The continuing effectiveness of e-mail as a marketing tool depends on the establishment of true permission-based e-mail lists, says Jay Schwedelson, corporate vice president for Boca Raton, FL-based list services provider Worldata. To that end, he offers the following suggestions:

When looking at that big stack of merge/purge reports, it can be tempting to file them away or maybe even toss them, says Don Buck, president of Milwaukee-based consultancy Buck Marketing. Think again. The volume of information that can be extracted from your merge/purge reports about your lists, your customers, and potential customers is invaluable.