The sources of your email lists could be from internal lists of the organization or external. Please note that you can not buy or rent the email addresses and use the list for email marketing through LeadPro. In order to be CAN-SPAM regulation compliant, the addresses should be based on the users' permission to email. 

Examples of internal lists are your existing customers, prospects who have participated in your earlier promotional programs (provided you have obtained permission to their email addresses for future campaigns. Another example of internal list source would be the list of names and addresses of the attendees of a trade show when they visited your booth. Internal lists are essentially obtained from your internal database systems within your organization.

The major source of email addresses used in eMarketing nowadays are obtained through the sign up pages of web sites including your corporate web sites, product web sites and promotional web sites. You can also manage the signup page using the LeadPro tool.

Addresses obtained through the sign up web pages are based on the users' permission. Double opt-in process can also be followed to obtain an explicit permission from the user. However note that the volume of users or addresses will be much lower but the quality of the data will be much higher.

If you are using post cards and other print campaigns to obtain email addresses, make sure that their explicit permission is obtained.

Categorizing the list data would help you manage the lists easily. Campaign definition also would be much easier if you can easily the segment the target audience using the category. This practice will also help enforce the permission based marketing principle. Better opt-in (opt-out) management and targeted campaigns produce significantly higher results.

The lists can be created directly if you use a sign up web form. However, there is significant data available within the organization in other databases and application. Such data can be imported in to the LeadPro application using the simple interface. List data can also be entered manually into the LeadPro system. This would be very useful feature for small businesses who do not have required IT resources to create internal systems.

While the list should have the email address of the user or subscriber as the minimum requirement, additional demographic information such as name, address, age, gender, income range, product usage or purchase, promotional participation would help better segmentation of the audience. The contents of the list varies with the business requirements and campaign specific requirements.

Note that the list is a 'living document' and hence needs to be maintained on a continuous basis. List quality is the most important factor in the return on email marketing. Opt-out and opt-in management are the most important facets of list maintenance practice.