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How to send a newsletter or mass email to your customers

To send a newsletter, you collect subscribers who agreed to hear from you, design the email in an email marketing tool and send it to your list with an unsubscribe link in every message. Email marketing software manages the list, templates, sending and reports on opens, clicks and unsubscribes. A personal inbox is built for one-to-one email, so once you're mailing a real list you need proper list management and unsubscribe handling.

How to send a newsletter or email campaign, step by step

The software this job takes

What to look for

Common mistakes to avoid

What to settle before you buy

Frequently asked questions

How do I send a newsletter?

Choose an email marketing tool, import your opted-in subscribers, build the issue from a template and send yourself a test first. Include an unsubscribe link in every issue. Review opens and clicks afterward to improve the next one.

How do I send a mass email without it going to spam?

Authenticate your sending domain, send only to people who asked to hear from you and remove addresses that bounce. Keep subject lines honest and the content clear. An email marketing tool tracks bounces and complaints so you can act on them.

Can I send a newsletter from my regular email account?

You can email a small group from any inbox, but a personal account is meant for one-to-one mail, not list sending. Once you need signup forms, unsubscribe links, templates and reports, an email marketing tool fits better. Of the 4 email marketing tools we track, Mailchimp and Klaviyo list a free plan or free tier (limits are in the table above); Constant Contact and ActiveCampaign do not.

How do I choose email marketing software for a small business?

Compare how each tool charges as your list grows, how easy the editor is for your team, and whether signup forms and automations are on the plan you'd buy. If you're switching tools, check how subscribers, consent records and templates export. The table above compares the 4 email marketing tools we track (Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Constant Contact and ActiveCampaign).

How we built this page

We start from the job, not the product. The phrasings people search for this job (for example “how to send a newsletter”) come from our research into how small and mid-size teams describe it. Which software categories the job takes is our editorial judgment. Every tool, entry price, billing unit and date comes from HelpCompare’s open dataset, recorded from each vendor’s own pricing page; nothing is estimated, and where a vendor publishes no price we say so. We take no affiliate commissions and publish no scores of our own. See our methodology or download the data from Open Data.

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About the author

Bill Belcamino

Founder and author, HelpCompare

Bill has worked in software and digital marketing for more than 20 years. He spent nine years as an engineer at HP, served as COO scaling a platform past 200,000 users, and ran Google’s $70M/year search syndication partnership at Alot.com. He has bought, trialled, integrated and cancelled more SaaS tools than he can count, and started HelpCompare because the real cost of switching tools is the part nobody covers.

“I’ve sat on both sides of the table: the agency recommending the tool and the client paying for it.”

Researched and fact-checked by the HelpCompare team. No paid sponsorships, no affiliate commissions.