Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of your website engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and I’m excited to be here with you today because we’re going to be talking about Wordpress or actually not so much Wordpress today, but reasons why I switched back my email newsletter from Mail Poet to Mail Chimp and we’ll talk all about that in this episode. Today I want to let you know that again, there’s no Wordpress news that’s happening right now.

This episode was recorded two weeks earlier as I was prepping for a trip to Spain. Today I’m actually flying back from Spain as this podcast is being released. So who knows where I may be while you’re listening to this, but I wanted to get this out there and make sure that you don’t miss a single week of your web engineering podcast. I do want to let you know about the Wordpress webinar that is happening on July 3. I’m hoping – I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that there will be a lot of people that can attend live just based on the fact that it is a Friday right before a big holiday and most people will have the day off and so that’s the thought process behind picking that date.

It’s also the first Friday of the month where I normally do webinars and this is going to be a webinar that’s going to be a little bit more developer based, but it’s going to focus on how to add Java Script to Wordpress themes and plug ins. Basically we’re going to add not just Java Script, but the proper way to add Google fonts and the proper way to add this certain embed and all that kind of stuff and we’re going to talk through that show a live demo of how to do that. I’ve got a lot of questions on how to do that and it’s probably one of the trickier things to kind of wrap your mind around how it works and so I wanted to talk about that.

So you can register over at your websiteengineer.com/webinar and again that will be on Friday, July 3 at 10 am Eastern. Also since there’s not a lot going on in the news this week, I just want to say an action item that you could take is to kind of browse your website. Take a look and see if there’s anything out of place. Does anything look weird? Should I really be displaying my most recent 10 posts on the home page? Should they be more excerpts? Just look around and see, okay, what can I do to freshen up my site and what can I do to just spend a little bit of time this week updating, changing, tweaking, making my site that much better.

So that’s kind of the call to action for this week. Just make sure that you’re constantly looking to improve your website, making sure that it’s never static and it’s always dynamic and always changing and always becoming better and better. So if you do this on a regular basis then it won’t be four or five years down the road, you won’t be so far outdated because you’ve not done any of these small, incremental changes to keep your website updated.

Also, make sure that your social platforms are connected properly. Have you joined maybe the latest and greatest whatever? Maybe you’re just new to Instagram and you can add your Instagram social media account. Make sure that you do that as well and make sure that all of those are updated. If you’re using a social account or if you’re not using a social account and you haven’t linked to your site, just go ahead and remove that because there’s no use of somebody navigating away from your website to a social platform that you’re not currently using.

So those are a few little housekeeping things that you can do this week to keep your website up and running and with that let’s take a look at the plug in of the week. This one is called flag icons and it is a Wordpress plug in of course. It’s in the Wordpress repository and it allows you to add flag icons with the targeted links of your site by choosing desired positions or using a short code and so I know this question comes up an awful lot on Wordpress.com.

People want to use – have different versions of their site for different languages and there’s no option on Wordpress.com, but on [inaudible] [00:03:16] we can do that and we can actually write our pages with several different languages. This plug in is really cool because of the fact that it gives you the ability to pick where you want it.

Do you want your – you pick which basically which icons you have and it basically you load different languages and it shows different flags based on those – the ones that you choose and you can put those in the upper right hand corner, the upper left hand corner, the bottom corner, wherever you want them where people can find them and then click on those icons and then it will show your Spanish version of your website or your French version of your website. It looks really cool.

I have absolutely zero use for it because I can barely speak English and I’m just learning a little bit of Spanish in prep for my Spain trip and so I have no use for it, but I think there’s a lot of people that it would have some sort of use for this type of plug in. So that’s why it’s the plug in of the week. All right. Today I want to share why I switched back to Mail Chimp and specifically four different reasons why I moved back to Mail Chimp. So I’ve actually been all the way – it’s gone full circle now because when I first got started and I heard oh, you’ve got have a list. You’ve got to have a list.

You’ve got to have a list. I looked around and Mail Chimp was the one, okay, let’s do Mail Chimp because Mail Chimp was that one that you could get up to 2,000 subscribers and you could send up to 12,000 messages at one time without having to pay anything and I was like that sounds perfect. I don’t want to have to pay anything. Let’s go ahead and just sign up for Mail Chimp. So I used Mail Chimp for probably a couple years, maybe not quite that long, maybe a year, year and a half. I don’t know.

