Whether your a new business starting out, young entrepreneur looking to find clients or new sales leads or an established business you need to keep in touch with your client base and this made simple with email however how do you go about keeping your customers up to date?

There are many email marketing or newsletter providers on the Internet many of which are download-able programs that you may use for free, some that are obvious yet hardly used such as Microsoft Outlook for sending out emails to lists of people (although this may be trivial as your ISP may block you in future for mass emailing) or there is the option of paying for a service either online or again a download-able product (such as GroupMail).

Pure360 a web based newsletter system I personally have had experience in using with newsletters of four thousand plus members. The system itself on the back end can be a bit confusing and misleading to use sometimes with items not clearly labelled as what actions they perform. Sadly if you are not very familiar with HTML or designing templates for your mail outs you will a bit stuck here as they do provide a user friendly editor but its very inaccurate and produces very nasty code and designs. If you are competent with HTML you can go write up the code for your designs although they do not always render correctly when sent out with Pure360. On the plus side you can schedule your newsletters so you can write them in the day and have them automatically sent out at a certain time of day.

MailChimp, i highly recommend as I recently moved away from Pure360 which was becoming very costly in terms of the cost per email being sent was too high. Since i signed up with MailChimp I have found the interface very simple to use and navigate with very helpful hints, tips and suggestions along the way. Staff are extremely helpful being available via email with very quick responses. MailChimp offer two different price plans, one is a monthly subscription where you purchase credits to use and then a pay-as-you-go plan where you purchase your credits (the more you buy the cheaper it gets) and your credits will roll over each month if you do not use all of them.

If your a new company or a student/young entrepreneur on a small budget i highly recommend checking out MailChimp, sign up try it out on a pay-as-you-go plan the smallest being US$15 which is not much at all and you get 500 credits (500 emails).

update: sign up to mailchimp by clicking here and receive 500 free credits!

What experience have you had with other marketing/newsletter providers online? Leave comments.