The mailing list is an invaluable tool in your marketing arsenal. It’s an entire list of people who think your brand is interesting enough to let you email them your marketing pitches on a somewhat regular basis. You may be wondering how a company gets consumers or clients to agree to such a thing, and honestly, it’s not always easy. We’ve got a few tried and true tips for making your mailing list bigger and better and we’re going to explore them today.

Before we get started, you’ll need to decide if you’re doing an email or direct mail list. Email is obviously much less expensive, but a direct mail list sometimes makes more sense for certain kinds of businesses. If you’re going to run a direct mail list, I’m going to get back to you. Direct mail is a totally different animal than email that deserves a blog entry of its own, which I will get to before the week is out. For now, I’m going to talk about building and maintaining an email newsletter.

Before you even start to think about email marketing, you must promise to observe the following rules:

1. Email marketing is for opt-in recipients only. Do not send your newsletter to anyone who didn’t agree to sign up for it. If you do, it’s spamming and it can get you in trouble with the law, your web host, your internet service provider, and it generally reflects badly on your brand.

2. All email marketing transmissions must come with an easy-to-use unsubscribe link. Not allowing people to leave your newsletter will also make you a spammer, potentially landing you in hot water and definitely fostering animosity with customers.

3. Use your newsletter strategically and sparingly. Do not email your newsletter contacts constantly. For most businesses a monthly newsletter is reasonable. If you have very compelling content, you might be able to get away with a weekly or daily message, but if you’re going to make your messages more frequent, keep in mind that you may have a harder time keeping people subscribed and getting people signed up. It’s also a good idea to let subscribers know if they can expect frequent messages so they know what they’re signing up for. For most companies, a monthly newsletter promoting a new product or service or offering a special deal is the way to go. This allows you to remind your customers or clients to spend money with you, gives them impetus to do so and, most importantly, doesn’t get on their nerves.

So how do you get all these fans of your brand signed up to receive your emails? There are many ways to go about this, but the following are tried and true in my experience.

1. Give something away. People love free stuff. If you can do a monthly or weekly drawing from your newsletter list for a free gift, you’re likely to attract more subscribers. Be sure to let your customers or clients know they’re eligible to get a free gift by joining your newsletter.

2. Offer special deals and discounts. Everyone loves the idea of being in on a special offer. Send your contacts a special coupon code or deal along with your newsletter. Be sure to tell potential newsletter subscribers about the access to exclusive deals when they subscribe. This company offers site visitors an instant 15% discount for joining the newsletter. That’s an offer that just about guarantees every paying customer is going to join up, since they’ll want to save at check out.

3. Offer interesting content. If you’re a subject matter expert on a topic that interests your customers or clients, offer them free information with your newsletter. This professional and personal coaching consultant offers newsletter subscribers access to a free book when they sign up. A company selling dog leashes might offer a newsletter providing pet parenting tips. A company selling gourmet hot sauces might have a recipe newsletter.

Whatever hook you use to interest people in your newsletter, make it easy for people to sign up. This means you should have a sign up form on every page of your site. Not a link to a separate sign up page, a form that justs asks for an email address and has the user click “submit”. You want as few barriers as possible to getting onto your newsletter. Take it from big companies like Crate and Barrel and Overstock.com. A link to a newsletter sign up is not nearly as effective as an actual sign up on each and every page of your site.

Once you’ve built up your list, you can not only use it to market your own company, you can use your list as a cross-promotion tool. The bigger your list is, the better position you’re in to cross-promote with another company with a big list. When you send out those deals and discounts you can mention promotions for your partner and they’ll do the same for you. This can add up to thousands of free eyeballs for your brand without spending a penny.