I had a few hundred subscribers that had signed up and they had registered and they were getting updates via my email newsletter which of course I rarely send out, but I had it all set up in Mail Chimp and then all of a sudden then I really liked a plug in by a company – it was a passed guest and they used to run a company called Be Automated.

And it was a Wordpress plug in that worked with benchmark email and it was really cool because they gave you the way when people signed up you could actually send out notification messages right through your Wordpress dashboard using the benchmark API which was really nice and so I could customize my messages and send them out right from Wordpress. I could send out posts specifically from Wordpress and it was really cool and I really liked that.

So I moved from Mail Chimp to Benchmark and Benchmark came with a price. Benchmark email had I think it was $11.95 per month for the size of lists that I had that time. I’m like, okay, that’s perfect. Let’s go ahead and we’ll use Benchmark email and then maybe if I’m paying $12 a month then I’ll actually start using it and I’ll – it’ll create a little bit of urgency for me to send out monthly newsletters or weekly or whatever my plan was at the time. It honestly it didn’t do a lot of that. It didn’t have that just driving force that oh, he’s paying $12 a month.

Let’s go ahead and send out more messages so that I’m getting my money’s worth and so eventually I – let’s see. I probably had that for at least a year or so and I used it occasionally, but then I moved to the Taj Mahal of products called Office Autopilot and I call this the Taj Mahal because this was back before my days at Automatic I had built a course called conquer your website and I was selling that and I wanted the automation features of okay, when somebody pays, I want them to automatically generate a user name and password and then from there they had that user name and password then they could log in to the back end of the site, the password protected site and so it was a very steep cost.

The package that I was using was $300 per month and I was like oh, that’s okay. I was charging $300 per month for the conquer your website course and so I was like as long you sell one course per month it pays for the whole system and then I really liked it. It was really cool that I could put my different customers in buckets. The big thing I guess with that whole automation process was you could have people in your sales funnel and so they got message one, message two, message three, but maybe they purchased after message two, you didn’t want to send them pre-sale message number three.

You wanted to move them into a customer bucket and then send them only customer information and so this was something that I was learning in a course that I was taking and I was like that is perfect. That’s genius. Let’s go ahead and sign up for that. Well, push come to shove, it worked out that I got hired at Automatic and with Automatic, we were not allowed to run Wordpress development businesses or we can’t charge for Wordpress services or whatnot as a conflict of interest of working at Automatic.

So I’m like okay, my burn rate at $300 per month when I’m making $0 is going – that’s not going to last very long and so I didn’t want to be spending that much money to do something that I was barely using. I was barely using the features because I wasn’t using the part that I really needed and so what I ended up doing was I moved to – from Office Autopilot, then what I did as I moved to Mail Poet and Mail Poet and I’ve done a webinar on Mail Poet and Mail Poet works really well for a lot of people and a lot of things and I moved to Mail Poet because it was a free basically.

You could have up to 2,000 people before you had to pay for their premium version of the plug in. The premium version is $99 per year. So it’s less than $10 per month and then you only pay for the number of messages that you send out and I was like this is perfect for someone like me who never sends out messages or rarely sends out messages. I’d rather pay okay, I’m going to send out this email blast and it’s going to cost me $2. Maybe I’ll do one per month or whatever and so that was – I mean that was essentially why I liked Mail Poet and it worked right inside the Wordpress dashboard. I could see my newsletters right there.

I could see my subscribers inside my Wordpress dashboard. I never had to really leave the interface and it all just worked. If I wanted to automatically send out an email with the most recent post that I did, it basically you could queue that up. You could say pull in this post and then you could customize it and you could say oh, only send out these two paragraphs and then make them come to the site for the rest of it. Whatever you wanted.

It was really, really powerful and it did all of the things essentially that I was looking to do in having an email list and those types of things, but recently I started taking another online course and it was teaching about how to get more subscribers and how to build your email list and provide more value for the people that are coming to your website and then the whole course is kind of written in with Mail Chimp in mind. Mail Chimp – just start with Mail Chimp and that’s going to be good for right now. So that kind of got me thinking should I move back to Mail Chimp and again it’s a little bit of a process to move from one place to another. I’ve done this now – this is my fifth move I think.

