Can anyone recommend email marketing software for a small business? I'd like to send email blasts to my customer base.

Here's a site that compares the top ten commercial email marketing software and provides reviews of each:

Email Marketing Software Review 2008

Depending on volume, it may be cheaper to use an online email marketing service; here's a review of the top ten from the same site:

Email Marketing Services Review 2008

There are open source (free) options available, but the installation can be difficult in some cases:

Open Source Email Marketing Tools

Bear in mind that all these sites are providing their opinion, you might find other reviews that provide other options or rate the tools listed differently.

Vasily

Why do you need any special software? Just create a group within your E-mail client and mail to the group.

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Originally Posted by ScottGem

Why do you need any special software? Just create a group within your E-mail client and mail to the group.

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Scheduling features, information hiding, reports, conversion tracking, click-through tracking, targeting by demographics,.

That is, software and services provide functionality that is either missing from many email clients or clumsy to implement. Whether this is worth the price of admission to the user depends on the user's abilities and needs.

Vasily

The best way to do email marketing is to build your own newsletter list. Once you have started building this list use a whitelist email server to send out your newsletters. If you try sending out a large amount of emails even if they are bonafide newsletter sign-ups from your site - your hosting service will potentially block you and as well will many email places block your IP or emails.

Here's a few email servers/senders: (these are just a very quick few and they range in cost)

Aweber
Constant contact
Emaillabs

Here is a good article on getting whitelisted
How to Get on a Whitelist

If you want more info please email me and I am happy to advise

There are some client management programs like ACT ( not sure the most current version, I am at version 6.

But it has some auto features that allow you to automatically send out emails to cleints in your data base.