If you’re responsible for your company’s e-mail marketing, here are five things that’ll generate better response and make you a hero:

1. Add ‘whitelisting’ instructions on the signup confirmation page: Telling folks to add your email newsletter’s ‘from’ address to their address books will mean your e-mail lands in fewer spam folders. Adding this to one of our client newsletters improved delivery by 25%.
2. Link to a sample newsletter, from the subscription page: A preview will mean more subscribers.
3. Write a great subject line: “20% Off All Acme Widgets” is a lot more powerful than “Acme Widgets Discount”. I’ve seen a great subject line literally double open rates.
4. Test your newsletter: Sign yourself up for Gmail and Hotmail, at least, and send the newsletter to yourself. Make sure it looks OK in those two programs, Yahoo mail, Outlook and Outlook Express, at a minimum. Throw in AOL and Mozilla Thunderbird if you can. There’s nothing worse than sending out a piece that took hours to create, only to have it look awful for half our audience.
5. Use an e-mail marketing tool: Constant Contact, WhatCounts and other tools are web-based (nothing to install), inexpensive ($50 or so for a list of 5,000 people).

5 simple things that cost almost nothing and will have your boss thanking you…