I use Constant Contact. It's only $15 per month for up to 500 contacts. I've never been charged any 'credits'. You can get a 60-day free trial; so it's no cost to check it out.

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Sue L Canfield
AwesomeAssistant.info
My Blog

I use Publisher tweaking and customizing the templates then publish with Adobe sending with an Outlook distribution list for email.

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Lisa Olinda of Olinda Services
Keeping you on the path to success!
www.olindaservices.com

You guys have given me some great ideas! Thanks for the imput!

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Janice Correa-Elite Business Services
"My Business is Your Business!"
www.elitebusinessonline.com

I've used 1SC, Campaign Monitor, Aweber among others for clients but I use my own product Tilda Mail. Whatever you choose, see how easy the WYSIWYG is to use, if you can use notepad or similar (until you purchase Dreamweaver or similar) to create the template, what the ongoing costs are and how much per contact it's costing you. Although it's easy enough to move providers these days, I'd try to find the one you want to use long term.

I wouldn't use my Outlook because of a number of reasons, it wasn't designed to send out mass emails and will tend to have a heart attack if you send 12 or more at the same time. And secondly, your ISP can ban you as you could be seen as a spammer.

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Kylie Short
Tilda Virtual Services - Making virtual personal

I don't have to pay a per contact or per email sent out using Aweber. I don't believe my client would be willing to pay for another program to send out the newsletters when Aweber already does this. The problem is the template. When folks open up the emails in Outlook, there are no live links because Outlook is not web-based. The links open up only in yahoo or hotmail other such web-based accounts. I'd like to find a good template that is inexpensive to be able to use in Aweber but as I mentioned previously, the pre-made templates seem to be expensive and the best ones we've seen are those written in Dreamweaver, which I don't own. Please let me know what you decide to do. I love working on the newsletters. Thanks.

I've been checking out the same options and found that SimplyCast and MailChimp offer special deals for non-profits. I'm sure some of the other companies do too. It might be worth checking them out. I've dealt with the spam-block problems of sending through an Outlook distribution list in the past. You definitely DON'T want to deal with the headaches involved there!!

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Ani Russo, V.A.
BAF Administrative Solutions

I have been using MailChimp's free service and have been extremely pleased. The interface is very user friendly.

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Lisa Olinda of Olinda Services
Keeping you on the path to success!
www.olindaservices.com

I use MyNewsletterBuilder. Great tool.

www.mynewsletterbuilder.com

I have heard of constant contact - but I didn't know it had a free trial! That is awesome, I'm going to check it out for my newsletters. Everything else I tried so far didn't seem to be very user friendly.

I believe Mail Chimp is now free to a limited number of contacts. Beyond that is it very reasonably priced. I've also used Constant Contact quite a bit and love the variety of templates available. Both are very similar and user friendly.

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Carol Aldridge
www.ProgressiveBusinessSolutions.net