So I went from Mail Chimp to – I moved to Benchmark. From Benchmark I moved to Office Autopilot. From Office Autopilot I moved to Mail Poet and then from Mail Poet I moved to mail chimp. So this is my fourth or fifth move and it is a little bit tedious and time consuming to do, but I think it’s a wise choice and today I just wanted to share the four reasons why I switched back to Mail Chimp and the one is – I mean the first one, the reason number zero is because the course said to do that. That’s not the biggest reason. I was perfectly find using Mail Chimp or Mail Poet – sorry, I’m going to get these confused.

The Mail Poet within WordPress to do everything that I needed, but I just felt like if I moved to Mail Chimp, I’m going to be able to successfully finish this course and I’m going to be able to do a lot more other things and so these other four reasons are the main reasons why I moved. The first reason is it didn’t easily integrate. Mail Poet didn’t easily integrate with other things and so one of – that’s probably my biggest beef with Mail Poet and it didn’t work with the lead pages and it didn’t work with Webinar Jam. So those are two services that I use every single month or want to use every single month.

I do a monthly webinar that’s hosted with Webinar Jam and Lead Pages is great for having people sign up for things on your website. There were so many possibilities to use Lead Pages, but I just couldn’t do it easily. Of course there’s work arounds to do it. You could basically would have to take the template. You design the template online. You download the template and then you replace the button with your code button and it was just a hassle.

It wasn’t as quick and easy, as painless as Lead Pages is meant to be. Lead Pages is made for you to drag and drop and click and do it and you’re done and so that was probably one of my big things. I found that I was trying to waste a lot of time trying to figure out, okay, how do I integrate this Mail Poet thing that’s kind of a standalone thing inside my WordPress dashboard, how do I integrate that with Lead Pages and how do I get people that sign up for Webinar Jam to move automatically into Lead – or yeah, move to Lead Pages, move into Mail Poet.

There was a lot of moving pieces and I was spending way too much time just trying to get things to work when they really should have worked – they work out of the box with a lot of the other big name providers and so that was one of the big reasons – that was reason number one. It didn’t easily integrate with some of the services that I’m already using and paying for.

Another reason that I switched to Mail Chimp is because I couldn’t messages to segments inside of Mail Poet and so that worked is that basically what I could do is I could set up anytime that somebody signed up for a webinar I went in and if they were signed up to my email newsletter, I would go in and check a box and say they were a webinar attendee. Well, I could send out an entire message to just webinar attendees and I could say, hey, there’s an upcoming webinar. You might want to sign up.

You went to one in the past. Here, click on this link and you can get registered. So I could do that, but then I couldn’t send a message out to the rest of my list. I couldn’t send it out because then it wasn’t dynamic enough to say, oh, send it to these – send it to everybody that’s on my main list minus the people that I’ve already sent a message to. So some people would get the message twice and it would be – it would come across as confusing because the message was different because you can custom tailorize those two things.

So this past week I had a webinar that I did and I sent a message out one specifically to the people that were on the hey, I’ve signed up for a webinar in the past list and then I could tailor it specifically to them, like hey I know that you’ve signed up in the past. You may be interested in this. This one is what this webinar is all about yadda yadda yadda and then for the people that are on my regular list, I was able to send a message because I could say send it to a segment of my list that is not a webinar attendee at any point and so I could do that. It has a little bit of logic in there.

I was able to do that and then I sent out a completely separate message to folks who have never signed up for a webinar before and I could really tailor and customize those messages. It was really interesting to see, too, the stats behind the thing.

So I looked at the stats, there was so many people that had attended in a webinar in the past, that had opened the message and they had clicked through the link, and on the contrary, you could see that the main list, there was only a handful of people that opened the message and there’s only a handful of the handful that actually clicked on the link and registered and so all those – all that analytics and stuff like that is really cool to see and look at as well. So that’s the second reason. I couldn’t send messages to segments. The third reason was subscribers weren’t actually getting my free download.

That’s the biggest thing. I want people to sign up and they should get an email immediately after they confirm their email address with all of the links. Here’s my free e-book. Here’s all the things that I’m giving away and then it should – in two days it should ask I have a follow up that goes out two days later just asking if there’s anything I can do to help and things like that, and people weren’t getting either of those messages and sure enough they would email me.

