Every website owner has one goal in mind: increasing the number of visitors to their website. There are multiple ways to do this – social media, good SEO practices, and one often forgotten method – email marketing.
Email marketing is an efficient way to reach a larger audience all at once and it’s easy to do with a WordPress website.
All it takes is a newsletter plugin, a bit of customization and you’re good to go.
Newsletters are pretty popular nowadays and most brands use them as a way to boost conversions or reach out to their customer base.
When done well, newsletters allow your visitors to stay up to date with your site’s latest content, deals and news. It also engages readers or customers with branded content such as polls, discussions and exclusive discounts.
The best way to get newsletter subscribers is to place a newsletter subscription form on your website and let your users sign up. Another approach is to use popups for advertising your newsletter, although the popup method can become annoying to some of your website visitors, which means it might better to go the voluntary sign up approach.
In this article, we’ll list the best WordPress newsletter plugins you can use to drive more visitors to your website and brand.
MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the best and most popular WordPress newsletter plugins. This plugin allows you to write newsletters through multiple methods and it makes easy access for your users to subscribe to your newsletters.
With the free version, you can have up to 2,000 subscribers, which is plenty for a small site. This makes it quite popular among small startup businesses, and once your business grows by using MailChimp – you can consider purchasing a premium version for more advanced features. MailChimp supports AJAX, so your visitors can submit forms without reloading their entire page.
The premium paid version allows you to create multiple forms (the free version allows a single form), have advanced Ecommerce integration (WooCommerce), email notifications and more style options.
MailChimp is well integrated with many excellent plugins such as WooCommerce, Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms so it’s a breeze to use in combo with any of those.
Price: Freemium
MailPoet
MailPoet is the perfect plugin if your goal is to grow email subscribers on your website. You can create your newsletters from scratch or you can use pre-made templates to build out a nice email subscription form.
It fully supports WooCommerce, and it has an option to schedule your newsletters. You can send newsletters immediately, schedule them, or have them appear via new blog post notifications.
MailPoet has great subscriber management features, and you can create multiple lists for different newsletters.
Keep in mind that you need your mail server to send newsletters via MailPoet, or you can subscribe to their Premium + Sending plan and use their mail server.
Price: Freemium
Newsletter
Newsletter is a freemium WordPress plugin that you can use to send as many newsletters as you want, for free. It supports external email providers, which is great as that allows you to control email deliverability by managing your own mail server. The plugin also has email sending controls, so if you’re on a shared hosting provider – you can control how many emails are sent at once.
Newsletter also offers free addons to connect the newsletter subscription with standard WordPress registration forms, create an archive of all newsletters on a custom page, ability to lock content (and provide access upon subscription) and much more.
It also has a drag and drop editor to let you design your newsletters easily and offers tracking and statistics for each newsletter. You can use multiple subscriber lists for different newsletters and place the subscription form on a website page or widget.
Price: Freemium
Mailjet
Mailjet is a powerful plugin that allows you to manage marketing campaigns and contact lists in addition to sending newsletters. It’s a feature-rich plugin, and you can manage all your marketing and transactional emails, sign up forms, and contact lists. It’s also fully GDPR compliant if your business is in the EU, and it’s ISO 27001 certified, so it offers the right level of email privacy and security.
You can add the subscription widget using a shortcode in any page or post, and use a drag and drop editor to build beautiful newsletters and engaging emails. The plugin also has an advanced automated contact synchronization – through existing WordPress users, comment authors, subscribed WooCommerce customers, or the Contact Form 7 integration.
Price: Freemium
Email Subscribers
Email Subscribers is an excellent, all-in-one suite of features that allow you to collect leads (subscribers), create and send broadcasts, manage everything in a single place, and send automated new blog post notifications. It’s a GDPR-ready plugin with automatic subscription spam checks to maintain a healthy list of subscribers. The free version allows you to have unlimited subscribers, unlimited broadcasts and post notifications, unlimited email templates, and more! The plugin integrates well with default WordPress users so that they can be easily imported.
The plugin also provides an HTML post editor, so you can create your broadcasts and post notifications, and you can add a subscription form via widget, form shortcode, or use PHP code.
You can import and export your contacts, send an automatic welcome email (adds a nice personal touch), and see metrics on the newsletter open and view rate (data is everything nowadays!).
The pro version allows you to schedule email sending, create post digests, autoresponder sequences, clean your email lists automatically, and more.
Price: Freemium
MailOptin
MailOptin is a powerful multi-purpose plugin that allows you to generate leads, send newsletters, set up autoresponders, and create forms on your website. It has a straightforward template and form builder to make it easy for you to build great forms and newsletters and ultimately boost retention and conversion. The free version offers tons of useful features:
- Calls to action (CTAs) – targeted messages to engage to your website visitors
- Lightbox, sidebar, widget, or pop up opt-in forms – perfect for gaining new subscribers
- Spam protection – to avoid spam contact form submissions using the Honeypot method
- Automated new post notifications
- Automated daily, weekly and monthly digests
- Newsletter scheduling
Price: Freemium
Whether you have a long running website or just started a new one – email marketing is a strategic way to win over new visitors and drive engagement. We recommend trying the free versions of any of the newsletter plugins covered, and if you need more features as your business grows – give any of the pro versions a try and see how it goes!
