You want to start an ezine. You setup an autoresponder and insert a form on your web site. So your visitors can enter their name, email and other information in to the form to get subscribed. Then script will send them a 'Confirmation email' to click on a link. This is double opt-in.
So what if your subscribers enter wrong email address by mistake?
Scipt tries to send messages to this email and they bounce back. Your subscriber will never receive any Confirmation email and you will lose a prospect.
So what if your subscribers enters correct email during subscription and abandon that email in future?
This happens often. People register with free email accounts, uses it for couple of years and stop using it. Email provider will close the account or the email account is full and out of disk space. When the emails are out of disk space the messages you send will bounce back.
You can avoid these situations as much as possible by the following few checks:
During subscriptions:
* Let your autoresponder or mailing list software check the email format before the subscription. This is carried away by background check by the script so it sees that '@' sign, .com (or any other tld extention) are entered.
* Your script should have the ability to block certain email accounts if you don't want them in your list. Like hotmail.com, yahoo.com etc. This takes away half of the burden of bounces. But now a days 80% of the subscribers are using free email accounts. So it is entirely up to you whether to aloow free email accounts or not. But certainly bounce rates will be much less.
* Regular expressions: Some webmasters use these Regular expressions to disallow some characters or number of characters in emails. This needs to be integrated with your mailing script.
Double opt-in:
Double opt-in confirms that the email really exists. Same time it excludes misspelled email addresses. You can also get confirmation from your subscribers.
Bounced Email management:
Believe it or not ... you will get bounces with your lists all the time. Could be due to abandoning email addresses espeially free email accounts, expiration of domains, inboxes are full or deleted email addresses etc. Sometimes mail server won't be available. So in all these cases you feel like not sending emails again to these email addresses.
Because sending a message, dealing with a bounce etc - these are waste of your server resources if this happens repeatedly with same email address. So if your software lists an email address as invalid, just delete them asap. No regrets about this ... Clean list gives you more profit margins than bulk and junk list.
