So you have launched a company and you are ready to tackle your online audience. Where do you begin? There are many different areas to begin but just starting somewhere will put you ahead of many others. At some point of your online marketing you will want to start collecting email addresses.

Many of your website visitors would be more than happy to give you their email address so it is important to be able to supply them with the opportunity to do it. Never assume anything in online marketing and make sure to spell out everything for your traffic. You can sometimes put an email field right in the middle of the screen and they still won’t know where to submit it. Make sure it is not hidden also on the page as well. Nobody is going to search through your website as to where they can give you their email address. make sure when building or tweaking your website you offer a field in plain view where they can give you their email address. If you have it located on one page your website your visitor will not necessarily navigate back to that page. It is important to lay it down very clearly for your visitors on every page. having fields located on every page of your website will allow your visitor to not have to back track to a previous page to submit their email address. Often times if a visitor has to click around too much they will just end up leaving from frustration. Taking email addresses during a purchase is just a given. If you have a brick and mortar business it is important to ask your customers if they would like to give you their email address. If you haven’t been doing this you should start. It is pretty safe to say that anybody making a purchase from you can assume to receive an email at some point in time down the road.

Make it clear for all visitors where they can submit their info on your website and always ask for email addresses. Your email marketing campaign will be very important in the future to stay connected with your customers and clients.

To start this post, and say “old lists are bad” is just not true. An old list that was created in an opt-in fashion is a good list, but it may have some drawbacks depending on its age. The older your list, and the frequency in which you have mailed to that list, may create havoc after time. Having a list that has sat for a long period of time, might collect a lot of un-subscribes, and hard bounces when you actually mail to that list in the future.

E-mail addresses are like clothes in the sense that people have multiple addresses to suit their needs. You can’t expect an old list to have the most up to date email addresses for your subscribers. Subscribers change their email address frequently depending on a multitude of factors like job hopping, or changing ISP’s. However, with the advent of gmail this is coming to an end.

The true benefit of a newly acquired opt-in list is not just for your own marketing results, but it also helps your ESP. ESP’s gain reputation based on the delivery rates of their clients. Using a fresh opt-in list creates a mutual relationship that you and your ESP share. Good delivery, and click rates.

Justin Lavino is an Account Executive for Net Atlantic. Net Atlantic provides email newsletter hosting, discussion group hosting, and web hosting.

Brick Marketing hit on this subject already, but I want to take a minute to weigh in on the value of organic lists, not only from a marketing point of view, but also from a cost standpoint. Why bring up cost? It’s free to grow lists organically! It also removes the risk in getting scammed from purchasing, or renting a list.

I can’t explain how often I receive the same phone call time again. It starts off with someone on the other end of the phone looking to send a mailing with a list they purchased from Joe Smith in Idaho. He or she says to me that they purchased this list, tried to email to it, and it was junk. Obtaining a bad list that you paid for is a quick way to lose your marketing capital. Buyers beware!

Trust is something that is earned, not something you purchase. By building an organic, opt-in list, you are building trust, not buying data. Growing your email list organically and creating a true opt-in list is essential in making your dollars work for you. See what Brick Marketing wrote about Opt-In techniques back on June 25th.

Justin Lavino is an Account Executive for Net Atlantic. Net Atlantic provides email newsletter hosting, discussion group hosting, and web hosting.