E-Mail is an application is the most used internet application. There are claims that messaging beats email but in terms of breadth of usage, there is no application that beats email. It is easily understood because of a strong parallel in the offline world which has now almost vanished snail mail or regular mail. That unfortunately also impacts email marketing.

Small Businesses understand direct mail. They receive lots and lots of it. They also use it at some point of time or the other. So online marketing immediately translates to e-mail marketing. And that is where small business owners start going wrong.

There are important differences between direct mail marketing and e-mail marketing. Here are the three most important differences:

Use of lists: It is a common practice in direct mail marketing to buy a list of names and start mailing these folks. With email, the practice is illegal. CAN SPAM laws dictate that you can only email to extend a relationship not spam people. What about all the spam you receive. Much of this junk is generated by folks with servers outside the US and therefore is difficult for the authorities to prosecute

So email marketing required a lot of preparation for setting up sources of emails. Collect emails through newsletters, So the next question that small business owners often ask is where can they get an email list?