Gert

Growing Your Permission Email List
Starting from Square One
If you just started your business, or if you just launched your website, you probably don't have an email list to send to. So what do you do?
Ways To Grow Your Opt-In List:
Place your email newsletter signup form on your home page (MailChimp gives you free signup boxes that you can customize and copy-paste to your website).
Link to your signup form from every page of your website (you might add a link to your footer, or side navigation).
Place a link to your email signup form in your email signature (ask everyone in your company to do it too)
Add the link to your signup form in all the invoices your company sends
Offer free giveaways to one lucky subscriber (it can be a company t-shirt, or something kooky, like a 20 pound box of banana candy).
Post free whitepapers or helpful articles on your site. They'll get downloaded like crazy, if you just offer them for free, and with no registration. Inside your whitepaper, place your own "full page ad" to your newsletter.
Send out personal, one-to-one emails to all your clients, and ask them to please signup to your newsletter.
In your "Contact Us" form on your website, add a checkbox to "signup for our newsletter"
Add an "opt-in for our newsletter" checkbox in your e-commerce checkout page.
Already Have a List of Customers?
What if you already have an email list of customers that you've been doing business with for years? Well, just because they're your customers, it doesn't mean they want to start receiving your email newsletters.
Let's say you run a small consultancy with a couple dozen clients who are very close to you. If you just assume they'd want your newsletter, and you subscribe them to your list without their permission, you're just going to irritate a lot of them (or worse, get yourself reported as a spammer). I've had colleagues start their own companies, and then add me to their lists. It's kind of awkward clicking the opt-out link in those emails, know what I mean?
If you've got an e-commerce store, you're probably sitting on a huge email list of customers who have purchased something from you in the past. But if they didn't check a box for email marketing, or if you haven't emailed them anything in years, you shouldn't start sending them emails out of the blue. If only 0.1% of your customers forgot who you are, and report your campaign as spam, you could get blacklisted.
So what the heck can you do? It's simple, but surprisingly few email marketers bother. They're so excited about sending their first campaign, they throw politeness out the door.
If you have a list of customer email addresses, and you want to start sending them email marketing, but you don't have their permission yet, ask them for permission.
Send a "Re-Introduction Email." It's extremely effective, and best of all, it's polite. You just put together a personal note. Write it like you'd write to a friend.

(For the full article, you might want to refer to http://www.mailchimp.com/articles/growing_your_permission_email_list/)