Mailchimp has been my solution for making and sending e-newsletters. I use it for my business and for my clients. https://mailchimp.com You can sign up for a free account which is plenty good for many small businesses. The free version offers up to 2000 subscribers and provides the means to make quality designed e-newsletters. You can collect email subscribers by adding a sign-up form to your website. You can even put the sign-up form on your Facebook Page. It’s also possible to add new subscribers to a Mailchimp list manually. For instance, If you have a shop put a sign-up form at the till. If you’re a local musician put it at the door to the event. Just make sure you make it clear that you are collecting these emails for the purpose of your newsletter. Mailchimp doesn’t like when people add the emails of those who never asked to be included.
Other features include analytic insights of your audience’s interaction with your e-newsletter once you’ve sent it. I am a data hound because this kind of data is valuable to understand what’s working, and what’s not. You can see metrics for how many people opened your e-newsletter and how often. It also shows how many clicks it got to links within the e-newsletter. It shows the times of day when your e-newsletter gets the most opens. These are just some of the helpful features this free app provides.
Here’s an article about how one such store ‘Highway Robbery’ uses e-newsletters to market its business and increase sales. https://mailchimp.com/resources/issue-105-featuring-highway-robery/
