Every internet marketer will be proud to tell how big their list is. 80,000 subscribers... 200,000 subscribers... But how much response they will be getting if they sent an email campaign?

Its not the number of emails you have in the database. Its the quality of the list. The more squeaky clean your list is, more profits you will get.

Here are some tips to maintain your list quality:

1. Use double opt-in. This way you can make sure that email is valid. The software you are using should be able to send a confirmation message, so subscriber will click on it to confirm their subscription.

Simply defined as sending solicited email to your opt-in list. Webmasters has to keep a form on their websit(s). Prospects if they want to receive email from that webmaster, they will enter their name and email address to subscribe. This in-house built list is safest to do email marketing with.

How to get them sign up? Buy a mailing list manager software. http://www.scripts4webmasters.com/follow-up-autoresponder-pro/index.shtml Create a mailing list there. Copy and paste the html code on your website. Use double opt-in. Means subscribers has to click on the link provided to them in their initial email.

2. Deal with Bounces mercilessly. Delete bounces... period. But make sure its a hard bounce. Hard bounce is when recipient mail server rejects your email. Soft bounce is when your email accepted by recepient's mail server but bounced back because of reasons like mail box is full, your message is large than receiving mail server upper limit etc. Make sure to configure your list manager to try to send the messages few times before you delete the email addresses.

3. Try to avoid free email accounts. Its a little hard to implement. Because now a days most people use a free email account like hotmail, yahoo.com though they have their own domains. This is because they don't want to expose themselves or they might be affraid that publisher of the list might send junk or spam to them. So think of pros and cons the situation and follow this tip.

4. Provide an option for subscribers to change their email address. Some list management software or services provide a link to your subscriber details and lists he opted for. From there he can change his email address. This way its easy for them to update their profile.

5. Validating the domain. While accepting an email address in to your database make the list manager to validate it either by some javascript or other means.

6. Delete unsubscribers. ALWAYS include an unsubscribe link for easy unsubscriptions. Once in a while do a search for unsubscribers and delete them from your database.

7. DON'T buy email lists. Not a good experience with buying email lists. Most of them sell email addresses that they will get from website email extractors. If you see an offer like one million emails for $19.95... Simply turned down that offer. You will feel glad about it if you gain some experince in internet marketing.

8. Manual import of subscribers. If you got your subscribers from your old list manager to new one or from your helpdesk to your mailing list manager etc, be careful to avoid spelling errors.

Radhika Venkata (c).