I believe that is true. Or if you don't have a newsletter to offer, offer them an email subscription to your future blog updates.

In my experience as a potential customer, there's one company that has really grabbed me with an email campaign although I have yet to subscribe to their service.

After a few years, I still save and intend to read all of the email from the company, because the sender of the email includes general, valuable information about the targeted business in the email. The company is a music A&R organization called Taxi.

The fact that you welcome the emails from that company (Taxi) illustrates how email marketing and blogging really works:

you might not be ready to buy from the company, but you welcome their emails, therefore keep having a positive image of the brand.

Once you decide you need one of their products, you'll be more likely to buy from them then their competitors because of the relationship that was established through the email campaign.

In marketing terms the email campaign is an exercise to keep the brand 'front of mind'. They keep you informed and give you information you value so that you will keep being aware of the brand and enhance a feeling of value and trust derived from the brand and its emails.

The idea is not to make an immediate sale, but to keep raising your awareness of the brand until the day comes that you want to make a sale.

Powerful stuff.

I think email lists are still a great tool for companies to use, I bet I get at least 6 or 7 emails a day from various lists.

A ning network sounds interesting. Might be able to do something with that. I'll go look see. THanks for the tip.

Ning is great when you don't have the budget to build your own network. The only drawback is that all the content is created on their site, and doesn't do much for your website in terms of creating content that can attract long tail keywords, or keeps visitors loyal to your site...

www.ning.com/