So – how can you write an email subject line that grabs your subscribers’ attention and encourages them to engage with the rest of your email?

Well, there are some tried-and-true email subject line best practices that you can implement, which is the subject of this post.

Below, you’re going to learn 17+ best practices that will help you write effective subject lines, while still retaining your unique voice and style.

These tips will help you generate genuine interest and engagement from your emails, which is essential in a post iOS 15 world where it’s harder than ever to track your subscribers’ actions.

Let’s get to it…

How to improve your email subject lines

Here are 17+ email subject line best practices, presented in no particular order. You might not apply every single tip to every subject line, but you’ll want to try and implement as many as possible for maximum results.

1. Write the subject line first

When you’re setting up an email, it’s easy to create the body content first and then come back to the subject line once you’re finished.

While some people can work effectively that way, it’s generally a better idea to start with your subject line first. That way, you can ensure that you’re not just throwing it in as an afterthought.

Writing the subject line also gives you a chance to directly connect the subject line text to the body text, which can make for more engaging emails in general if the body builds on the subject.

If you don’t want to totally commit before you’ve finalized the body of your email, you can try brainstorming a few variations to start, rather than choosing a final version. Then, you can pick the option that works best once you see how everything comes together.

2. Add some personalization

Instead of sending off the same generic subject line to every subscriber, try addressing each subscriber by their name in the subject line. Or, you can also experiment with other types of personalization, depending on the data that you have about each subscriber.

There’s data suggesting that people are anywhere from ~20-30% more likely to engage with personalized emails over generic ones.

Most email marketing tools make it easy to dynamically insert each subscriber’s name in your subject line. 

If you’re using MailPoet, you can check out our email personalization guide to learn how to set it up. All you need to do is include the relevant shortcode in your subject line. You can also specify a generic fallback in case you don’t have a certain subscriber’s name:

3. Ask a question?

Why do questions make for engaging email subject lines? Mainly because every question needs a good answer. So if the question in your subject line intrigues the reader, they’ll be more likely to engage with the email to get the answer.

Of course, the key here is that the question needs to be compelling enough to generate interest. You can’t just add a question mark to any sentence like you’re in Anchorman (I’m Ron Burgundy?).

For example, let’s say your email list is in the strength training space. Consider these two emails:

• How to hit PRs every time
• How can you hit PRs every time?

PR = personal record.

It’s essentially the same subject, but formulating it as a question makes it a little more engaging and can get you more clicks.

To take things further, you can go with the question and answer one-two punch, which is a pretty common strategy. Here’s an example:

How can you hit PRs every time? Try these 9 tips

4. Keep it short

Shorter subject lines are more effective than longer subject lines for a couple of reasons:

1. A lot of people consume email on mobile devices nowadays, which means that there’s very limited screen space and longer subject lines will be cut off.
2. People will often scan subject lines rather than reading them word for word, so a shorter subject line makes it easier to engage someone who’s quickly scanning.

Nowadays, we recommend keeping your subject lines under 50 characters. Additionally, try to put the most important words/details towards the beginning to account for people who are quickly scanning.

5. Create a curiosity gap

A “curiosity gap” is the gap between what we know and what we want to know.

If you can create a curiosity gap where people want to know what’s in your email, they’ll obviously be more likely to engage with your content.

A lot of clickbait titles are excellent examples of the curiosity gap. For example:

“X-Ray Scans of Ancient Egyptian Mummy Reveal a Surprising Discovery”

The curiosity gap is the difference between our existing knowledge of mummies and this “surprising discovery”. What is the discovery? We need to know!

If the headline provided all of the information right away, we wouldn’t feel as compelled to open the article because we already know the information (so there’s no curiosity gap).

Stop Clickbait has lots of other fun examples of clickbait, which is where we sourced this one.

Now, we’re certainly not saying you need to go full-bore into clickbait to create engaging subject lines. That will quickly lead to diminishing returns and risk turning off your subscribers as they get tired of your shenanigans.

But we are saying that there’s a reason clickbait headlines work, and it can be useful to understand that principle so that you can incorporate it into your own subject lines in a softer way.

6. Mix things up for recurring offers (like sales)

If you have a lot of sales, it’s easy for subscribers to become “blind” to your deals if you’re using the same subject lines over and over.

For example, imagine that you send “50%-Off Sale Today Only” every time you have a sale – customers might eventually tune that out because they’ve seen it before.

To fix this, make sure to mix it up when sending emails for sales and offers. It’s still important to include the 50% off in the subject line, but you can play around with the other words and target your deals towards specific events or conditions.

7. Be clear when clarity makes sense

Above, we told you that creating a curiosity gap can be an effective subject line to drive engagement with your emails.

However, there are also times when it’s better to be clear and upfront.

This is the tough part of writing effective subject lines – there are no hard rules that apply to every single email. You need to adapt your strategies to your audience, as well as the content and purpose of your emails.

Let’s say you’re about to launch an awesome 75% off sale. You could try to create a curiosity gap by writing something like “Something big just dropped…”.

But in this case, it’s probably just better to lead with the 75% off sale detail because that’s already pretty engaging by itself! There’s no need to try to get overly creative – just let your awesome deal do the talking.

If you’re sending multiple emails, though, you can try mixing things up. For example, if you’re teasing the 75% off sale a week in advance, you might go with something mysterious like “There’s something big brewing…”.

But when it comes time to actually launch the deal, you want to hit them with that 75% off number in the subject line so that people know exactly what’s happening.

8. Add identity words

Identify words are words that connect with the self-identities of your subscribers. This can be especially powerful if you have a niche audience who you know are all focused on certain topics.

For example, let’s say your website is about helping freelancers grow their businesses. In this situation, you can be pretty confident that most of your subscribers will self-identify as freelancers (or at least want to get to a place where they can become a freelancer).

Instead of writing a subject like this:

How to work more productively

Try adding identity works like this:

How freelancers can work more productively

By including the identity of the reader, you build a connection and make your email more engaging to that person.

9. Include numbers (and use numerals)

Including numbers in your subject lines is a great way to boost engagement.

For example, Campaign Monitor A/B tested these two different headlines:

1. 3 steps to measuring the success of your email marketing with Google Analytics
2. How to measure the success of your email marketing with Google Analytics

They found that the first subject line (with the number) had a massive 57% higher open rate than the second headline.

Both high and low numbers can be effective, but in different situations:

• High numbers are effective when you’re providing value to the subscriber. For example, “17 tips for improving your subject lines” – more tips = more value so a higher number is better. The same is true for sales/discounts where a higher discount means cheaper prices.
• Low numbers are effective when you’re talking about the effort a subscriber needs to take. For example, “2 steps to a faster-loading WordPress website”. The lower the number of steps a person needs to take, the less effort they’ll need to expend. Less effort is good, which is why a low number is more effective here.

Finally, you always want to use the actual numeral instead of writing out the number. That is, “3 steps to…” is better than “Three steps to…”

10. Add some urgency or scarcity

Urgency and scarcity are tried-and-tested marketing tactics for driving engagement and interactions. You might also see this called fear of missing out, AKA FOMO.

If people feel like they might miss out on something, they’ll be more likely to take action to avoid having to feel FOMO.

For example, if you’re promoting your freelance business coaching services, you could try something like:

Only 3 freelance elevation coaching packages remain

Only if it’s the truth, of course. Using false scarcity isn’t cool, and might even run afoul of the law in some jurisdictions.

If you’re promoting a sale, you could use something like:

Our Sale Ends in 6 Hours

Adding those elements of urgency encourages people to click on your email right now rather than scrolling by (and maybe never coming back to your email).

11. Harness social proof

Social proof is a great marketing strategy across all of your digital platforms, including your email subject lines.

The basic idea is this – “other people think we’re great, so you’ll probably think we’re great, too”.

You can go with raw numbers – e.g. “lots of people think we’re great”. Or, you could highlight specific influencers – e.g. “George Clooney thinks we’re great”.

You can also play around with combining social proof with other strategies on this post, such as a curiosity gap.

For example, if we’re sticking with our freelancer coaching example, you could try something like “423 freelancers found a client using this strategy”. There’s social proof from the success of people using this strategy, and there’s a curiosity gap because people want to know what this successful strategy is.

12. Play around with emojis

Ok, there’s some debate with this one, which is why it’s “play around with emojis” instead of “you absolutely should use emojis in your subject lines because they always work.”

With that being said, a lot of brands have had success with incorporating emojis into their subject lines, especially if the brand has more of a playful brand personality.

There’s data showing that including certain emojis in your subject lines leads to higher engagement…but there’s also data showing that other emojis can lead to lower engagement than the alternatives.

