You should be gathering emails of your customers and prospects every chance you get. These are the people that want to get information from you and want to buy from you, when the time is right. Stay in touch with them.

At a minimum, you should have email signup on your website.

Depending on your business, you can write to them anywhere from once a year to once a day. For most businesses, somewhere between once a week and once a month is probably the right number. You can also send out special promotions anytime you like. If you are looking to generate some extra business by giving people a special deal, your email marketing list will be a great tool. This is one of the reasons people signed up with you.

You can maintain your email list by hand, if you have a small list, like I do for this one. I use an Outlook distribution list and send out a simple text email.

If you have a large list you can use an email list marketing service provider. You can design fancy looking newsletters, see reports of your email campaigns, set up auto responders, create surveys, register people for events and use other email marketing tools.

Aweber - among the oldest and most well-respected, email marketing service providers. Favored by Internet marketers because of the ability to set up Autoresponders. Autoresponders let you set up a series of emails to new subscribers. This helps you follow up and build a relationship.

Constant Contact - also among the oldest and most well-respected email marketing providers. Has Email Marketing, Email List Management, Tracking and Reporting, Online Surveys and Event Marketing, but no Autoresponders.

By Andrew Weitzen (c) 2010

Weitzen is the publisher of several online Internet journals including: InternetHandholding.com, DomainNames.gs, DotNetNuke.bz, Programmer.bz, Software.vg, WebHosting.vg