Email marketing vendors come in all shapes and sizes. To date, I've identified three that are used by the vast majority of Internet Marketers I know and work with. They include:

• Aweber
• Constant Contact
• iContact

There are many other email marketing vendors, but you won't find professionals using their service. The three companies listed above are reliable and easy to use.

There are "must have" features that all three vendors offer that are not necessarily available with every service. If you find a company that's missing even one of these features, run. You need a service that can track these statistics.

• Sent mail
• Delivered/Undelivered mail
• Bounced mail
• Opened mail
• Forwarded mail
• Click though tracking
• Conversion tracking

After you find an email service provider that offers all of the features you need, here's what you need to look at next.

Cost/Email or Cost/List Size
In the past, email marketing companies charged per the number of emails you sent per month. That means if you had a list of 500 names and you wanted to mail to them once a week, you were changed for 2,000 emails.

Fortunately for those of use who take advantage of email marketing, that policy is changing. Today, most of the companies, and all three listed above charge per your list size. So, if you had a list of 500 names and you wanted to mail to them everyday for a month, your fee would be the same as if you mailed them only once.

Here are the fees for 2009
Aweber $19/500 contacts
iContact $14/500 contacts
Constant Contact $15/500 contacts

Ease of Use
Do this right and you will save days of work.
All three companies offer you a free trial with the knowledge that if you take the time to learn their system, you won't make the effort to learn a different system ... and they're right. Email marketing programs can be confusing and difficult to learn. Here's what I suggest.

Start by taking a good hard look at each website. If their site is easy to understand and navigate, their software will be easy too. If you have a hard time getting around their site, guess what? You'll have a hard time with their software too.

Look at their tutorials before you sign-up for a trial. The email marketing vendors who offer tutorials that you understand will shorten your learning curve greatly. Look at the tutorials offered by all three companies and note which one you understood the best.

Then, and only then, sign-up for their free trail and dedicate a full half-day to learning their system. It will take you that long to figure out how the system works. This is why you don't want to sign up for three or four trials. You will never get through them.

Reputation
This is another tip that will save you time and headaches. Before you select an email marketing vendor for your business, talk to your Internet marketing friends and ask them which system they use. Odds are very good that they're going to be using one of the three programs listed above.

Not only will they be able to tell you what they like and don't like about the software, but they might be easily available to help you learn the system quickly. Don't discount the value of a friend who has gone before you into the land of email marketing.

Running a successful email marketing campaign starts and ends with your email marketing vendor. You want a service that you can trust.

Based on my experience in the Internet marketing world, I would feel comfortable using any one of these services.

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