Are you making a newsletter campaign part of your company’s overall marketing and sales campaign? If not, you should.

To collect the most email addresses, customers should be able to opt-in for a company’s free newsletter during all points of interaction. When sales people make calls, they should mention the newsletter. When company employees attend trade shows, they should pick up business cards and ask if people want to receive the newsletter. When emails are sent from company employees, they should contain a signature file giving recipients the opportunity to subscribe to the newsletter. In short, an aggressive outreach program should take place where company employees are focused on collecting email addresses for the company newsletter. In addition, the website should be designed so that the opt-in box is on every page. This way wherever visitors go within the site they are able to sign up for the newsletter.

By aggressively enabling visitors to provide their email addresses, and making it a company policy to collect email addresses at all point of contact, companies will quickly grow their lists. As long as these prospects and customers are not sent superfluous information and the company does not sell their addresses, they should remain subscribers and allow the company to continually send them information.

In addition to your clients and targeted clients viewing the newsletter as valuable, your marketing department can use the data we collect as a source of information about your customers' and prospects' preferences. Your product managers can look to the data to determine customer interest when planning the next offering. Your salespeople will look at this information as a sales tool to use. Imagine if they knew what a specific targeted client was interested in before they made that first call to them - maybe even send them more information on their interests.