If you want to learn the best practices here, check out our guide to using emojis in email subject lines.

13. Pay attention to sentence case and title case

One common question for optimizing subject lines is what capitalization you should use.

There are two viable options:

• Title case – How to Write Good Subject Lines
• Sentence case – How to write good subject lines

USING ALL CAPITALS IS NOT A VIABLE OPTION.

Both are ok to use and you’ll see both used quite frequently.

In general, using sentence case feels a little more personal, which can make it a good option when you’re trying to build a connection with readers.

On the other hand, using title case feels a bit more formal, which can make it a good option for business-focused emails or transactional emails.

We recommend playing around with both approaches to see which works better for your specific audience.

14. Use your FROM name and email

When people open their email inboxes, pretty much all email clients will show at least two pieces of information for each email:

1. Your subject line, which is what we’ve been focusing on in this entire post.
2. Your FROM name, which typically appears to the left of the subject line.

If there’s more space, some email clients will also show the preview text, which is our next tip.

This makes your FROM name another valuable piece of real estate for driving engagement with your emails.

You’ll want to choose something straightforward that people will instantly associate with your brand. Typically, your brand name itself is a good starting point.

Some people also like to use real names to create a more personal connection. However, using just a name alone can be confusing because people have no way to associate the name with a brand. If you still want to try it, consider a hybrid approach like “Colin at MailPoet”.

And no matter what, don’t use “noreply” as your FROM name if you want people to engage with your emails.

15. Connect the subject line to the preview text

Ok, this one isn’t exclusively about the subject line. But some email clients will display both the subject line and the preview text next to one another.

This means that you can tie them together to further boost your engagement.

For example, if you formulate your subject line as a question, you can use your preview text to tease users with the answer to that question.

If you’re using MailPoet, you’ll get a separate field to enter a custom preview text. This field appears right below the subject line:

16. Learn from other brands

One of the best ways to improve your subject lines is to be a little more mindful when you’re scrolling your own inbox.

Pay attention to which email subject lines make you the most likely to engage. Then, try to apply those lessons to your own subject lines.

If you don’t want to go scrolling in your own inbox, you can also check out our collection of the best email subject line examples to get some inspiration.

17. Avoid these pitfalls that negate your results

So far, we’ve talked about a lot of positive things that you can do to improve your email subject lines.

However, this post wouldn’t be complete without discussing some of the biggest email subject no-nos that could reduce the effectiveness of all your hard work.

Here’s a quick rundown of what you should not do in your subject line:

• Use spammy words/phrases – certain words or phrases have been abused by spammers and as such can hurt your subject lines. HubSpot maintains a pretty detailed list of spam trigger words and phrases to give you an idea of what can cause problems.
• WRITE IN ALL CAPITALS – this is pretty clearly annoying, right? Most users think so too. And if that’s not enough, using all capitals increases the chance of hitting the spam folder. In very rare situations, it might make sense to capitalize a single word. But you need to REALLY be careful if you’re doing that.
• Overuse exclamation marks!!!!! – one exclamation mark in a subject line is ok. But adding a bunch can look spammy (and is more likely to actually trigger spam filters).
• Don’t use a question mark and an exclamation – “Are you getting flagged for spam? Stop using exclamations after questions!”. This format naturally looks a bit spammy, which is why it can be an issue in your subject lines.

For more things to avoid, check out our post with 11 signs that you might accidentally be an email spammer.

Implement these email subject line best practices today

If you want to create more engagement with your emails, focusing on your subject lines is key.

Your body content could be the best in the world, but you won’t generate clicks unless your subject lines do a good job of grabbing your subscribers’ attention.

In this post, we’ve shared 17 different tips to help you write better subject lines and drive more engagement from your email efforts.

Try them out today and see how they work for you.

If you’re using MailPoet, you’ll be able to easily track the engagement for each email subject line so that you can find the formulas that work best for your specific audience.

If you’re not using MailPoet yet, sign up today for free to start getting more from your email marketing efforts.

Do you still have any questions about these email subject line best practices or getting the most from your email subject lines? Let us know in the comments!

You might want to send email notifications to your blog’s subscribers when you publish a new post. Or, if you have multiple authors and you want to simplify your admin processes, you might want to send yourself post notification emails when someone publishes a post on your site.

Either way, we’ve got you covered because we’re going to cover everything you need to know about the best plugins and tools to send WordPress post notifications.

In this article, we’re going to cover plugins that help you send two different types of notifications:

1. Automatic email notifications to your blog’s subscribers when you publish a new post.
2. Admin notification emails to yourself (or your site’s editors, or really any registered users on your site).

You can click the links above to jump straight to the section for the type of plugin that you’re interested in. Or, just keep reading to learn about all of your options.

Ready to get started? Let’s dig in!

Two plugins to send WordPress post notifications to blog subscribers

If you want to send email post notifications to your subscribers, you’ll need a tool that can do two things:

1. Create an opt-in form that visitors can use to subscribe to your post notifications, along with a way to manage those subscribers.
2. Automatically send notifications when you publish a new post.

We’re going to showcase two tools that can help you do that:

1. MailPoet
2. Jetpack, via its Subscriptions feature

Both tools are easy-to-use and non-technical, but they have a pretty different approach – MailPoet offers the most flexibility and customizability, while Jetpack offers a really simple option for basic notifications.

Let’s go through them…

1. MailPoet

MailPoet is a full-service WordPress email plugin. It can help you:

• Send automatic post notification emails on a custom schedule. E.g. instant notifications for each post, a daily digest of all the posts that day, a weekly digest, and so on.
• Completely customize the email template for your post notifications using a drag-and-drop editor (or any other email templates that you use).
• Design custom email subscribe forms using the WordPress block editor.
• Manage subscribers via your dashboard, including separating them into different segments if needed.
• Send one-off emails in addition to your automatic post notifications.

That’s the main advantage of MailPoet – it’s a full email solution that also includes a built-in feature for automatic post notifications.

It’s the best option if you want the most flexibility for controlling the schedule of your notifications, customizing their design, and managing your subscribers (like sending different types of notifications to different segments of subscribers).

How MailPoet works

To help you collect subscribers, MailPoet lets you design email opt-in forms using pre-built templates and the WordPress block editor.

You’ll be able to manage all of your subscribers from your dashboard, including dividing them into different segments.

To set up post notifications, MailPoet includes a built-in feature to send automatic emails for your posts. You can send an email right away for every single post. Or, you can also set up daily, weekly, or monthly digests that include some or all of the posts that you’ve published in those timeframes:

Then, to control the actual content of your emails, you can use MailPoet’s drag-and-drop builder and pre-built templates, including inserting merge tags for dynamic information (such as the name of the subscriber). 

The builder also includes dedicated widgets to dynamically insert content from your posts. You can choose how much content to include. For example, you could only display the post title or you could include the excerpt or full text.

Finally, MailPoet also includes its own built-in email sending service, which means that you can be confident your emails will make it to your subscribers’ inboxes.

For a detailed look at how to use MailPoet for post notifications, check out our full guide on how to send automatic WordPress post notification emails with MailPoet.

2. Jetpack Subscriptions

Compared to MailPoet, Jetpack’s Subscriptions feature is much less customizable. However, in some situations that might be exactly what you want!

Here are the limitations of Jetpack’s post notifications feature. You…

1. Can’t customize the design of the notification emails. You can choose whether to send an excerpt or the full text of a post, but that’s pretty much it.
2. Don’t get advanced tools to manage your subscriber lists. For example, you can’t create list segments.
3. Can’t send your own custom one-off emails. It only works for automatic post notifications.

But if you’re ok with those limitations, there are some definite positives to Jetpack post notifications:

1. It’s 100% free. Whether you have 100 subscribers or 100,000 subscribers, you won’t pay anything to send them post notifications.
2. It’s super simple. You pretty much just activate the feature, choose where to add your subscribe forms, and you never need to think about it again.
3. It works for comments, too. You can give subscribers the option to also get notified for new comments on posts that they’re following.

How Jetpack Subscriptions works

To set up Jetpack post notifications, you’ll need to install the Jetpack plugin and enable the Subscriptions feature. From there, there’s not much to configure.

Really the only thing that you must do is choose how to collect subscribers. You can create dedicated forms and/or you can add checkboxes to your comment forms that let readers subscribe to notifications when they leave a comment on your blog.

If you want to limit which types of content trigger notifications, you can use code filters to include/exclude certain categories of posts. There’s also a code filter that enables an option to enable/disable notification emails on a post-by-post basis.