I would have to stop what I’m doing and look in and yes, they were set as unconfirmed. So I would have to go in and there was no easy way to just resend the message. So I’d have to go in and I would have to preview the message and then I would have to copy and paste it and send it via Gmail and it was just – I mean I was spending a lot of time doing something that my autoresponder series should be doing. Now I did some troubleshooting. I spent some time talking with the Mail Poet developers and we just couldn’t figure out what was happening. I ended up changing the company that was sending my emails through.

So I was using Elastic Email and then I moved over to Send Grid and both of those didn’t seem to help a whole lot. So it was just like – it was just getting so frustrating that I was spending all this effort to do something that’s automated. It should automatically go out and then looks bad on me, too, when somebody signs up or something then they wait hours and hours and hours and never get it and then they have to remember to email me.

There’s a good change there’s a lot of people that never actually confirm their subscription and I had hundreds of people who were in Mail Poet inside my WordPress dashboard listed as unconfirmed because they had either never received the email message or they – that was the main reason or they hadn’t actually clicked on the link inside of there. So that was another thing and the last reason that I moved over to Mail Chimp was I wanted to send out more personalized messages.

There are some cool things that you can do that you can’t do with a basic tool like Mail Poet. So some of the things is I can send out a message now to people who have only clicked on links on the last three messages that I’ve sent out. So I can look at my last three broadcasts.

I can see there’s six people that opened all three messages and there’s only four of those people how actually clicked on the link inside the email and I can send a message specifically to those people. Now that’s a very small base. Why would you ever want to send out just a message to four people, but think about it. If you are trying build a product, if you’re trying to get some feedback on something that you’re doing, it’s probably a good idea to ask the people who are regularly engaged with your content.

If they are looking at your email messages and they’re clicking to make sure – and they’re clicking on links inside the message then you know that they’re following the call to action or whatever it is and they’re kind of “superfans” and you can really ask them for some valuable information. So will I ever do anything like that?

Probably not that complex, but it would be kind of interesting to know if people get just information about oh, maybe they clicked on links that are advanced links that I’ve sent out in newsletters or more beginner and so I could kind of segment and send specific messages to okay, these people have expressed some interest in advanced techniques of WordPress so that’s the kind of content that I’m going to generate and build for those people and then people who are brand new to WordPress and just getting started, they’re going to have a whole different track that they’re going to go through and begin engaging in learning when it comes to Word Press.

So I probably won’t use the personalized messages nearly as much, but I wanted the option to be there. Mail Chimp has the ability to do what’s called segments and you can do automatic segments or you can create your own manual segments. So I’ve created a segment that’s webinar attendees inside my list and so that’s how I’m able to send out custom messages just to the webinar attendees, but you could also do it based on what type of browser they’re using or what type of messages they’re looking at.

I could send out messages on the fly to everybody who looked at my last email on an iPhone if you will or they were looking at it in their mail application, in Microsoft Outlook on their computer. I can send specifically to those people. There’s a lot of really cool analytics stuff that’s built in that you can send those messages to those specific people and you don’t really necessarily have to break your list up into chunks.

It’s just sending to a small segment of your list and so that’s one of the other cool things about Mail Chimp that I’m excited to start using and digging into. So the four reasons as a recap is the first reason is it didn’t integrate with other services that I was using. The second one was you couldn’t send messages specifically to segments and different segments. The third reason was my subscribers weren’t getting my free download. So that was another thing.

If that’s happening to you, then you can either troubleshoot it or you can jump ship and move like I did and the last thing is I wanted to set up more personalized messages to people who have specifically clicked on links or haven’t clicked on links or whatever that case is. I just wanted that extra flexibility and freedom and I think too that Mail Chimp is now a paid account. I have to pay for it because of the number of subscribers that I have.

So it’s like okay, now Dustin, you actually have to do it otherwise you’re paying this money to not do anything with your website and with your email subscribers. So that’s kind of another little motivating factor for me as well. So those are the reasons that I switched from Mail Poet to Mail Chimp. So that’s going to wrap up this episode. Hopefully next week I’ll be – I’ll have some WordPress. Hopefully things have happened in the last three weeks while I’ve been away from my computer and we can talk about some of the new beta stuff that’s coming out for WordPress 4.3. I think that’s supposed to shift early in July.

So be on the lookout for that and with that, I guess enjoy the summer if you’re in North America or the northern hemisphere. Enjoy time outside and get away from your computer for a little bit. That’s what I’m going to do. All right. We’ll talk to you next week. Take care. Bye, bye.