If the thought of sending unsolicited ads to your subscribers turns your stomach, there are some great companies out there that offer robust and full-featured ezine services for a very affordable fee.

These include:

SparkList – http://sparklist.com/

Email Factory – http://www.emailfactory.com/

Lyris – http://www.lyris.com/

L-Soft – http://www.lsoft.com/

Constant Contact – http:www.constantcontact.com
Constant Contact is one of the time-tested favorites. They charge according to how big your mailing list is, so you can start out small with no or very little cost and build predictably from there. They have a great selection of templates to select from and with little knowledge about web programming you can change the look and feel of the site to match your own brand, including adding your logo, using your corporate color palette and adding graphics.

Perhaps the best part of fee-based ezine services is that they have really great reporting tools so you can readily gauge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. The reporting tools let you see not only who opened your ezine and read it, but which links they clicked on within the ezine. You can also manage new subscribers and bounced emails.

To add the feature to your site, simply follow the prompts during setup. The ezine service will provide you with the code that you or your web designer can then copy and paste into your website so visitors can subscribe or unsubscribe to your ezine without your need to manage the process.

While you can create your own ezines, there are several advantages to using a service:

1. Services have really great templates that are easy to use.

2. They have very detailed reporting tools that will help you strengthen your marketing and customer relationships.

3. The services are hosted on servers that are set up to handle the sending of thousands of emails at once. Some smaller server companies will send you curt emails telling you that you bogged down other websites while you sent your ezine out to 10,000 subscribers on their system.

4. You know exactly what you are getting for your money. For example, you can send ezines out on Constant Contact to 2,500 subscribers for just $30 a month. Fifty subscribers and less is free so again, you can start out small and build your list intelligently.

Another nice thing about services is that they follow federal law so your ezine won’t be detected as spam, even by the most security minded spam filter.