To learn how it works, check out our full guide on using Jetpack Subscriptions for email post notifications.

Which tool should you use?

Again, both tools are easy to use, so your decision should really just come down to this:

• If you want the flexibility to customize the design for your post notifications, customize their schedule, and send other types of emails to your subscribers, use MailPoet.
• If you just want a really lightweight solution exclusively for post notifications and you don’t need to control the design of the email, you can use Jetpack Subscriptions.

For most people, we think that MailPoet is probably a better option because it offers more flexibility while still keeping things beginner-friendly.

However, if you’re fine with the limitations of Jetpack Subscriptions, it’s also a great solution for what it does.

Two plugins to send email post notifications to admins, editors, or other registered users

Above, we showed you some useful plugins to send WordPress post notifications to your readers. But as we mentioned in the introduction, there’s another type of post notification that can also be useful – sending notifications to yourself or your editorial team when there’s a new post.

If you have a multi-author blog or if you just generally publish a lot of content, setting up post notifications can help you stay on top of what’s going on with your site’s content.

These plugins can also help you send post notifications to your users. However, there’s a very key difference between these plugins and MailPoet/Jetpack – both of these plugins only let you send notification emails to people who are registered on your site.

As with the previous section, we’ll share two solutions that you can use here…

1. Better Notifications for WP

Better Notifications for WP is the most popular plugin at WordPress.org for setting up custom WordPress alert emails.

It lets you set up email alerts for a variety of different actions, but we’re going to focus on the post notifications.

When you set up your notification, you can choose from different actions related to your posts. For example, you can send a notification email when a post is…

• Published
• Updated
• Submitted as pending review
• Scheduled
• Moved to trash
• Made private

To control who receives the notification emails, you can either select entire user roles or choose specific usernames.

Then, to control the content of your emails, you can either use the WYSIWYG Classic editor or format the email as plain text.  You’ll also be able to use lots of merge tags to insert dynamic information related to the post, such as the title, URL, author, and so on.

With the premium version, you’ll get more advanced conditional controls. For example, you could only send alerts for posts with certain…

• Categories
• Tags
• Authors
• Post formats
• Terms

By default, the plugin sends its alerts using the regular WordPress mail function. However, to improve reliability, you could pair it with MailPoet by enabling MailPoet’s built-in feature to send transactional emails.

Or, it also works with SMTP plugins and services, including SendGrid and Mailgun.

The free version of the plugin works for basic post notifications. For more advanced features, bundles start at $129.

2. Notification

Notification is another popular option that lets you set up your own custom post notification emails (along with notifications for other types of activity on your site).

When you set up the notification, you can choose from a variety of different actions for your posts. You can send a notification when a post is…

• Published
• Updated
• Saved as a draft
• Set for review
• Scheduled
• Trashed

When you choose who should receive the notification email, you can choose from different user roles, choose specific usernames, or enter any email address.

You can also fully customize the text of the email using the WYSIWYG Classic editor, including using merge tags to insert dynamic information, such as the name of the post and its URL:

With the premium version, you’ll also be able to add conditional logic, such as only sending a notification for posts with a specific category, tag, author, and so on.

You can send basic post notifications with the free version of the plugin at WordPress.org. To unlock the conditional rules and other advanced features, the premium version starts at $99.

Which Tool Should You Use?

For basic WordPress post notifications, both tools are pretty equal so you should be fine with either.

If you need more advanced features, such as only sending notifications for posts in certain categories, the Notification plugin is a bit cheaper for that specific feature (though there are other feature differences between the premium plugins that might push you in one direction or another).

Get started with WordPress post notifications today

Whether you want to send WordPress post notifications to your readers or to your site management team, you can find some great plugins that make it easy to set up.

If you want to send automatic post notifications to your readers, we showcased two great options that work in different ways:

• MailPoet – this is the best option if you want the ability to customize when to send your emails, the content/design of your emails, which segments of users should receive notifications, and so on. You’ll also be able to send other emails beyond post notifications. Check out the full MailPoet guide.
• Jetpack Subscriptions – this can be a good option if you just want a very simple way to send notifications and only notifications. It does have some notable limitations that we discussed above, but if you’re fine with those limitations, it’s a very easy way to implement post notifications (and it’s 100% free). Check out the full Jetpack Subscriptions guide.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a way to send post notifications to yourself, your editors, or other types of registered users on your site, then you might be better off with the other two plugins that we featured – Better Notifications for WP or Notification. 

You can also pair the two types of plugins. For example, you could use MailPoet to send notifications to your readers and Better Notifications for WP to send notifications to your editorial staff.

The cool thing about this combination is that you can still use MailPoet’s built-in sending service to deliver the notification emails that Better Notifications for WP sends – just make sure to enable MailPoet’s transactional email feature.

Do you still have any questions about sending post notifications on WordPress? Let us know in the comments!

Email list churn, or decay, is a real problem, with many lists losing 25-50% of subscribers in a year.

Beyond people unsubscribing (“transparent churn”), which is easy to track, you might also have people who churn because they stop engaging with your emails (“opaque churn”), which can be much more difficult to track because these people are still technically “subscribed”.

By sending re-engagement emails, you have a chance to win back those unengaged subscribers and get them to start opening and clicking your emails again.

Or, at the very least, you’ll be able to accurately clean your lists of unengaged subscribers who stopped opening emails but haven’t unsubscribed.

Basically, it’s a win either way, so it’s definitely worth putting in the time to learn how re-engagement emails work.

In this post, we’re going to make that easy for you because we’re going to go over all the important details:

• What re-engagement emails are
• Why re-engagement emails are important
• Best practices for sending re-engagement emails, along with real-life examples
• How to easily start sending re-engagement emails with MailPoet

What is a re-engagement email?

A re-engagement email is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

It’s an email (or often a sequence of emails) that’s designed to re-engage subscribers who have stopped engaging with your regular emails, as measured by engagement metrics such as click rate, open rate (if available), and so on.

In a perfect world, every single subscriber would open every single email and click on every single call to action.

But in the real world, it’s easy for subscribers to start tuning you out.

There are a lot of reasons why people might stop engaging. Some of those reasons are things that you could maybe improve on while others are just totally out of your hands. Here are some examples:

• You send too many emails and people are tuning them out.
• Your emails aren’t relevant to what the subscriber is interested in.
• Your subscribers’ inboxes are packed full of emails from other brands.
• Your subscribers really are interested in what you offer, but they’ve been really busy lately and kind of just forgot about you.
• …you get the idea.

Re-engagement emails are emails that are designed to win back these unengaged subscribers and get them interested in what you have to offer again. For that reason, you’ll also see these types of emails called win-back emails.

Or, for some reason, you’ll find lots of people calling these emails The Divine Jackfruit. It really is a thing, though we’re not sure why. We’re going to stick with “re-engagement email” in this post.

Why are re-engagement emails important?

Having a large percentage of unengaged subscribers on your email lists can be bad for a couple of reasons:

• You can reduce your sender reputation if you’re constantly sending emails to people who don’t engage with them (or have marked you as spam).
• Your costs are higher because that subscriber is taking up space on your list. Most email marketing services bill you based on the number of subscribers that you have, so unengaged subscribers are just wasting money and forcing you to pay for a more expensive plan.

Most importantly, if you’re selling products or services, it’s generally easier to re-engage an existing customer than it is to find a new customer, so you could be leaving money on the table by not trying to connect with these people.

Re-engagement emails and Apple’s iOS 15 update

To complicate matters further, it’s also becoming more difficult to actually figure out whether subscribers are even engaged in the first place. This is thanks to some privacy-focused changes that Apple made to email tracking in iOS 15.

We have a whole post on how the iOS 15 update affects email marketing, but here are the basic ideas:

• It’s difficult to accurately track open rates for people using Apple Mail, so it can be hard to tell whether or not people are opening your emails. You can still see if people click in the email, but you can’t track if Apple users open the email without clicking. This makes it hard to rely on open rates alone as a metric for engaged subscribers.
• Apple has made it easy for people to hide their real email addresses by letting them create unique, disableable emails that forward to their actual address. Subscribers could have disabled the dummy email without bothering to unsubscribe, which means it’s impossible to tell whether they’re still receiving emails from you.

So, in addition to winning back subscribers, re-engagement email campaigns can also help you verify that people really are engaged in a post-iOS 15 world.

Re-engagement emails are a win-win

To sum up, re-engagement emails are definitely a win-win situation.

If your re-engagement email succeeds in winning back a subscriber, that’s a success because your list now has more engaged subscribers. This is the ideal scenario and, hopefully, your emails work to win back every single unengaged subscriber.

