Every web marketer will tell you one of the keystones to website success is using email newsletters. For an ecommerce site, it should be mandatory. You are already collecting an email address when you are making a web sale, so there is a good chance your customer will want to sign up for your email list.

Your ecommerce shopping cart may come with a newsletter module, but chances it might get the job done. So what do you do if you want a little more out of it?

There are plenty of pay for email newsletters services out there, one of the better ones being Aweber. But of course this comes at a price. In the case of Aweber, it will cost you $19 a month for the service for up to 500 customers.

Many of us fall in between, not yet ready to commit to the monthly charge, but still wanting an easy, and reliable way to get out a newsletter.

In comes phplist to save the day. This free script is loaded with features. It was very easy to install, it took me about 30 minutes of playing around with the program. I set up a few small test lists with a handful of personal email addresses (yahoo, gmail, etc…), and soon I had a good feel for the program.

I would certainly recommend you make sure that you fully understand the program, because sending out a newsletter to hundreds of customers in NOT something to be taken lightly. While it won’t make your business, it could break your business. Again, I would not import you live list until you are pretty sure you know what you are doing in the program.

phplist is a very flexible program. You can create your own questions associated with a newsletter signup, and it can all be done from the web-based interface. (this part took me the longest to figure out, but I was glad I could remove the “sample” questions).

Once I was ready I imported my emails from my shopping cart, (during the import be sure you mark your users as confirmed, as you may end up having a confirmation email go out to all your already confirmed users.), you can also mark all your imported users as “html” users. Meaning they prefer to receive HTML based newsletters.

Once all my users were imported, you simply go to “send a message”, enter your message, set a few options and off it goes.

Now, since I am using the list just to import, setup and send. I will be flushing and reloading my user list each time. There isn’t an obvious way to do this in the program, but it can be easily done following these steps I found in the forum.

Go to your lists and ‘view members’
At the bottom of the page it says:
‘What to do with all users
This will process all users on this list
Delete (from this list)’
Do that.
Do that for all your lists.
Now all the users in the datbaase are not connected to any list.

Now go to:
Manage users
Reconcile Users
‘delete all users who are not subscribed to any list’
and they will all be removed.

from http://forums.phplist.com/viewtopic.php?p=43905#43905

I will admit it took me a little while to fully understand the program, but don’t give up, after just a little while you will find that it is a pretty simple, yet flexible program to use. phplist has many more features than those I’ve touched here, that is only because I already had my list, and I only need to import emails. phplist can be a beginning to end email marketing solution, and will actually manage your list for you.  phplist also has fantastic online documentation. Not bad for a free program!