It's a new year, and for many that means new budgets and new marketing campaigns. If you've never used email promotions, now is the time to start thinking about building an in-house email list and designing some cool postcards. Or, if your email marketing campaign seems a little stale, revamp it with a new look. Try a new format, or ditch your old marketing message and try an email newsletter.

VerticalResponse's marketing blog has a great marketing checklist full of ideas to start the (marketing) year off with a bang. Their ideas encompass every aspect of a truly comprehensive marketing plan, not just email, so you can use it to tie your whole campaign together, pull everything in a new direction or pick and choose what you'd like to try and make it work for you. A lot of the suggestions can be applied to email, even if it's not specifically mentioned.

Their best "marketing resolution" is to get people talking, because isn't that what any good marketing promotion is all about, email or otherwise? The "send to a friend" feature allows easy, one click email forwarding of anything people think is worth talking about, and sharing, with friends. So if you can get one person talking, they can help you get ten more friends talking.

Remember chain letters? How many jokes, cartoons and interesting articles do you get in your inbox a day? All these require you, or someone you know, to pass along an email to a friend or two. It's free for them, and they are only too happy to do it because they see something in the email adding value to their, and their friends', lives.

By creating a buzzworthy product or service and an email campaign to match, you could almost double your reach! If you sent 500 emails and every one of your recipients forwards your email to just one person, you get 500 free email promotions. And these promotions are almost more valuable, because they come from a trusted source-a friend or coworker, not an advertiser.

So resolve to take some time and come up with something worth sharing with friends. It could be a simple promotional code (everyone loves saving money) or a crazy contest. Just give them something to talk about.