Every business needs to keep in touch with past, current and potential customers. There are lots of ways to do this, including phone, in-person meetings, flyers, etc. One of the easiest and cheapest ways is by email newsletter.

What is a newsletter or ezine distribution service?

I'm sure you have subscribed to email newsletters in the past, so you probably know the drill. There's a box on the company's website that says "sign up for our newsletter" or something to that effect. You type in your name and email address, and then you get an email asking you to confirm that you actually want information from that company. This is called double-opt-in. It is required by law and ensures that companies don't send you unwanted email.

In fact, if you fill out the "GET EMAIL HIGHLIGHTS" box on this page, you'll go through a similar process.

The two newsletter services I recommend

Building a mailing list of people who are interested in what you offer is an important part of marketing. There are two services that I recommend to automate this process for you. The first service is called EZezine and it is free (Note added June 6, 2007: Ezezine is no longer free, but it is still very low-cost. Worth checking out.) It is strictly a newsletter mailout service.

The second service I recommend is Aweber. It is a newsletter mailout service as well as an autoresponder service. I explain what this means in a separate article here. For now, I just want to focus on explaining the pros and cons of EZezine.

Pros about EZezine

EZezine gives you the code to put on your website to create one of those sign-up boxes that I mentioned above. When people sign up on your website their name is automatically added to your EZezine mailing list. Then you log into your account at EZezine when you want to write and send out a newsletter.

EZezine is great for a couple of reasons: it is free, (Note added June 6, 2007: Ezezine is no longer free, but it is still very low-cost. Worth checking out.) it is extremely easy to use, it is run by good people and has great service, and it has a good "deliverability" reputation.

Cons about EZezine

There are two things to keep in mind if you decide to use EZezine:

1) EZezine is not an autoresponder service (see definition here). So you can send out email newsletters, but you can't set up an automated series of messages such as a multi-part ecourse.

2) If you decide down the road that you want to go with a service that includes autoresponders, you will need to ask your EZezine subscribers to re-subscribe to your new service. You inevitably lose between 30 - 50% of your subscribers when you ask them to do this. That sounds awful, but in my opinion it's actually a good way to "clean off" your distribution list. The truth is that anyone who doesn't bother to re-subscribe probably isn't reading your newsletters anyways.