Alternative to Paid Email Marketing Services?

[jcsmilez]

I am wondering if anyone uses a certain program to be able to send email newsletters. I cannot seem to send them using my gmail account with the pictures and formatting that I would like and I do not want to send them as an attachment as people do not seem to open those. I like the idea of having control over what I put in my newsletter and being able to manage my contact list and am looking for an alternative to paying for the email marketing services. Any thoughts or suggestions from those of you that don't subscribe to a monthly service?Thanks in advance!

 

[PampChefJoy]

Do you use gmail via webmail or a program like Outlook or Thunderbird? If you use a program, you shoudl be able to compose in Word, and paste into email and send from there and retain formatting. That's the way I used to do it before I used a service.

Gmail via webmail itself is not so "composer-friendly". I've found it tries to insert line breaks where they shouldn't go.

Other than that, I think you're probably looking at a monthly service... there are some that price by the email instead of by the month, so if you have a low # of recipients, you're only paying for what you send.

 

[chefann]

It's easy to do a mail merge from Word, and that actually creates separate messages for each person on your list. But the downside is that you must use Outlook to do it. (Entourage on Mac) The message will retain the formatting from Word.