Free is overused these days, especially in email marketing. However, if you’re looking to grow your subscriber list, then create or source a product of value to your visitors (such as an e-book or discount coupon) and offer it to them for free when they signup for to receive your newsletter. Often, these can be free to you, but provide a legitimate value to your subscribers.

To make sure users don’t simply type any email address into your subscription form, setup an Autoresponder to send them the free bonus immediately after they subscribe. Get more help with Autoresponders here.

A high bounce rate can be detrimental to your continued email campaigns. In order to protect their customers from unsolicited or unwanted email communication, many Internet Service Providers and Spam Filters look at previous bounce rates for your sending email address to determine whether to deliver your emails. The logic is this: if an email has a high bounce rate (20% or greater), the sender is a potential spammer, “making up” email addresses to try to hit a lot of recipients with their message.

If a lot of your emails are bouncing, we do recommend removing those particular email addresses.

Online Outbox utilizes a technology called “Automated Bounce Processing”, which helps control your bounce rate. If a particular email address bounces three times within a relatively short period of time, that email address is automatically deactivated from the Contact List. This helps keep your emails deliverable over the lifetime of your email campaign.

Online Outbox allows you to customize the email headers in your campaigns, so the emails actually come from you, rather than from Online Outbox. Email headers contain organizational information that will likely remain the same for the entire campaign. Email headers contain such information as the From Name (your name, or your organization’s name), the From Email Address (your email address, or a generic newsletter-oriented email address) and the Reply-To Email Address (your email address, or “donotreply@yourorganization.com”, etc.).

You can configure unique email headers for each Contact List. To edit email headers for an existing Contact List, simply navigate to the Contact Lists page, and edit the appropriate Contact List. You may edit any available options here, in the Edit Contact List page.

As a truly spam-free service email marketer, you’ll want to make sure that your subscribers are aware that they will be receiving your emails, and that they look forward to receiving them, because the content of the email benefits them in some way.

That said, we will all come across subscribers who, for some reason or other, no longer wish to receive our newsletters. The key to positive karma in email marketing is to make it as easy as possible to help people get what they’re looking for. If they want to unsubscribe, let them! If they want to update their email address so that they continue receiving newsletters at a new address, let them as well.

I came across this article from our friends at Marketing Profs, and just had to share.

“Contrary to popular belief among marketers,” says a ReturnPath whitepaper, “an unsubscribe request is not necessarily the end of a customer relationship. By executing a well-thought-out, positive unsubscribe experience, a company can extend their brand equity and keep the customer for years to come, even if that customer is no longer an email subscriber.”

To see how well corporations currently manage the opt-out process, ReturnPath unsubscribed from 45 email lists it had previously joined for another study. While most included links to unsubscribe or preference pages in their messages, a few still required recipients to send unsubscribe requests by email. The majority of the companies provided immediate confirmation that an address would be removed from the list. Some even offered the exact date this would take effect.

However, surprisingly few offered anything but a total opt-out: only 2 companies out of the 45 studied offered options for subscribers to change the frequency they received email, or to opt out of just some of the marketers’ emails. And only 11% of companies allowed subscribers to change their email address on the unsubscribe landing page.

Read more here.

Online Outbox makes creating subscription forms simple, and will even give you the html code to place on your website to give your subscribers a seamless experience. Check it out! Login and Create a Website Form.

Do you post to a blog on a somewhat regular basis? A great way to get new and recurring traffic is to notify your subscribers when you have new content available on your blog. Sending a short “teaser” with a link to your blog page to “read more” will 1) show your readers that they matter, 2) bring more traffic to your site, and 3) give you a little rapport with Google and most of the other search engines.