Using email to reach current and prospective customers is both a convenient marketing strategy and also a powerfully effective one. But successful email campaigns are often found wherever the best and most relevant email lists are also found. And, for many, obtaining or compiling a great email list is far more tedious than orchestrating the email campaign itself.

No matter what industrial banner flies above your product or service, a targeted subscriber list is a vital component to contemporary digital marketing. And while many advertisers tinker with diverse ways of building these lists, only recently have business owners and entrepreneurs significantly stepped up efforts in the realm of social media to better compile a contact database of targeted customers.

Social media itself reveals the secrets to a successful email marketing campaign. All things considered, social media is rooted in large networks of like-minded people and thrives on regular, meaningful interactions. In this regard, a top notch email campaign will similarly reach consumers ripe for your pitch and willing to hear from you on a routine basis.

As a result of social media’s preeminence as a modern promotional platform, aspiring networking gurus have observed many simple but effective tricks for capitalizing on social media’s ability to help one build a web presence that both defines a brand and extracts critical information from customers – information that can later be compiled into a stellar email list.

• Make it real. Create a professional profile for your business on social networking site like Facebook or Linkedin. Use a quality picture of yourself and a polished bio to illustrate why you’re a pro. Let it be known where you are located and how people may contact you. After all, social networking is a two-way street. If you want someone else’s email address, you have to be equally willing to share yours.

• Make it interactive. Draw others into your profile or fan page with events and other opportunities (like online Q&As or seminars) that will require sign-up – a means for collecting valuable contact information.

• Make it stick. If you write a blog on your company’s website or release a regular newsletter, push the content to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Myspace or any of the other gazillion social networks now in existence. Making your brand and your business stick requires frequent exposure to the right audience. And the free exposure born of successful networking is comparable to any exposure money can buy elsewhere.

• Make it avoidable. Although the ultimate goal is to build as large of a contact database as possible, it’s inevitable that some folks will eventually select to opt-out. Make it easy and obvious how to do so from the start. If you make yourself as easy to avoid as you are to find, you will drastically reduce the likelihood of people initially choosing not to give you their email address in fear of inbox harassment.

Astonishingly, for as powerful and prevalent as social media is today, it remains a largely underutilized tool for scores of marketers. And while the world of social media looks daunting to outside observers, there are truly no simpler or more effective platforms for reaching customers, fostering relationships, and growing a business.