How do you get people's e-mail addresses?

What's the best way for a Yellow Pages company to get business email addresses for a large number of clients?

• A Yellow Pages company wants to notify customers by email when they update their public profile with information from other sources so they can correct any errors through online self service. They can send letters but this would be expensive and the dead mail rate is several %. The sales people are supposed to get email addresses but they only get them for a low % of active customers. The company has many more inactive customers that the sales people dont talk too. The volume of customers is far too high for the company to consider ringing them all to get email addresses. The company would buy or scrape the email addresses if they could get accurate addresses.

• Answer:

  Small business owners are always looking for how they can either attract more customers to their business or increase the spend of existing customers. Since Yellowpages is a directory search, give them a sponsored placement in a particular category for a week in return of their email address. Then, give them back the hard number of how many clicks and calls you referred within that period - they might even convert to a customers of yours.