A few weeks back I’d talked about the laissez faire attitude so many brands had toward customers who cancelled their e-mail subscriptions. But I’m also finding that many marketers appear to take the same attitude when it comes to building their opt-in e-mail lists.

When it comes to e-mail opt-ins, I agree completely with web guru Amy Africa: If your website does nothing else, it should capture visitors’ e-mail addresses and permission to contact them so that you can continue to try to convert those visitors to customers. Yet too many websites make it difficult to even find the damn e-mail sign-up box. I’ve already detailed my laborious attempt to sign up for one specialty e-tailer’s newsletter, but that site isn’t the only one that makes potential subscribers work way too hard.

Online grocer Trader Joe’s, for instance, doesn’t mention its e-newsletter at all on its home page. It’s only when you click the drop-down menu of the “TJ’s Media” tab on the horizontal navigation bar that you come across the link to the e-newsletter sign-up. I persevered only because I’m a rabid Trader Joe’s fan (we shipped cartons of its goodies with us when we moved to England, and it was a sad day when we used up the last of the macaroni-and-cheese). But if I weren’t, I would have glanced at the home page, seen no sign-up, and promptly skipped away, and Trader Joe’s would have missed the opportunity to convert a prospect or a casual customer into another rabid fan. And when you consider that Trader Joe’s marketing e-mails do a great job of promoting product while retaining the brand’s distinctive voice, obscuring its sign-up link is a real crime against marketing. E-mail marketing should be more than preaching to the converted, after all.

Then there are the sites that do feature a sign-up box on their home page, but just barely. Taftsville Country Store and ICelebrateDiversity.com, to name just two, have itty-bitty boxes below the fold. WunderTime, which sells Tintin collectibles (oh, and toys, which I guess is its main product line), exhibits a real passive-aggressive attitude. On its left-hand nav bar, below the links to the product categories, the search box, the shipping policies, and the site map, is the “Newsletter Unsubscribe” link. Huh? Did I miss the “Newsletter Subscribe” link? No, I did not. But at the very bottom of the nav bar, under the heading “Important Links” (and if they’re so important, why are they at the bottom of the page?), is a link labelled “New Accounts Save 10%.” It’s only by opening an account—in effect, registering with the site—that you can sign up for the WunderTime e-newsletter. And you don’t even find that out until you click through to the actual registration form.

In contrast to these sites that seem uncertain as to whether they want e-mail subscribers or not are those that offer incentives to sign up. Women’s apparel cataloguer/retailer J. Jill offers new subscribers a chance to win a $500 gift card. Toys marketer Maukilo, a much smaller merchant, offers the chance to win a $20 gift card. The Icelandic Tourist Board enters new opt-ins into a sweepstakes for a free trip to Iceland (please, please, pretty please!), and bookseller Alibris offers the chance to win books.

Sweepstakes aside, only a few sites make it clear from the home page how signing up for e-mail can benefit the visitor. Magellan’s, a catalog seller of travel-related products, says “Receive travel news and email offers” beside its sign-up box. Bliss Living, which sells baby products, entices with “Get an Instant Coupon! Sign up for our newsletter and receive exclusive discounts.” “Get free recipes & sales delivered to your inbox!” promises Prepared Pantry.

For the most part, though, the websites seem to assume that a visitors know the benefits of receiving their e-mails or, worse, that a visitor will sign up to receive them out of the goodness of his heart. One of the first tenets of marketing is to let prospects know what’s in it for them, no? And with so many people concerned about online privacy, you really have to reassure them that you’re not capturing their addresses solely for your own nefarious means but because you want to give them something of value in return.

Several websites, such as Restoration Hardware and Icelandair, greet first-time visitors to their home page with a pop-up e-mail sub form. Some sites shy away from pop-ups because they fear annoying and alienating visitors who still have horrible memories of the ubiquitous pop-up ads of old. But a test by Marketing Experiments showed a 190% increased in e-mail subscribers for a niche e-zine when it used pop-ups, and other anecdotal examples abound. If nothing else, they’re definitely worth testing, though even if you go ahead and adopt them, don’t remove the sign-up from your home page altogether. Personally I like the pop-ups, as they meant I didn’t have to scour the site to sign up. Then again, I also like gefilte fish, so I’m not necessarily the norm.

The opt-in forms of the pop-ups are brief and generic, asking simply for e-mail address and name. That’s pretty much all that the vast majority of the sites asked me for, though two of those (Daedalus Books and Maukilo) asked for my preferred format (HTML or text) as well.

Indeed, the subscription form is definitely another area to be tested. Conventional wisdom has it that peppering prospective subscribers with too many questions can cost you opt-ins. But best practice also has it that you need enough information from subscribers to ensure that you can provide them with relevant, targeted content. The question then becomes “How many questions are too many?”

I was surprised that none of the 36 sites I visited had a two-step sub process: first a generic form, then as part of the confirmation e-mail a more detailed questionnaire asking my preferences. I guess there’s some major drawback to the tactic that I’m overlooking. Maybe between now and next week, when I discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of the sub forms and welcome e-mails, the answer will come to me.