But even if your re-engagement emails don’t win back every single subscriber, it’s still a win because you can now feel confident in deleting those subscribers from your list.

Sure, it’s not as much of a win as re-engaging a subscriber, but at least you’ll now have a cleaner list, reduced sending costs, more accurate analytics, and a better sender reputation.

Nine best practices for sending re-engagement emails (plus real examples!)

Now that you know what re-engagement emails are, let’s go over some re-engagement email best practices that you should consider when you’re setting up these campaigns.

Along with this, we’ll share some real-life re-engagement email examples from brands implementing these best tactics. That way, you’ll have some inspiration to go along with the best practices.

Then, in the next section, we’ll show you how you can actually set up your re-engagement emails in MailPoet using MailPoet’s new re-engagement campaign type.

1. Define when subscribers are “unengaged” and create segments

The first step in sending re-engagement campaigns is to make sure you’ve accurately set up your segments so that you really are only sending emails to unengaged customers.

That brings up an important question:

How do you define what an unengaged subscriber is? Is it someone who hasn’t engaged with an email in a week? A month? Two months? A year?

Well, there’s no single “right” answer here, but most experts recommend using around one or two months as the bare minimum of when to consider a subscriber “unengaged”. You’ll also see people recommend longer periods such as six months or even up to a year.

If you’re using MailPoet, the new re-engagement campaign type makes it easy to automatically target subscribers who haven’t engaged in a certain period of time. All you do is choose the cutoff and MailPoet will handle everything else for you (more on this below).

If you’re using a different email marketing service, you’ll need to see if that tool offers something similar or you might need to manually create segments or tags to target unengaged subscribers.

2. Send a sequence rather than a standalone email

As a general guideline, re-engagement emails are generally best sent in a sequence rather than a single email, though this isn’t a hard rule.

Most experts recommend sending about 3-4 emails as part of your sequence but feel free to adjust this to your site’s specific needs.

You typically want the emails to build on one another. So you might start with just a nudge and end with a clear email that tells people they’ll be removed from the list if they don’t engage (in a nice way, of course).

3. Offer an incentive (if applicable)

One great way to win back unengaged subscribers is to sweeten the deal with some type of incentive.

If you have an eCommerce store or sell any type of products or services, the obvious incentive is a sale or discount. You could give them a special coupon with the goal of enticing them back to make another purchase.

GoDaddy isn’t doing anything fancy in this email – just a straight-up “bribe” to keep people engaged:

For informational sites, you could offer some special content upgrade if they re-engage or maybe a free course.

Note – we’ve sourced this example, and many of our other re-engagement email examples, from the excellent Really Good Emails website.

4. Reinforce your value

If someone took the effort to sign up to your list in the first place, they probably have at least some interest in what you have to offer.

That means a re-engagement email can be a good spot to reinforce those values that convinced them to subscribe in the first place.

If they think you’re not living up to your values, this might not work. But a lot of people might’ve just naturally forgotten about you in their busy inboxes so reminding them why they signed up can be a great strategy to generate interest again.

This email from Airbnb does a great job of convincing potential hosts to re-engage by highlighting their potential earnings. Most people host on Airbnb for the money, so Airbnb is reinforcing that benefit by including the average earnings in the email:

5. Highlight new benefits/values (if applicable)

If you’ve added new value or benefits recently, another great win-back strategy is to showcase these new features so that subscribers can see that they’re now getting more than they were when they originally signed up.

For example, maybe you recently launched a new feature that you think people will love. Or, maybe you launched a new course that you think people might be interested in.

You could send a re-engagement email that highlights the value of your new offerings with the hopes that it will win back your subscribers.

Here, Clear does a good job of highlighting that they’ve improved their service since the subscriber last engaged, so it might be worth another look:

6. Add some FOMO

FOMO stands for fear of missing out. It’s a pretty powerful motivator because, let’s be honest, no one wants to miss out on cool stuff that’s happening to other people!

If someone unsubscribes from your list, they’ll quite literally be missing out on what you have to offer. So – don’t be afraid to put a little fear into them – in a friendly way, of course!

The way that Other Goose phrases this re-engagement email is a great way to do things – “Click Here to Restore Access”:

Without being negative, Other Goose makes it seem like subscribers will be missing out on something they’ve been enjoying (access) if they don’t re-engage.

7. Let people optimize their experience

In some situations, it might not be that subscribers aren’t interested in hearing anything from you; it might just be that they don’t want to hear everything from you.

That is, they might only be interested in certain types of content that you send, which is why they generally aren’t engaging with the other content.

One useful strategy here is to create segments or lists that let people subscribe to specific interests. Then, you can use your re-engagement campaign to give people the chance to update their interests.

For example, take this email from Matt D’Avella. This email isn’t technically a re-engagement email, but it demonstrates this principle very well. 

Matt launched a YouTube course that he was marketing to his regular lists. Personally, I’m interested in his regular emails, but I’m never planning to create a YouTube channel, so I didn’t find these specific emails to be very engaging. That’s why it’s nice that Matt adds an easy option at the top to stop receiving emails about his YouTube courses:

By giving me this option to customize what emails I receive, Matt keeps me engaged with his other content and opening his other emails. 

If you give your subscribers the same choices, you can keep them engaged with the content that they like.

8. Play around with emotion

If it fits your branding, incorporating emotion into your re-engagement emails can be a fun way to connect with customers.

Typically, most brands will go with the “sad” angle when adding emotions.

For example, Duolingo, the language learning app, is already pretty playful with its cartoon owl. In their re-engagement emails, Duolingo plays things up further by having the owl crying and standing in a puddle of tears:

Google Local Guides does something similar with a cute sad dog:

Does this approach work if you’re Salesforce (or another B2B company)? Probably not. But in B2C markets or industries where you have a close connection with your followers, this type of emotion can be a great strategy.

9. Make it easy for subscribers to opt out

In some cases, people might just really not be interested in receiving emails from you anymore. That’s ok – you can’t please everyone!

In these situations, no amount of quality copywriting and email best practices will convince them to engage.

So, rather than annoying these people, make it easy for them to remove their email from your list.

As an example of this, you can check out one of MailPoet’s re-engagement email templates, which includes a clear option for people to unsubscribe right away:

Speaking of MailPoet…

How to set up re-engagement emails in MailPoet

Now that you know all of the best practices for re-engagement emails, let’s talk about how you can set up these types of campaigns using MailPoet.

In MailPoet version 3.74.2 (released in late 2021), we added a brand new re-engagement email type designed to make it easy to run your own re-engagement campaigns. 

Instead of trying to manually set up your own custom engagement tracking, all you need to do is choose the time to consider a subscriber unengaged, customize your email using MailPoet’s builder, and you’re ready to go.

Here’s how it works…

1. Create a new engagement email and choose timing

To begin, go to MailPoet → Emails and click the Set up button under the new Re-engagement Emails option:

On the next screen, you can choose when you want to send the email.

The default setting is to send the email five months after a subscriber has had no activity, which is a good starting point for most sites. 

However, you can also adjust this number higher or lower as needed. You can also set the timing in weeks instead of months.

2. Customize your email template

On the next screen, you can choose from MailPoet’s premade re-engagement email templates. 

When we’re writing this guide, there are two different templates:

• Confirm your interest or unsubscribe – people have two options. They can click the button to stay subscribed to your list or click the link to unsubscribe right away.
• Confirm interest before deactivation – the template only highlights one option to stay subscribed. There’s still an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, but it isn’t highlighted in the body.

Once you choose a template for your starting point, you’ll be able to fully customize its content using MailPoet’s visual builder:

When you’re happy with the design, click Next to advance to the final settings page.

3. Activate your re-engagement campaign

On the last screen, you’ll be able to perform a few final housekeeping steps.

For example, you can choose one or more lists to target with this re-engagement campaign. You could use the same re-engagement email for all of your lists or you could create unique re-engagement campaigns for different lists – it’s totally up to you.

Once you’re happy with the settings here, click the Activate button to make your re-engagement campaign live:

Now, MailPoet will automatically send your re-engagement emails to people who meet your inactivity condition. You won’t need to lift another finger and you’ll be able to enjoy cleaner, more accurate lists.

If you want to create multiple re-engagement emails in a sequence, you can repeat the same steps above to create another email with different timing.

How to manage your re-engagement emails

If you ever want to disable or edit your re-engagement emails, you can go to MailPoet → Emails → Re-engagement emails.

You can use the Status toggle to quickly enable or disable a campaign and you can hover over an email and click Edit to adjust its content and settings:

Get started with re-engagement emails today!

