Denise and I, AKA The Blog Squad, are so excited about our April anniversary celebration. It’s supposed to be a secret until next week, so all I will say right now is we’re giving away 2 iPods and a Razer Copperhead mouse in a contest. You might want to check back here next week…

I suggest you subscribe through our Feedblitz subscription form on this blog, upper right…you’ll get automatic updates in your inbox.

Why the contest? Why give away iPods? It’s been a year since we published Build a Better Blog, the Ultimate Guide to a Professional Business Blog, plus a year since we started doing our weekly Conversations with Experts teleseminar.

The iPods we’re giving away come preloaded with 43 of our experts being interviewed…Featured experts include Dave Taylor, Des Walsh, Bob Bly, Dan Poynter, to name just a few. When we calculated how much an hour of their time would cost, it came out to over $8,000 to listen to them on the podcasts!

What’s the catch? Of course, we’re asking that you submit your name, subscribe to our new Savvy Biz Tips ezine, and refer others to our contest. This is going to be a mega subscription drive during the whole month of April. We hope you’ll participate, and maybe you’ll win. And don’t worry, if you end up not liking our ezine, you can unsubscribe easily.

List building can be tough. Now you’ve got to squeeze, trap and hit ’em with bonuses before they will hand over their email addresses. Here’s some examples of how others are doing it, plus some good conversion stats, thanks to the prolific and knowledgeable Chris Knight of EzineArticles.com.

The "NAME SQUEEZE" email list building strategy is the act of setting up a single page where the only way you release a benefit to the reader is if they give up their email address. Some people call this a subscription trap strategy. Do these pages work? When should you use them?

Read his article on his email squeeze page conversion survey, then get yourself over to his own Email Universe Ezine squeeze page.

If you are interest in learning more about effective email marketing tips, you will gladly fork over your email address to Christopher Knight.

Bigger isn’t always better in e-mail marketing. Read this new study reported on Chris Baggot’s Blog:

The bigger the e-mail list, the lower the open and click-through rates, says a new study from e-mail service provider ExactTarget.

The 2005 study of more than 4,000 organizations 230,000 e-mail campaigns and 2.7 billion e-mail messages reports that lists with 100,000 or more names experienced an average open rate of 18.2% and click-though of 3.6%.

Those of 101-1000 names had an open rate of 42.1% and click-through rate of 6.8%.

For lists of 1,001 to 10,000, the rates were 33.2% and 5.1%.

For 10,001 to 100,000, the rates were 25.8% and 4.5%.

"This phenomenon is one of the strongest cases for audience segmentation," says Morgan Stewart, director of strategic services at ExactTarget and author of the study. "The smaller the targeted audience, the better organizations can aim their message directly to their subscribers in their e-mail communications."

The ExactTarget 2005 Response Rate Study summarizes overall open, click-through and unsubscribe rates and provides additional analyses based on day of week for sending email while examining list size and target audience.  The study is available by going here…