Whenever a new client begins to use our email marketing platform: OpusMailer, we find that regardless the size of the company, one major question gets asked nearly 100% of the time: "How do I create my email marketing list?" The answer to this is probably right under your nose!

What most first-time email marketers don't realize is that they've ALREADY generated the start of their email marketing lists, and that they've done so with several key-resources their business already utilizes. The most common places where subscriber list starts are:

1. Existing Email Contact Lists — customers who you've already contacted via email are eligible to become part of your email marketing list. Pulling subscribers from your email contact book is an excellent place to start. As a rule of thumb however, make sure these contacts are active, and have been in contact at some point in the last 24 months.
2. POS (Point-of-Sale) — For "brick-and-mortar" stores the POS system is also an excellent resources for starting and growing your email subscriber list. Most out-of-the-box POS systems provide a field for inputting your customers' email address. Some of our current OpusMailer clients have also resort to the old standby of pencil and paper at their checkout counter. Claiming: "Sign-up to receive Special Discounts and Incentives", in order to encourage customers to provide their email address.
3. Existing Customers — Anyone who's bought a product from your in the last 24 months is also eligible to be emailed. Keeping track of your customers with hopes of making repeat business out of them is a huge part of the success of email marketing, or as we like to say: "Remind & Reward"
4. On YOUR website — Within the OpusMailer "Manage Subscribers" Tab click on any list you've already set-up, or set-up your first list. From the next screen, there's a link in the right-hand column to "Create A Subscriber Form". Clicking that link and after entering some basic, yet specific information, you can generate a code-snippet for a sign-up form that can be placed on your website. When someone fills out the subscriber form on your site, their automatically subscribed through OpusMailer. Seamlessly integration between your website and your email marketing. Using the same priniciples as the pencil and paper, explaining the benefits of subscribing to your list are helpful in encouraging people to volunteer their information.
5. Old-Fashioned Business Cards — Again, if someone has given you their business card and said, "Please contact me about your product/service", then they too can be added to your email marketing list. Same rules apply to business cards as your email contacts, only those contacts who you've received in the last 24 months are legit.

These 5 places are a great place to start mining the email subscriber list your didn't know you already had. In contrast here are some places where it's not a good idea to grab email addresses, and may get you in trouble regarding the CAN-SPAM Act.

1. DON'T Use Old Email Address (older than 24 months ) — Outdated contacts aren't very helpful simply because these people are unlikely to remember giving you permission to contact them. Remember that email marketing is most effective when it's targeted at people that are genuinely interested in your product or service.
   
2. DON'T Use Third Party Lists — There are many "grey-list" retailers on the internet, our recommendation is to avoid doing this for a number of reasons. First off, the estimated return on email marketing (over $40 : $1 in 2009), no longer applies to you if you get a 3rd party list. Secondly you run the risk of getting your email address black-listed with the ESP's (email service providers, such as: Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, etc.), this will not only render your email marketing useless, but also render your email addresses associated with your website useless. Finally you'll get us in trouble, the server we use to deploy our emails has managed to stay in the good-graces with the major ESP's, a batch of bad addresses could give us issues, in which case we may lose privileges to send email for anyone. You do want us to continue eating, don' t you?
3. DON'T Steal — Simply put, don't steal email addresses off the internet, or from local government business listings, or the like. It's simply bad news, bad results, and bad reputation for anyone who expects to gain any business from doing this.

We hope that this blog-post has helped to answer the "Golden Question". In the future we plan on explaining how to then take your starter email list, and utilize OpusMailer to grow your subscribers.