If you want to maximize your email marketing efforts, re-engagement emails are an important tactic to implement.

There’s really no downside to sending them.

If you manage to win back an unengaged subscriber, that’s just as much of a win as getting a new subscriber in the first place.

And even if you don’t succeed in winning back all your subscribers, you’ll at least be able to clean your lists of people who really have no interest in what you offer. That means lowered costs, improved sending reputation, and more accurate engagement analytics.

After Apple’s iOS 15 update, re-engagement emails are even more important because of how Apple has made it harder for email marketers to track accurate open data and easier for people to hide their real email addresses.

Best of all, sending re-engagement emails isn’t complex or time-consuming. With MailPoet’s new re-engagement email type, you can easily set up your own re-engagement emails in minutes by following the tutorial above.

If you’re already using MailPoet, set up your first re-engagement email campaign to try it out.

And if you’re not using MailPoet yet, head to the MailPoet homepage to learn more about how MailPoet can help you achieve your email marketing goals without leaving your WordPress dashboard.

Do you still have any questions about re-engagement emails or how to use MailPoet’s new re-engagement email type? Let us know in the comments!

However, Apple’s iOS 15 update included some major privacy-focused features that have changed how the email marketing industry as a whole is able to track email engagement. That includes MailPoet.

To continue providing you with meaningful data about your email efforts in a post-iOS 15 world, we’ve made some changes to MailPoet’s analytics.

Most notably, MailPoet will now focus on click rate as the primary engagement metric in the MailPoet interface. Beyond that, MailPoet will also now divide open rates into separate machine-opened and human-opened rates and display bounce rate data on the main analytics page (you’ll learn why these changes are important in a second).

In this post, we’re going to introduce you to everything that you need to know about the new ways to measure email campaigns including:

1. The reasons why we’ve made these changes.
2. More details on the specific changes that we’ve made.
3. Our plans to continue helping you get more from your email marketing efforts now that iOS 15 is live.

Why did we change MailPoet’s analytics measurements?

Based on averages, Apple Mail and Apple devices probably account for around 30-50% of your email list, so any changes that Apple makes to its software are going to have huge ramifications on the data for your email campaigns.

So – what changed in iOS 15, and why should you care about it?

Apple Mail Privacy Protection obscures open rates

The biggest change is Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature, which affects how MailPoet (and all other email marketing tools) track open rates.

Email marketing tools like MailPoet track open rates by including an invisible image in your email’s code – called a “tracking pixel”. 

Each email includes a unique identifying image. When a user opens the email and their email client loads that image, we can know that the user opened the email and count it as an “Open” in MailPoet’s analytics.

With Apple Mail Privacy Protection, Apple Mail will now automatically preload that image (and other email data) when the email is received, instead of waiting for a human to open the email. It will also hide the user’s IP address to avoid geo-tracking and fingerprinting.

Using the “normal” method of tracking opens, this would essentially mean that every single email you send to a person using Apple Mail would look like it was opened right away, even if the actual human recipient never opened the email.

Given Apple’s market share, this means that it’s now difficult to accurately track human open rates for anywhere from 30-50% of your email list. Obviously, that’s a problem.

We want the data that MailPoet gives you to be useful and actionable, which means that focusing on open rates as the primary engagement metric is no longer an optimal strategy since we can’t guarantee that open rates are accurate for your entire audience.

To account for this, we’ve done two things:

1. The MailPoet interface will now position clicks as the primary engagement metric, rather than open rates.
2. MailPoet will divide open rates into “machine-opened” (triggered by Apple Mail Privacy Protection or something similar) and “human-opened” (opened by a human).

We’ll share more about these changes in a few seconds. But first, there are a couple of other iOS 15 changes that are worth mentioning.

Apple Hide My Email and Private Relay further muddy things

While Apple Mail Privacy Protection marks the biggest shift, Apple also released two other notable features in iOS 15 that will affect email marketing:

• Hide My Email – this feature lets users create a unique, disposable email address for each service they interact with. This is essentially a dummy email that forwards to the user’s real email address. This means that you might not be able to get a user’s “real” email address, which will make it harder for you to clean your lists of unengaged subscribers.
• Private Relay – this update also lets users hide their IP addresses when browsing in Safari. This means that you won’t be able to accurately detect a user’s physical location, which will affect sending emails targeted to users in specific geographic areas.

If you want to learn more about these changes, we have an entire post on what the iOS 15 update means for email marketers.

Here are the new email analytic measurements in MailPoet

Now that you know why we’ve made these changes, let’s talk about the new analytics area in MailPoet.

In the past, the MailPoet analytics area emphasized both open rates and click rates. Here’s what it looked like in the past:

With these changes, MailPoet will now position click rates as the only primary engagement metric. Again, this is because click rate offers a more meaningful, accurate measure of engagement now due to Apple’s changes.

You will still be able to see open rates, but open rate data will be less prominent in the MailPoet interface. Additionally, open rates will now be divided into two types:

• Opened – opens that we estimate to come from a human.
• Machine-opened – opens that we estimate to come from Apple Mail Privacy Protection or something similar.

We’ve also included a new metric in the main analytics interface – detailed bounce rates. The bounce rate gives you a general idea of how healthy your email lists are, which Apple has made more difficult to track with its new features. 

For example, if someone uses Apple’s Hide My Email feature to create a disposable email address and then later turns off that email address, that would count as a hard bounce if you send an email to that address. 

By giving you access to bounce rate data on the main stats page, you’ll be able to more easily track these details and see how healthy your lists are.

Finally, you’ll still be able to view unsubscribe data, just like you could before.

We’re not done with iOS 15 changes – you’ll get a new re-engagement campaign type soon

Because of Apple’s new Hide My Email feature and the lack of accurate open data, it will now be harder for you to remove inactive subscribers from your lists.

A user might have already abandoned the disposable email address that Apple created for them, but you might not be able to tell this because of how Apple handles open rates now.

If the user disables the private email, you should see it as a bounce rate, which is why we now display bounce rate data on the main MailPoet analytics page.

But if the user just abandons it or changes the email address to which it forwards messages, it will be more difficult for you to monitor the health of your lists.

To help you clean your lists, make sure you’re sending to engaged subscribers, and just generally improve your results, we’re planning to introduce a new re-engagement campaign type in the near future.

Keep an eye out for this new campaign type in the coming months!

iOS 15 changed the game, but you can still have meaningful email analytics

Because of Apple’s privacy-focused features in iOS 15, it’s become more difficult for email marketers across the industry to get accurate open rates and engagement metrics for the 30-50% of people who browse their emails on Apple devices or in Apple Mail.

With MailPoet, we want to provide you with actionable data that you can use to make smart decisions about your email efforts. Given the inaccuracy of open rates in a post-iOS 15 world, this means that focusing on open rates as a primary engagement metric is no longer a viable strategy going forward.

To account for this, we’ve updated the MailPoet analytics dashboard to continue to provide you with meaningful data:

1. Clicks are now the primary metric in the MailPoet interface. Click tracking is still accurate, which is why we’ve chosen this metric as the primary indicator.
2. Open rates will now be divided into machine-opened and human-opened. This will still give you a good estimate of a realistic open rate for your email efforts.
3. Detailed bounce rates are now available on the stats page, which will help you understand how healthy your lists are and account for Apple’s new Hide My Email feature.

If you’re already using MailPoet, you should see these changes in your dashboard when you visit the analytics area.

If you’re not already using MailPoet, install the free MailPoet plugin today to get started.

Finally, if you have any questions about the new email analytics, let us know in the comments!

Sending out an email newsletter of your latest posts is a great way to engage with your audience and get eyeballs on your content. But doing everything manually can be tedious, especially when you have to do it for every single post.

In this article, we’re going to show you how you can completely automate sending WordPress post notification emails using MailPoet.

Setting up this functionality with MailPoet has a few big benefits:

• Save time/effort – as a busy webmaster, you probably have a lot of things on your to-do list. If you automate sending your blog posts, you can permanently eliminate one task, which gives you more time for the other stuff!
• Ensure consistency – if you automate things, you never need to worry about forgetting to send an email. You can be confident that every single blog post will go out at the exact right time.
• Avoid third-party setup – with MailPoet, you don’t need to mess around with RSS feeds or third-party setup. You can configure/manage everything without leaving your WordPress dashboard.

In this step-by-step tutorial, we’ll show you exactly how you can set this up on your site, along with a few useful tweaks you can implement to really make this setup work for you.

Let’s dig in!

How to automatically send blog posts to subscribers on WordPress

For this tutorial, we’re going to assume that you already have MailPoet set up on your site. If you don’t, you can install the free MailPoet plugin from WordPress.org and then follow our getting started guide to get up and running.

