There are a host of different offerings from free to quite dear, but the for a moderate volume the emerging consensus is that MailChimp takes some beating. It helps with everything:

Content creation – using snappy templates and no coding required

Distribution – including easy up load of email addresses, extensive monitoring of take-up, easy opt out

Integration – links with facebook et al, survey monkey, eventbrite  

Accessibility - you can distribute the full glossy or a plain text version of your newsletter

Customization – covering emails and the newsletters themselves can hold the equivalent of mail merge fields (tags). It’s not as extensive as the direct hooks into the database you’d see in an Infoworks Action-Message Module, but hey... it’s pretty powerful in its own right

Best of all – it’s free if for up to 2K subscribers and 12K mailings per month! Check it out at mailchimp.com



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Need to specify requirements for 3rd sector CRM system?  Writing an invitation to tender? 
... you simply must check this out!