You are working hard to build a valuable email list of consumers, business owners, community connections, and other qualified prospects in Kansas City. Once a new contact has agreed to receive your email marketing communications, you should follow-up with a welcome message immediately.

All of the major Email Service Providers (such as Constant Contact) provide an automated method for sending such a message. This makes your job much easier.

Ideally, you would like to know everything you possibly can about your prospects--because this will help you better identify their needs.

Regrettably, not all prospects are excited about spending their valuable time answering a lot of questions when they sign up for an email list. Just signing up may be pushing the envelope for them!

When building your email list, you should only collect the most essential information at sign-up. This will allow you to maximize the number of subscribers. Requesting too much information will drive away new prospects.

Other information is important, however, and you should collect it as soon as is appropriate following the initial sign-up process.

When collecting information from prospects for your email marketing list, you don't want to overwhelm them with so many requirements that they pass on signing up at all.

At the same time, there is certain basic information you should collect to make sure your list has value.

If you go to the effort of setting up an automated online form to capture email addresses, the last thing you want is to lose some of those addresses because they were entered incorrectly.

Fortunately, there is a simple fix for this problem, one you have most likely used online many times yourself--double entry.