How easy is it to set up an email newsletter

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi, i am trying to find out how easy it would be to set up an email newsletter for our website. I would like to know what software is recommended and what i would need to put on our site to get people to sign up.

I currently work in joomla for building sites

Any help would be great

[Host1]

Extremely easy.

I would just check http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/content-sharing/mailing-a-distribution-lists for a list of extensions that may help you do the job.

[matbennett]

Very easy.  Services worth taking a look at would include mailchimp, letterly and aweber - although there are hundreds.  Do it!  It's rarely a bad move.

[TheeDigital]

MailChimp seems to the preferred email client these days for small businesses, but there seems to be a new email client popping up everyday now.  
i'm not that familiar with Joomla, but if you're looking to set up an email newsletter here are a few questions you should ask.1) Do you already have an existing email base?  If you do that's awesome, if not you need to ask yourself what are you going to do to get these emails.
2) How many people are you looking to get signed up and how much are you sending?  MailChimp seems to be the best and easiest email to use.  It's free if you only send once  a month and have a small fanbase, but once it gets over 1,000 users it can get pricey.
3) What email client fits your needs?  Most email clients have plug-ins to use for most CMS' including Mailchimp, iContact, and Constant Contact
4)  Do you have enough content?  If you don't have enough content to share with your customers you probably should not be emailing them.

Anyways, hope that helps.

[ClaireH-184886]

at the moment we do not have any email addresses to send the news letter out to, so we need to know what we should be doing to get email addresses. we have seen websites where they are asking people to sign up for a newsletter so we are going to start doing this once we have looked at the extensions for joomla

[ClaireH-184886]

thanks for this, do you know what extension i should have to start getting addresses and people to sign up such as http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/newsletter/subscribe/

I have seen lots of online sites that have a section to attract subscribers but i have not seen any extensions that offer this

[DeanAndrews]

Personally I use campaignmonitor.com for my clients. I have also used mailchimp.com on occasions (free account).

Joomla integration - www.campaignmonitor.com/integrations/CMSubscriber-joomla

[matbennett]

I like campaign monitor.  As your list gets larger it works out better value too. Hard to argue with that free level on mailchimp though.

[TheeDigital]

I would suggest start talking with your current customers and see if a newsletter is something that they would be interested in.  Maybe do a blog post on it, promoting what  will be in your newsletter or even use your social media channels.  It all depends on the level of conversation you are currently having with your clients.  
Even LinkedIn offers you the opportunity to see people's emails if you wanna steal those. Also don't forget to use your email to engage customers, not just push your items.  I recently saw an email that said in the header "first person to email me back with a reply to said question gets a $10 gift card", this will allow you to keep an idea of who is actually engaged with your email and reading it.