Once you’ve got that out of the way, you can jump into setting up your automatic email newsletter.

1. Set up a new post notification email

To get started with your automatic blog post email, head to MailPoet → Emails and click + New Email to create a new email. 

Then, click the Set up button under Latest Post Notifications:

Now, you’ll be prompted to choose the frequency of the email.

What frequency should you use? Well, that really depends on your personal preferences and how frequently you’re publishing content.

There are two questions you need to answer here:

1. When do you want to send the emails? 

You can either send the emails immediately (as soon as you publish the blog post). Or, you could schedule them to go out at a certain time each day. For most sites, scheduling the post will work better as it lets you make sure the email is always going out at an optimal time. 

For example, if you publish your blog post at 11 PM, you might want to wait so that the email doesn’t hit subscribers’ inboxes when they’re sleeping.

2. How often do you publish new content and how often do you want to send emails?

When you set up an automatic email, MailPoet will include all of the content that was published since the last email up to the post limit that you set. If you publish a lot of content, you’ll need to decide if you want to give every post its own email or if you want to combine multiple posts into a single email.

For example, if you publish three posts per week, you could:

1. Send a weekly digest that includes all three posts in one email.
2. Send three separate emails for each post.

In total, you have five options for the frequency:

1. Once per day at a certain time – e.g. every day at 7 AM.
2. Weekly on a specific day – e.g. every Monday at 7 AM.
3. Monthly on a specific date – e.g. the first day of the month at 7 AM.
4. Monthly on a specific day of the week – e.g. the first Monday of the month at 7 AM.
5. Immediately – as soon as you publish the post.

For this example, let’s say you want to send your latest blog posts every Monday at 7 AM – you would configure it like so:

2. Choose a template and design your email

Next, you can choose one of the pre-built templates. Or, you can also choose to design your email from scratch using one of the blank canvases:

You’ll then be in the visual editor.

You can use the regular content blocks to add content and control the design. For example, you might want to add some static content that you want to be the same for every email.

To automatically insert your latest content, add the Automatic Latest Content element where you want your blog post(s) to appear. 

MailPoet will fill the widget with some real data from one of your existing blog posts, but this is just dummy data – in real life, this will automatically fill with the real information from your latest blog post(s).

To configure how your latest content appears, click on the widget to open its settings in the sidebar.

At the top of the sidebar settings, you can choose:

1. The maximum number of blog posts to include in one email. Remember, MailPoet will include all of the blog posts since your last email, up to the limit that you specify here. So if you set the limit to three posts but you’ve published four posts since your last email, MailPoet would only include the three most recently published posts.
2. Whether you want to filter out specific blog posts based on their categories or tags. For example, you could only send automatic emails for blog posts in a certain category, or you could exclude a certain category.

To open some additional design options, click the Display options link. Here, you can control how posts appear in your email. For example, you can:

• Choose how much content to include.
• Choose whether or not to include the post featured image.
• Show additional details like the author or categories.
• Configure the read more button/link. For buttons, you can click the Design a button link to access more options to configure the text, colors, etc. For example, you could change the button text from “Read More” to “View Full Post”.
• Choose how to sort posts (if displaying multiple posts).

3. Activate your email

Once you’re happy with the design of your email and you’ve added the Automatic Latest Content element to ensure your latest posts get automatically placed in the email, you’re officially ready to activate your email.

To do this, click Next in the top-right corner of the MailPoet interface. Now, you can configure a few more important odds and ends.

First, there’s the title and preview text of your email. One nice thing here is that you can use shortcodes to insert information, such as the number of blog posts that have been published since the last email.

For example, if you’ve published two blog posts since the last email, “The last [newsletter:total] posts from our blog” would read as “The last 2 posts from our blog”.

You can check out the full list of available shortcodes here.

Beyond that, another important choice here is which list you want to send these emails to. Depending on what people have opted in for, you could send this to all of your subscribers or just a specific list/segment. 

You could even use the MailPoet form builder to create a custom form to let people specifically subscribe to new post notifications. You could do this by adding people who use that form to a special list.

Other things that you can do here are:

1. Make any edits to your frequency if needed (you already set this up in step one – this is just a recap and another chance to make edits).
2. Edit the sender and reply-to details.
3. Add a Google Analytics campaign.

Once you’re happy with everything, click Activate to make your email live.

And that’s it! Your emails will now start going out automatically according to your settings.

If you ever want to pause or edit your automatic emails, you can go to MailPoet → Emails → Post Notifications:

How to automatically include your latest blog posts in other emails

In addition to letting you create a newsletter that automatically sends, MailPoet also makes it easy for you to include your latest blog posts in emails that you create manually.

For example, let’s say you write a custom newsletter that you send out every Friday. As part of that email, you might want to also include details on your most recent blog post(s).

With MailPoet, you can easily automate including those details so that you don’t have to worry about copy and pasting URLs, images, titles, etc. every time you write your newsletter.

To quickly insert one or more blog posts in a newsletter email, you have two options:

1. You can use the same Automatic Latest Content element from above to automatically insert your most recently published posts.
2. You can use the Posts element to choose any piece of content on your site – new or old.

We already showed you how things work with the Automatic Latest Content element, so let’s just take a quick look at the Posts element.

To begin, just add the Posts element wherever you want to insert the content. You can use the sidebar settings to choose one or more pieces of content to include and click Insert Selected to add them to the post:

Then, you can expand the Display options to control exactly what information you want to display and how to present it. For example, you can choose whether you want to include the post’s excerpt, just the title, or the full text:

And that’s it! You can proceed to send the email just like you normally would.

If you want to save time, you can save this design as a template. Then, whenever you go to write your weekly newsletter, all you need to do is write the unique content at the top and MailPoet will automatically handle inserting your blog posts for you.

To save your design as a template, click the arrow next to the Save button in the top-right corner of the editor and choose Save As New Template:

Then, you’ll be able to choose that template when you create a new email.

Bonus: New content notifications aren’t just for blog posts

So far, we’ve focused exclusively on automatically sending your latest blog posts to subscribers. But MailPoet actually isn’t limited to just blog posts – you can also use it to automatically send your products or the latest item in any custom post type.

If you’re not familiar with custom post types, they basically let you store new types of content on your WordPress site. For example, an event site might have an “Event” custom post type, a job board site might have a “Job” custom post type, etc.

For custom WordPress sites, this opens up some really cool solutions. Here are some examples:

• WooCommerce store – automatically send an email with your recently added products.
• Event site – automatically send an email with your latest events.
• Job board – automatically send a list of the most recent job listings.
• Directory site – automatically send an email with the businesses/service providers that have been most recently added.

Here’s an example of what it looks like to automatically insert posts from a custom post type – “Jobs” in this example:

Basically, no matter what type of content you’re creating, you can use MailPoet to automatically send out new content notification emails.

Start automatically sending blog posts to subscribers today

Automatically sending your blog posts to subscribers is a great way to engage with your audience and promote your content without lifting a finger. Once you set up your automatic post notifications, you can be confident that they’ll go out at the right time and with the right formatting.

With MailPoet, you can easily set up these automations for your blog posts (or any other type of content). Or, you can also quickly insert blog posts in newsletters that you manually create.

If you’re already using MailPoet, try out this feature today and start benefiting from automation.

And if you haven’t started using MailPoet yet, install the free MailPoet plugin today and you’ll be up and running in no time.

Jilt is a great tool for eCommerce email marketing. But the fact that the Jilt team is permanently shutting down the service at the beginning of 2022 means that you’re going to need to find a new solution to connect with your store’s customers.

If your store is powered by WooCommerce, MailPoet is a great Jilt alternative for WordPress that lets you use a lot of the same features that Jilt offers without leaving your WordPress dashboard.

In this post, we’re going to do two things:

1. Introduce you to MailPoet and explain why we think it makes a great Jilt alternative.
2. Show you step-by-step how to migrate from Jilt to MailPoet so that you can get up and running with no downtime in your store’s email marketing efforts.

Ready to learn more? Let’s dig in!

Note – MailPoet is a native WordPress plugin, so it’s not going to be a good Jilt alternative if you’re using Jilt’s Shopify integration.

Why Is MailPoet the Best Jilt Alternative?

If you’re a current Jilt customer, you probably loved Jilt because it made it so easy to create targeted segments and set up eCommerce-focused automations like abandoned cart reminders and after-purchase sequences.

With MailPoet, you get all those same core features so that you can keep up your WooCommerce email marketing efforts without missing a beat. Let’s quickly run through them…

Visual Email Builder With Automation

Just like Jilt, MailPoet makes it super easy to send one-off email broadcasts or set up automations.

