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Email Marketing Software
So, you've studied the business. You know what you want to accomplish and how to do it right. But how do you collect the data from your web site without having to enter each response manually? What tools do you use to get the message out?

Our email software sage has tested the field, and these are his picks for the best tools for the small or mid-sized business getting started in email marketing.

Group Mail (Free or $49)
The beginners' mail merge software for business. The demo program is free, and includes ads in the messages it sends. This is a great tool for practicing and learning the ropes.

Mail merge is just a way to include data from a database in specified parts of an email. For example, making it say "Dear Merlin" instead of "Dear master of the arcane arts."


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WorldMerge ($49)
This is the best bang for the buck for simple mail merge emailing. It handles straight bulk mail or merged mailings, and is simple and reliable to operate. It's also the fastest of the straight mail merge programs. And it will work with your existing Access database or any text delimited format, so you don't have to learn weird new systems.

Especially good for delivering newsletters and update notices to small lists (under 5,000).
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PS Autoresponder ($97 or $237)
It slices, it dices, it makes great Julienne fries!

Actually, it doesn't. But it does nearly everything else. This program will do mail merges to your list, compile data from web forms into Access database format (as many as you like), manage email discussion lists, send followup autoresponders (as many as you like), handle subscribes and unsubscribes, send HTML mail, and generally save you more time and money than anything currently on the market.

The only real drawback is that it's run from your desktop. If you get into really big lists, or a lot of subscribers to a long series of followup autoresponders, you can spend a lot of time running it in the background. (This is only really a problem on dialup accounts. With DSL, PSAR should be all you need.)

For small to mid-sized lists or projects, this is the closest thing to the ideal marketing software there is. And at $97 for the limited version or $237 for the unlimited, it beats everything else out there on price.
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Aweber ($20/month)
If you expect really heavy responses and a lot of people getting your followup autoresponder series, or just don't want to tie up your modem and phone line with sending mail, Aweber is the way to go.

Sold as a followup autoresponder service, it also includes listserver features that allow you to send email to your entire list from a web based form.

The first and the best of the followup autoresponder services.
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