The first step in creating a solid email marketing campaign is to build a great list. Finding people and

Getting the right people targeted to your list.

The secret to getting people to give you their permission for you to sending them something is to

Offer them something of value. What could you possibly have that someone else might want? Giving a lot of it away encourages more people to give you their contact information and allow you to put something in their inbox.

With your experience in your business, you have information that is valuable to prospects and customers where you can generate a report or some other type of format that you can give to your prospects and customers where they can gain that knowledge. Think of things like market statistics, customer behavior or product comparisons that you can create a PDF document and make that document available for free on your site in exchange for them providing you with their private information.

Another option to consider is to rent a list. In a lot of cases, the best way to find targeted lists can be with a magazine or newsletter or some other publication that speaks directly to your target demographic. In many cases, the authors of these publications are amiable to renting out their list or at a minimum provide some ad space where you can place a call to action ad directing people to come to your site and sign up for your mailing list.

Always make sure your articles or advertisements mention an email address like subscribe@yourdomain.com to push emails into that inbox as a way to collect names as well, it is a manual process to do this but by far the easiest way to harvest email information. Another method is to include a form on your website or blog to collect this information. Make it simple! Lengthy forms provide the opportunity for more people to abandon filling out the rest of the form.