For automations, you can choose from various WooCommerce-specific sequences like abandoned cart reminders and after-purchase sequences:

You can then choose a pre-built template or design an email from scratch. Either way, you’ll be able to use MailPoet’s visual, drag-and-drop builder – no technical knowledge needed. You’ll also be able to easily insert WooCommerce products and dynamic information via merge tags:

List Management and Segmentation

Another great Jilt feature is how easy it makes it to segment your customers. With MailPoet, you get those same detailed options, including the ability to segment by:

• Country
• # of orders
• Purchased items
• Total spent
• WordPress user role
• Signup date
• Active subscription using WooCommerce Subscriptions
• Past email behavior (clicks, opens, etc.)
• Etc.

Looking to create more complex workflows? Combining MailPoet and AutomateWoo makes a powerful Jilt alternative

Form Builder

Like Jilt, MailPoet lets you create your own email opt-in forms. You’ll even get more flexibility for building popups, slide-ins, notification bars, inline forms, and more. You can start from pre-built templates and customize everything using the native WordPress block editor:

You’ll also be able to add an opt-in checkbox to your checkout page.

Built-In Email Sending for Reliable Delivery

To help make sure your emails make it to your customers’ inboxes, MailPoet includes a built-in email sending service just like Jilt. This means you don’t need to mess around with SMTP services – you can just send emails and be confident that your subscribers will receive them.

Reports and Analytics

Finally, another strength of Jilt is the ability to clearly attribute revenue and purchases to your email marketing efforts. For example, if you send an email, you can see exactly how much revenue that email drove.

MailPoet gives you that same great depth of reporting, letting you not just see clicks and opens, but also see the actual revenue and purchases that come from your emails.

How to Migrate Jilt to MailPoet

Now that you know how MailPoet can pick up right where Jilt leaves off, let’s talk about how you can migrate from Jilt to MailPoet.

Before we get to the detailed step-by-step guide, let’s talk about what you…

1. Will be able to migrate.
2. Will need to manually recreate.
3. Won’t be able to migrate.

What you will be able to migrate:

• All of your contacts – MailPoet will automatically sync with your existing WooCommerce customers and you can also import your Jilt list directly to MailPoet to add any subscribers who aren’t registered customers.
• Third-party signup forms – if you’re using a third-party tool for opt-in forms such as OptinMonster or MailOptin, those tools also integrate with MailPoet. That means you can keep using the exact same forms – you just need to tell them to send data to MailPoet instead of Jilt.

What you will need to manually recreate:

• Email templates – MailPoet gives a visual, drag-and-drop builder to create templates, but you’ll need to rebuild them from scratch – you won’t be able to bring along your existing HTML templates from Jilt.
• Jilt signup forms – if you were using Jilt’s built-in form builder, you’ll need to recreate those forms using MailPoet’s form builder. 
• Automation flows – MailPoet includes built-in sequences that make it really easy to set up common emails like abandoned cart reminders and after-purchase messages, but you’ll need to manually set up your sequences again.

What you can’t migrate:

• Historical stats – unfortunately, you won’t be able to migrate your existing analytics and stats from Jilt. MailPoet can help you track this information going forward, but your historical data will be gone. Jilt does let you export some data on abandoned carts as a CSV, though.

How Does Migrating From Jilt to MailPoet Work?

To migrate from Jilt to MailPoet, you’ll basically need to do three things:

1. Set up your site to use MailPoet. This includes adding MailPoet forms, syncing MailPoet with WooCommerce, etc.
2. Disable existing Jilt features on your store, such as disabling your Jilt signup forms.
3. Migrate as much of your data as possible from Jilt to MailPoet (as we discussed above).

Let’s go through it…

1. Set Up MailPoet on Your Store

Before you start deactivating Jilt and migrating your data, you’ll first want to set up your store to use MailPoet to ensure a seamless transition. 

It’s best if you can do this on a staging site that you can then move live when the migration process is finished. By working on a staging site, you can ensure that your visitors won’t see any changes until you’re 100% ready to go live.

You can perform the migration on your live store if absolutely necessary, but we recommend taking a backup first (just in case – you shouldn’t have any issues) and making the changes during a low-traffic time (like later at night).

To get started, install and activate the free MailPoet plugin from WordPress.org.

Once you activate it, go to the new MailPoet tab in your WordPress dashboard to launch the setup wizard:

In this wizard, you’ll be prompted to sign up to the free MailPoet Starter plan to unlock the MailPoet Sending Service and all of the eCommerce features.

This account is 100% free for all core features, you can send up to 5,000 emails per month, and have up to 1,000 subscribers. Once you pass the 1,000 subscriber mark, or you require advanced functionality, the paid plans with the MailPoet Sending Service start at €9 per month:

At the end of the wizard, you’ll see another prompt to connect MailPoet to WooCommerce. Make sure to activate both of the options so that MailPoet can sync all the important data from your WooCommerce store:

If you need any help here, you can check out our full getting started guide.

2. Replace Jilt Signup Forms With MailPoet Signup Forms

Next, you want to replace any Jilt email signup forms with forms for MailPoet.

First, you’ll want to remove any Jilt email signup forms that you’re using.

To disable Jilt’s popup signup forms, go to the Signup Forms area in your Jilt dashboard and uncheck the box for Enable popup forms…

If you’re using any Jilt signup form shortcodes, you’ll need to manually remove those from your content and replace them with the MailPoet form shortcodes or blocks.

Speaking of, MailPoet also lets you create popup signup forms and inline forms that you display using a shortcode – plus a lot more.

To create forms, go to MailPoet → Forms → New Form. There, you can choose from a range of different form types and templates, including popups, slide-ins, notification bars, widgets, in-content forms, and more. You can also start with a blank form:

Once you choose your starting point, you’ll be able to fully customize your form’s content and design using the native WordPress block editor:

For popups and other targeted forms, you can target your form to specific content, like targeting certain types of content, categories, tags, etc. You can also use exit-intent targeting.

Or, you can manually place forms using shortcodes, which you could use to replace the Jilt shortcode forms if needed.

3. Adjust Any Third-Party Signup Forms (Optional)

In addition to Jilt’s signup forms, you also might be using opt-in forms from a third-party list building plugin such as OptinMonster, MailOptin, MailMunch, etc.

If you are, you’ll need to also edit those forms. But if you aren’t using any of these tools, you can just skip to the next step.

All of these providers will also integrate with MailPoet, so you can keep using the same form – you just need to change the backend integration so that your form adds subscribers to MailPoet instead of Jilt.

How you’ll do this depends on the service. For example, in OptinMonster, you can do it from the Integrations tab of the OptinMonster editor:

If you’re using any Zapier recipes or recipes from other webhook tools like Integromat, you’ll also want to update these to point at MailPoet instead of Jilt.

4. Enable Subscriber Sync At Checkout

As part of growing your email list, Jilt includes a feature that lets you show an opt-in form for marketing emails on your store’s checkout page.

If you’re using that feature on your WooCommerce store, the next step is to:

1. Disable that feature in Jilt.
2. Enable and configure that feature in MailPoet (MailPoet enables this by default but you might want to configure it).

To disable this feature in Jilt, go to Settings → Shop Settings → Storefront Settings and uncheck the box for Show an opt in at checkout…:

Then, to configure this setting in MailPoet, go to MailPoet → Settings → WooCommerce. Make sure that the Opt-in on checkout box is checked. Then, you can also:

• Choose one or more lists to add these people to. The default will be to just add them to the “WooCommerce Customers” list.
• Configure the checkbox opt-in message.

5. Set Up Your Welcome Email Autoresponder (and Disable in Jilt)

Next, you can set up a new welcome email/series for shoppers at your store.

To create a welcome email with MailPoet, go to MailPoet → Emails and choose the Set up option for the Welcome Email:

You can then configure who should receive the welcome email, choose a template, and customize it using the drag-and-drop MailPoet email builder (more on the email builder a little later on).

If you need some help, check out our guide on how to create a welcome email.

Once you’ve created your welcome email autoresponder in MailPoet, you’ll want to disable your welcome email in Jilt. Go to the Automations area in your Jilt dashboard and click Stop next to your welcome email:

When you stop the email, you probably want to choose to Keep scheduled emails to ensure that any recent signups aren’t lost in the cracks. Jilt will finish sending welcome emails to people who have already registered within the last hour but won’t send any new emails.

We’ll cover how to move the other automations later on.

6. Import Your Contact List from Jilt

Now, you’re ready to export your contact list from Jilt and import it to MailPoet.

