183 – Control Your Email List with WordPress and MailPoet
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Is there a plugin for that?
With more than 50,000 plugins in the WordPress repository, it’s hard to find the perfect one. Each week, I will highlight an interesting plugin form the repository.
For more great plugins, download my 50 Most Useful Plugins eBook.
This week we are going to talk about MailPoet. This is a popular plugin (with over 1.5 million downloads) that you can use to control your newsletter subscribers within your WordPress Dashboard.
Control Your Email List with WordPress and MailPoet
I’ve been using MailPoet for two weeks now and I’m excited to share with you all the awesome benefits of this plugin:
- You control all of your contacts
- Gravatar images are next to users names / email address
- Plugin is free for up to 2000 users
- No limit on number of sent messages a month
- Use a professional SMTP server like Elastic Email
- You don’t pay for a certain number of subscribers, even if they are on separate lists
- Everything sits inside of WordPress dashboard
- Drag and drop your newsletter
- You can easily send out a new post by dragging into email builder
- Add automatic latest content (filterable by custom post type or categories) (great for sidebars of “Latest Posts”)
- Dozens of free themes with full PSD document optimized for mobile
- Extra add-ons for Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, WooCommerce
The plugin does come with a couple of disadvantages:
- The stats for each campaign are not too detailed, but you can see a more detailed look with the Premium version.
- The other disadvantage is that you have a large list, more than 2000, then you will have to upgrade to premium which starts at $99. This is still less expensive than some of the bigger companies.
A few questions from listeners:
Drip email campaigns like Aweber?
Yes! You can determine exactly when a notification is sent out, whether immediately, hours / days / weeks later.
Is it easy to embed a opt-in form below each blog post?
Out of the box, no. But it can be done quite simply with OptinMonster.
Is it easy to design a cool looking opt-in form with custom graphics, etc.
Again, out of the box, not really. But you can create some amazing things with OptinMonster.
Can you send out RSS to email campaigns?
It’s not considered an RSS email campaign, but you can send out an email whenever you publish a new blog post.
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Dustin,
Just listened to this episode. Thanks for the tips. I just got on MailChimp last month so I’m a little leery of tackling another learning curve right now – unless you think Mail Poet and Elastic Mail have distinct advantages over MailChimp.
I get the difference that Mail Poet can be operated within the WP Admin page, but I didn’t know if there were any other clear-cut advantages that Mail Poet had over MailChimp.
Jun 4, 2014MikeGantt I would say that most things are pretty equal between MailChimp and MailPoet.
The learning curve might be less on MailPoet, because it’s WordPress, but just starting with MailChimp, I think you are in a good place 🙂
Jun 4, 2014Hey, dhartzler10
I was reading just the other day on WPBeginner about this method for sending emails and here’s what they wrote:
“When you send out emails using a newsletter plugin which relies on PHP and WordPress mail functions, there is a great chance that your emails will land in your user’s SPAM folder.
“Email providers (gmail, yahoo, etc) have spam tools which would mark your email as SPAM for a number of reasons. For example, the email server receiving your email will look for an SPF record to determine whether the server sending email is allowed to do so or not. It will look for suspicious behavior, words, and phrases to rule out spam.
“The spam catching tools will also check their databases for your IP address. On shared http://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-hosting/, your website is sharing the same server IP address with several other websites. Any sign of abuse by one person on that server can trigger spam catching databases which will make your email delivery doubtful. There are countless other factors that are checked by spam catching algorithms, and it is very challenging to satisfy all those.”
What do you think?
Jun 5, 2014Great episode this week Dustin. You pack a ton of information into a 30 minute podcast. Very awesome… very inspirational to both the WP and Podcasting community.
I was listening to the whole episode wondering if it would work with OptinMonster… I’ve been debating on if paying $199 is worth it and it looks like they can go hand in hand.
I’m absolutely looking for a video or webinar on your process for this one.
Keep up the great work.
Jeff
Jun 5, 2014One additional thought…
You had mentioned in the podcast that you were going to get the premium version of Mail Poet because you had multiple websites…
I’m running 3 WP sites now to run TeacherCast… is there way to connect the newsletter subscriber list or have a newsletter sign up on each website that then flow into 1 database? Is that the advantage that using MailChip or aWeber has? (i think that makes written sense)
I think I will be going for OptinMonster eventually, but MailPoet only makes sense if I can use them with multiple websites at the same time.
Jun 5, 2014Definitely going to try this out! Thanks, Dustin!
Jun 6, 2014TeacherCast MailPoet and OptinMonster work hand-in-hand. That’s how I’m currently capturing email addresses for my opt-in forms
Jun 6, 2014TeacherCast I don’t think it’s possible to connect multiple sites to the same database. For your situation, a third party system like MailChimp or Aweber is best.
Jun 6, 2014Hey dhartzler10 TeacherCast !
Ben from MailPoet here, thanks for the written review Dustin. I loved the webinar too, that’s what I call enthusiasm 🙂
TeacherCast It is actually possible to manage all of your Mailing lists from one single site:
1 – Create your subscription form in the Mailpoet’s settings of your main site
2 – Use the Iframe version of that form in your secondary sites.
The only drawback of doing it that way is that you won’t be able to use content from your secondary websites within the newsletters. For example, you won’t be able to send automatic post notifications for the new content created in your secondary websites.
TeacherCast if you have other questions, go ahead and send us a quick email, our friendly support staff will gladly answer you 🙂
http://support.mailpoet.com/feedback/
Cheers!
Jun 9, 2014Ben
May I know why I cannot capture phone number details in the mailpoet’s subscriber information? I can capture the name and email. I have set phone number as a required field. I am using WordPress. Tks
Oct 9, 2015That’s strange! Have you reached out to MailPoet’s support team?
Oct 9, 2015TeacherCast Hey, it’s Kim from MailPoet here. You can put an iframe form on the other two websites.
This way, the visitors on the two sites will be subscribing to the one that has MailPoet.
Jun 11, 2014Great podcast, Dustin. We enjoyed listening to your fast pace talk. 🙂
Jun 11, 2014I was wondering, is it really wise to have your email list and service dependent on your website? What if you lose access for some reason?
Jun 12, 2014I’m thinking about something like what happened to Pat Flynn. His site was down for over a week, but he was able to communicate with his mailing list through Awebber.
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