In my opinion, the most important aspect in marketing online or offline is building your lists. The bottom line for you to run a successful business lies in your mailing list---subscribers that make up your opt-in database.

Opt-in is an important concept for building your mailing lists. The fact that your mailing list is opt-in, means you have collected information from people that have asked for your e-mail messages.

There Are Many Reasons to Have a Mailing List

One of the most common reasons to have a list is to publish a Newsletter. These people have placed their names on your list because they are interested in the information that you are giving them. If it is an Internet publication, they will have subscribed through your web form or sent an e-mail to your subscription auto-responder.

Another mailing list may keep track of prospects that have signed up to receive information on a product or service you are selling. Still another list can be made up of your clients or customers. It is always a good idea to keep your customers updated on new products or services.

Gone are the days of manually adding your prospects and customers contact information to your spreadsheet program. Now, there are tools available that add contact information to your database automatically. With today's database management tools most database activities are automated. An auto-responder is a good database management tool. Simply put, an auto-responder is an e-mail address. A person triggers an auto-responder by sending a direct e-mail or submitting a web form, their contact information is then stored in a database.

A quality database management tool should have the following features:

• Automatic subscribe and unsubscribe feature;
• E-mail notification to list manager when someone has been added or removed from a list;
• Easy importing of existing lists;
• Option to send single mailings or group mailings to list members;
• Intuitive control panel to view and edit subscriber profiles;
• and Automatic cleaning (i.e., deletion of bad e-mail addresses).

In order for your business to grow through the Internet, you need a contact database system. A contact database system manages your mailing lists automatically, freeing up your time to come up with ideas to bring in new subscribers.