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One of the most popular marketing tools out there right now is the newsletter. A good newsletter builds trust in your business and keeps people coming back. It is a tool to increase your sales with relatively little effort.
The first step in creating your newsletter is to decide how you will send it to customers. Current anti-spam laws such as CAN-SPAM make it very important that you do this right. Getting it wrong can be very expensive.
The cheapest way is to host your list yourself. Some hosting companies do include autoresponders to allow you to do this. Hosting your list yourself gives you complete control and also complete liability. However, as a good autoresponder service can cost more than hosting, this is an affordable way to get going. Companies such as SiteBuildIt do include your autoresponder for your newsletter.
On the other hand, if you want someone else to handle spam complaints, the potential for blacklisting and so forth, you will want to choose a good company to host your list for you. My personal favorite is
AWeber. They do cost more than other companies, but they have the best delivery rates and have an excellent relationship with most ISPs, which increases the odds that your newsletter will be delivered.
How do you choose a service? Take a look at this article on choosing an autoresponder service to help you decide.
Another alternative is to deliver your newsletter in RSS. This is a format you may not be familiar with, but you have probably heard of its most popular form - blogs. As people only get those blogs which they subscribe to, this format is free from spam and is increasingly popular for the delivery of newsletters.
Regular communication with your customers is one of those things which will keep them coming back. A newsletter can be a way that they will welcome you into their inbox and give you the chance to make more sales.
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