this as long term project. It takes time to build a list and it also depends on how many visitors you have to your website. Get started now on this and over time, you will build a large list.

3. Discounts and Coupons - Offer a coupon or some type of price discount for those that signup on your existing website. Develop a special list of customers that want to know when the next discount or new product is available.

4. Business Cards - Hand out business cards to everyone you meet. Let them know about your website. Promote yourself in your daily life. We sometimes think that you have to make all your contacts on the internet, but why not use what you are doing on a daily basis to build contacts. Place a note on your card that they can sign up for more information and if they mention a special word, they can get a discount.

Once you get the list built or at least in the process of building, you are going to want to have a specialized e-mail marketing software to make all this happen. Do not be sending e-mails from your Outlook Express or personal e-mail system.

Here is a list of the best e-mail marketing software programs.

1. Atomic Mail Sender

2. GroupMail

3. MaxBulk Mailer

4. Mass Mailer

About the Author

Richard Seng tells it like it is. Richard is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer with an informational website where you can find the top rated Business software programs to protect your computer. In many cases you can find discounts that range from 10% to 25% Off at Business Software Reviews