Hello tracy.lyricy, On my blog, meltingwaves.com, I use email marketing to notify my readers once a week of all the new posts that I published during the week. I also use it to alert readers about new products I've created that are for sale and discounts on products that will benefit graphic designers. Sending emails about what happened on the blog is a great way for me to draw my readers back incase they missed something. I use Mail Chimp for my email marketing services, as I find it extremely easy to use, and they have a brilliant layout that is very clean on their website. You can create beautiful HTML messages and I always make sure to include links to other important websites of mine like my facebook fan page, RSS account, etc. Mail Chimp really gives you a lot of options when it comes to integrating your information in the emails you send out, and the best part is that you can start out with 500 subscribers and send 3,000 emails a month for no charge at all! This is great because once you have your 500 subscribers, you should be making money off of your list anyway, so you can easily afford the upgrade. I hope that helped. You can sign up for Mail Chimp here if you're interested. -Benjamin M. Jacques
I definitely recommend Aweber. But if you're on a tight budget, you can try mailchimp, it's free for the first 500 subscribers. But when we talk about long-term, it's definitely aweber.
I go with aweber, since most people here recommended and it is easy to use and this is a good way to build your list and promote your products.