Email marketing is still widely used by many businesses as we can see that we or at least I get a lot of advertising emails sending to my mailbox daily. Also, in many websites you will see the boxes asking you to fill your emails in order to periodically receive newsletters from them. Email Marketing is quite working well especially with people or your customers who choose to receive your emails or subscribe your newsletter. Therefore, you should not just send your emails to anyone or your emails can annoy people. Today, I will introduce you to one free email blast management tool named PHPlist so if anyone is planing to so email marketing or newsletter, they may use this tool.

You can download this tool from http://www.phplist.com/download, which is free and the latest version is 2.10.10.

In order to install, first of all, you have to extract the zipped file. After that, you have to config the file ‘config.php’ in the directory ‘config’ under the directory ‘lists’. The main thing you have to config is your database info. Then, you have to upload the directory ‘lists’ to your server so your PHPlist will be located at http://www.yourdomain.com/lists/. The rest of the process will be done via the browser so you have to go to http://www.yourdomain.com/lists/admin/. The default username and password are admin and phplist relatively and of course you can change later. After signing in, you will go to the main admin page. You may configure something else like the welcome message when people choose to subscribe your newsletter. But here I will tell you how to send the email.

To send the email, you must have the list of people who will receive your email so the first thing is to create the list. To do so, you have to click the menu ‘lists’ and then ‘add a list’. Next, you have to fill the list name and check the box labeled ‘Check this box to make this list active (listed)’. The rest of fields are optional. After this, you have to add the email addresses of the people that you will send the newsletter to. If your newsletter is HTML one, don’t forget to check the box labeled ‘I prefer to receive emails in HTML format’.

OK you have got the list of people who want to receive your newsletter. It is time to send to them. Click the ‘send a message’ menu. On the content tab, fill the information you want to show in email. However, in the message editor, if you prepare your newsletter as a webpage you can add the tag [URL:http://www.yourdomain.com/yournewsletterpage.html]. With this tag, the system will fetch the contents of your newsletter and add into the email. On the format tab, you have to choose the format of your newsletter (HTML / Text). On the lists tab, you can select which lists you want to send your newsletter to. Once everything is ready, you just press the button ‘Send the message to the selected mailing lists’.

In my opinion, I think this one is quite good for the free one but if you guys know any better ones, please share here …..