Sort your lists by domain names. Many times you’ll be able to catch typos that your call center or data entry people have made such as "oal.com" instead of "aol.com", "hotmale.com" instead of "hotmail.com"

If you have a lot of bounced mail it may be worth your while to send your file over to an email updating service that can find a person’s new email address. Databases to match your list against are growing. You only pay per name (about 90 cents) and minimums are as low as $200 per file. ReturnPath.com and imatcher.com are two companies that offer this service.

Clean your database – even if you don’t pay for bounces, your ISP may refuse to send your lists because they have a large number of bad addresses and clutter up the network.

If you want to be sure to reach paying customers you might consider eliminating Hotmail and Yahoo addresses from files you rent. Response may be better with email addresses that users pay for than free web-based e-mail addresses.

Don’t trust the open rates you are quoted by different email vendors. Messages can be viewed in the preview box in Outlook and other email clients. So vendors’ calculations of open rates can vary. It can be like counting apples and oranges. Also recipients may have opened your message merely to unsubscribe.

There are no set rules about which day is the best to mail. It can vary from industry to industry. One publisher at Ziff-David tested this by sending 5,000 names a day for five days of the week for three weeks and found that Monday and Friday actually brought in higher response rates than the prized Tuesday, Wednesday Thursday approach that has prevailed for the last few years.

Using the email address as the login to a password protected area can increase the likelihood of the user keeping that email address current.

Maximize "zero-click commerce." The fewer the number of clicks a subscriber has to make the better. Food and Wine and Travel & Leisure magazines offered surveys with order options. Food and Wine’s pop-up offer was done through AOL, which provided one-click form completion. But Travel & Leisure prospects were directed to another page. The Food and Wine offer pulled 20 times better than Travel & Leisure.

Remember the Three-Second Rule – that’s about all you’ll get of a reader’s time with an e-mail he or she receives from an unknown entity.

Think "preview window" and obey the "top- to-bottom" principle – most people will see the top inch or two of your message in the preview window of their e-mail client. The thrust of your message should be at the top and the explanation in the body of the message as a person reads their way down to the bottom.

Unsubscribes are a great opportunity for market research – provide a comment box and ask why a person has chosen to unsubscribe.

Here’s some good advice reported in Mediapost’s Media Daily News:

Office Printing Business (OPB), a division of Xerox, created an online lead-generation campaign using banner ads to attract inquiries from potential customers. According to spokesperson Jill Fairbanks, "Xerox found that the database the campaign produced was 10 times more cost-effective than purchasing a list from a third party."

Among those who responded to the online campaign, the cost per lead was $10; using a Third party list, the cost jumped to $100 per lead. As a result, OPB no longer purchases third party lists for email campaigns

"When it comes to B2B email marketing, we recommend sending useful information rather than giveaways or contest offers," says Mark Devaney, public relations director for Grafica Group agency that applies CRM technology to marketing campaigns.

In a six-month period, Grafica tested four email campaigns with different offers to incentivize recipients. Giveaways included a free hour of consulting, a free book on CRM, and a chance to win a free email pager. Info offers included an interactive Q&A on email marketing, a white paper, and a CRM newsletter. With all variables being fairly equal, B2B recipients chose to receive information over gifts by a margin of five to one.