How to gather email addresses and create mailing lists

Email marketing is one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to promote your products and services. If you are not using email marketing, you are not reaching a significant portion of your prospective clients. But how do you start, if you don't have knowledge of email marketing? OK, let's start with some basics.

Obviously, you need a list of e-mails. More e-mail addresses you have, more people you are going to reach, and more money you will make. So, all we need is a bunch of e-mails, right? Not quite. You don't need just any email addresses. You have to know your target audience. If you are selling lingerie and perfume, you don't want any men's e-mail addresses. Then you have to figure out what age range is most appropriate for your products. Are your products very expensive? Then you have target people with very high income level. Now you get the idea.

So, how do you get "right" email addresses? In some cases, you can buy them. In other cases, you have to gather addresses yourself. And you will need appropriate software tools, unless you want to cut and paste every single email address manually.

There are different types of e-mail harvesting software based on the media they gather emails from.

Atomic Email Extractor is a program that is specially designed to extract email addresses from the Internet. It is fully customizable and you can set your own search parameters, so that the program won't grab just any email address. Atomic Email Hunter can find emails anywhere - pages, forums, guestbooks, message boards, etc. Let's say you've added new products to your website and would like to notify your audience about the changes.

You can gather email addresses from your forum and send out the news about an update. But what about attracting new visitors? You can do this with Atomic Email Hunter too. Let's say you make 3D games. All you have to do is to enter "3D Games" in Google and see what websites are popular with 3D gamers. You can then gather e-mails of people who left their messages in the guestbook and send them a message with screenshots of your new game. Simple, isn't it? And with Email Hunter it is done automatically almost instantly.

But isn't it spamming? Not if you are responsible about it. If you keep e-mailing every day trying to sell these people books, printer cartridges, subscriptions, rubber dolls, used construction equipment and other things that are not related to 3D games, then you can be sure that these people won't appreciate it. But one-time mailing with interesting relevant non-offensive content is a great way to attract new visitors to your website.

Next week: Learn how you can automatically grab email addresses from files and CDs using email collector

Relevant links:

  • Atomic Email Hunter home page
  • Software to send bulk email

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