Getting people to sign up for your email newsletter is only half the battle.  Actually getting your emails into their inboxes is the other half.

There are plenty of best practices for ensuring email delivery.  One of the easiest is simply asking the email recipient to add your email address to their contacts list.  Most email clients will “white list” emails coming from email addresses included in the recipient’s contact list.

Here’s a good example of how to ask the recipient to include your email in their contact list:

I was recently introduced to Drop Box , an online service which allows you to share data between devices seamlessly.  In keeping with their simple product, their website is amazingly intelligent and simple.

A clever video describes in detail how DropBox makes the user’s life easy.  And a large download button drives conversions.  Really all it is lacking is a tag line that accurately speaks to the purpose and value proposition of Drop Box (“Easily Share Data Between All Your Devices”, maybe?) and some text for search engine optimization.

Creating a simplified download page is critical to minimizing site leakage and abandonment.  While DropBox doesn’t hit a home run on all best practices, it does exemplify some of them.

The complete list (well, at least to date …  I’m reserving the right to add more in the future) is here:

• Keep the download page simple.  Simple simple simple.
• Make sure that the download page is compatible with all major browser types.
• Utilize geo-locational technologies to deliver local language versions of your download page.
• Don’t make it difficult to actually download the software.  Create a large clickable area around the “download now” button.
• Prepare for the worst.  If someone has trouble downloading the software, what are you going to do ?  Give users step by step installation instructions during the download.  Don’t forget to customize those instructions based upon the user’s browser type!
• Include web analytics code to track not only how many people visit the download page  and where those downloads are being referred from, but also how many people are actually installing the software.
• Capture user information before the download … so that you can start marketing to the user often and frequently.

Here’s a great example of an upsell email.  With my Carbonite subscription about to expire, I have received the following email.

Let’s break this email down:

• The subject line: “My Carbonite Trial has Expired”.  Notice the initial capitalization, and the compelling call to action.
• Personalization: Well, they haven’t personalized this.  It should read something like “Dear Scott”.
• Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt:  “Your backup will be deleted from our servers”, “Don’t let this happen to you”, “In only 10 days, your backup files will be completely deleted”.
• Several clear call to actions: “Subscribe now”, “Become a paid Carbonite subscriber today”. “Become a Carbonite subscriber”
• Testimonials.  In this case, they are from people who didn’t take advantage of Carbonite.

These are just a few of the best practices that you can incorporate into your email marketing to increase upsell conversions.