New study finds the most and least effective methods for collecting email addresses for email marketing.

If you have ever done anything with email marketing, chances are you know how important it is to have a solid list of email addresses to target. But what’s the best way to capture those email addresses?

A new study by ExactTarget, in collaboration with the Email Marketers Club, and the Center for Media Design at Ball State University might have the answer.

According to the paper, capturing email addresses when a potential customer is highly engaged, either at point-of-sale, on a website, is up to 60% more effective then via other methods such as list rentals and mass advertising.

The most effective methods for capturing email addresses according to the study are online registration, inbound call centers, at the point-of-sale, and through social sharing sites, in that order.

The least effective methods, the study concluded, were offline advertising, outbound call centers, and list rental. The study also points out that almost 33% of email marketers don’t bother to evaluate their list building methods for issues.

Another interesting finding of the report shows that while B2B marketers benefited from offering incentives to capture email addresses, B2C marketers do better without offering incentive.

Finally, the study predicts that just this year, sharing email content via social networks is expected to increase 348%. That means that if you are not making it easy to share each article on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, you may be losing out.

Request a copy of the whitepaper here.