3) If you feel as if you cannot fully explain yourself in a message, tell other person to call you at their convenience. Don't demand; ask nicely and say "thank you."

4) Always answer your e-mail within 24 to 48 hours. Not responding promptly shows a lack of interest on your part and is definitely unprofessional. By showing such a lack of respect you may easily anger party who's been trying to get in touch with you. If you'll be away on vacation for any length of time set up an autoresponder that answers your mail and notifies sender that you are away and when you'll return. If you don't know how to do this call your ISP for assistance.

5) Always spell check every message for accuracy. Bad spelling and grammar in a message can make someone form an opinion of you from that message, and it's not a good one.

6) Also never type in all caps as it means you ARE SCREAMING at someone. It's considered very rude.

E-mail is a quick and convenient way to communicate, but it's important that your messages are received as you intended. By following these tips when dealing with your e-mail you'll be thought of as a professional and a pretty nice person as well!

6) What should a good campaign generate in terms of response rates; i.e. those that clicked through from your message to a web site or called a toll-free number? These numbers will fluctuate based again upon your market segment, product or service you are selling, type of response rate you are seeking (download, ecommerce sale, review of materials via a web site, etc.). But, industry averages are from 4% up to 20% - unfortunately these numbers are going south as more and more companies integrate opt-in e-mail with interactive and offline marketing processes.

7) Message testing is also a very important component of this process – meaning, you need to develop 1-3 messages ("creative" in marketing speak) that have different content and call to action components. Then test by utilizing 10-15% of your total media buy by sending out these test messages and assessing response rates and go to market with message that generated highest return. Be forewarned, this process can slow campaign down, but testing can help you increase your response rates or back end ROI exponentially.

8) Your interactive ad agency or list partner should help you setup "landing page(s)" - actual page where people are taken via a hyperlink in your opt-in e-mail message. This page should have content that is integrated with your opt-in message and act as a response mechanism by capturing sufficient information to enable you to build your own in-house newsletter, which in turn helps to leverage downstream media costs.

9) Finally, last and most important part of process is setting up tracking reports that will enable you to carefully analyze results from your opt-in e-mail campaign. This is typically done by inserting 1-2 lines of HTML code on 3-5 pages of your web site (product overview, registration, or home/index pages for instance) – a report can then be generated that shows number of respondents for each page as a subset of overall response rates from campaign. This critical analysis process will help you understand effectiveness of your overall campaign and will also provide valuable insight about your web site content, UI (User Interface) and navigation.