All those opt-in teasers that you liberally sprinkled all over your site should point to an opt-in page that sells the benefits of joining your list. This is the pre-blind-date telephone call, or the "tell me about yourself" part of the job interview. It should:

• Sell the value of your newsletter or communications program with sample emails, customer testimonials and incentives for signing up.
• Manage expectations about how often subscribers will be contacted and spell out your privacy/email policy.
• Capture the "right" amount of information-- usually first name, last name, email address, format preference (HTML or text) and just enough demographics to specifically target your emails. Asking for the email address only, as this WordBiz Report example does, makes signing up a breeze, but may not provide you with enough intelligence. The Intevation Report form captures additional user data.
• Prevent typos and bad addresses with a script that checks for syntax errors or a secondary box that requires users to re-enter their addresses.