At this point, MailPoet will have already synced all of your existing WooCommerce customers to your MailPoet lists. However, you might have people in your Jilt lists who haven’t registered on your store, so you’ll want to make sure to import your contact list to avoid missing anyone.

Don’t worry – MailPoet will not create a duplicate entry if the contact already exists (from having synced your WooCommerce store customer list). You can choose whether to overwrite the existing contact with the new data from Jilt or just skip any duplicates.

Export Contacts From Jilt

To begin, you need to export your contact list from Jilt. In your Jilt dashboard:

1. Go to the Contacts tab.
2. Use the checkbox to bulk select all contacts.
3. Under the Actions menu, choose Export contacts.

In the popup, make sure to choose All contacts and then click Start export:

Jilt will then email a .zip file that contains your store’s contact lists to the main email on your Jilt account.

If you start your export during a busy time, this might take up to a couple of hours.

Once you receive the .zip file, it will contain up to five CSV files (depending on your store’s data). The five files are:

• All contacts – every single contact from Jilt.
• Subscribed – only contacts that have opted in to receive marketing emails.
• Unsubscribed – contacts that have opted out, typically by clicking the unsubscribe link on an email.
• Non-subscribed – contacts that have neither opted in or opted out.
• Suppressed – contacts that have a suppressed status, such as hard bounces, people that marked you as spam, etc.

If you don’t see a certain file, that’s just because your store doesn’t have any contacts that meet the conditions for that file.

Import Contacts to MailPoet

Now, you need to import those contacts to MailPoet. When you import a list to MailPoet, you can set all of the subscribers’ statuses to one of these statuses:

• Subscribed
• Unsubscribed
• Inactive

For this reason, you should not just import the “all contacts” CSV file from Jilt, as you might accidentally mark unsubscribed contacts as subscribed. Instead, you should only import contacts from the Subscribed.csv file first. Then, you can go back and separately import your unsubscribed contacts if needed (making sure to mark them as unsubscribed). For more details, please read our checklist before importing contacts.

To import your contacts, go to MailPoet → Subscribers and click Import:

We recommend cleaning your lists before importing them – the next page will show a prompt to try clearout.io for free. Or, you can just proceed straight to the import process:

On the next screen, choose the option to Upload a file and select the CSV from Jilt. Remember – you should start with just the Subscribed.csv file so that you only import subscribed contacts:

Then, click Next Step.

Now, you’ll see another screen where you can:

• Map the fields in your CSV to fields in MailPoet. If MailPoet doesn’t have an existing field, you can either ignore the field or tell MailPoet to create a new custom field for that information.
• Choose which list to add subscribers to.
• Set the status for these subscribers. Since you only uploaded the Subscribed.csv file, you can safely mark all of these contacts as subscribed. The same is true for updating existing subscribers.

The last setting – Updating existing subscribers’ information… lets you choose how to handle duplicate contacts. That is, a contact that MailPoet has already synced from WooCommerce. 

You can either tell MailPoet to overwrite the existing information with the information from Jilt. Or, you can choose No to have MailPoet just skip those contacts and leave the information as the defaults from the WooCommerce sync:

Then, you can click the Import button to import all of your Jilt subscribers.

If needed, you can repeat the process to important unsubscribed contacts – just make sure to mark them as unsubscribed in MailPoet’s import settings.

Create Your Segments

Once you’ve imported your contacts, MailPoet gives you lots of tools to create segments. You can set this up by going to MailPoet → Lists → New Segment.

From there, you can set up segments by adding one or more conditions like:

• Country
• # of orders
• Purchased items
• Total spent
• WordPress user role
• Etc.

As long as the shopper has a WooCommerce account, you’ll still have that shopper’s full purchase history for segmentation – you won’t lose that in migrating from Jilt because it’s all stored in WooCommerce.

You’ll also get dedicated integrations for certain plugins, like whether or not a person has an active subscription with WooCommerce Subscriptions or a membership powered by WooCommerce Memberships.

7. Move Email Templates and Set Up Automations

Now, you’re ready to move all of your email templates from Jilt to MailPoet. As we mentioned earlier, you cannot migrate them automatically. Instead, you’ll need to recreate your templates using MailPoet’s visual, drag-and-drop editor. Or, you can also create new designs using MailPoet’s pre-built templates.

As part of this, you’ll also want to use MailPoet to set up any other email automations that you need on your store. This includes:

• Abandoned cart reminder emails
• First purchase emails
• After-purchase emails for certain products or categories
• Etc.

However, even though you can’t automatically migrate your emails, we do still recommend exporting your key Jilt emails as HTML just so that you have them. This can also help you manually recreate those emails in MailPoet.

Let’s go through the process…

Export Emails from Jilt

To export your emails from Jilt, go to the Automations list in your Jilt dashboard. Then, select the automation sequence you want to export – e.g. your “win back inactive customers” sequence:

On the next screen, open the drop-down for the email that you want to export and click Export HTML:

You’ll need to repeat the process for all the emails that you want to export. Unfortunately, there’s not an option to bulk export all of your emails. For this reason, you might just want to focus on key emails.

To export the HTML for broadcast emails:

• Go to the Broadcasts area.
• Click the gear icon next to the email that you want to export.
• Select Export HTML.

Create Emails in MailPoet

Now, you can recreate your emails/sequences in MailPoet.

To get started, go to MailPoet → Emails → Add New. Here, you can choose from basic emails, like a newsletter (which is similar to Jilt’s Broadcast emails).

Or, if you scroll down, you’ll see five types of WooCommerce-specific emails:

• Abandoned Shopping Cart – send one or more abandoned cart reminders.
• First Purchase – send a special email to people after their first purchase.
• Purchased In This Category – send an email to people who purchase a product in a specific category for the first time.
• Purchased This Product – send an email to people who purchase a specific product for the first time.
• WooCommerce Emails Customizer – customize your core WooCommerce transactional emails using MailPoet’s editor.

These WooCommerce-specific emails are what let you really duplicate the automation functionality in Jilt.

Select the type of email that you want to create – for example, abandoned cart reminders.

You’ll then be able to customize some details, like how long to wait after an abandoned cart to send the email. You can create multiple emails with different timings to create an abandoned cart sequence.

Once you’ve made that choice, you can choose from one of MailPoet’s pre-made templates or start from a blank slate:

Then, you can customize everything using MailPoet’s visual editor, which lets you recreate your Jilt templates or build new designs.

To help you work with WooCommerce, you’ll get dedicated content widgets for products and abandoned cart content. For more about how it works, check out the email editor documentation.

If you want, you can also save your design as a template, which lets you quickly reuse it later on:

To create additional emails, you can just repeat the same process.

8. Export Additional Jilt Assets If Needed

At this point, your site is configured to use MailPoet going forward. But before you close your Jilt account, you might want to export some additional data. Namely:

• Your historic Jilt invoices if you need them for accounting.
• Your existing abandoned carts. You won’t be able to import this data to MailPoet, but you still might want to have it just in case you need the information. Jilt will export it as a CSV file.

To export your Jilt account’s invoices, go to Settings → My Account → Invoices in your Jilt dashboard. We’re using screenshots from Jilt’s help documentation here:

Then, bulk select all of the invoices that you want to export and click Export invoice. Jilt will then email you a .zip file that contains all of those invoices:

To export carts:

• Go to the Abandoned carts area.
• Bulk select the carts that you want to export.
• Choose Export carts under the Actions drop-down.
• In the popup, choose All carts.
• Click Start export.
• Wait for an email from Jilt that contains a CSV file.

9. Sunset Your Jilt Account

Now, you’re officially ready to sunset your Jilt account. 

However, all Jilt cancellations are permanent and it’s not possible to reactivate your account or access data once the cancellation is processed.

So – before you make things permanent, we highly recommend going through and double-checking that you’ve exported everything and your site is working properly with MailPoet. For example, you’ll want to make sure that…

• Your MailPoet forms are up and running where they should be.
• Any third-party opt-in plugins now point to MailPoet and not Jilt.
• All of your contacts show up in your MailPoet lists.
• You’ve set up all the automation emails that you need and you don’t need to access any of your existing Jilt email templates.

Once you’ve verified that everything is working, you can cancel your Jilt account by going to Settings → My Account → Billing and clicking Cancel account (or Downgrade to free plan):

Start Using MailPoet as a Jilt Alternative Today

Jilt is a great email marketing tool for eCommerce stores, but it’s going away for good on April 30, 2022. If you’re looking for an alternative to avoid interruption in your email marketing efforts, MailPoet is a great choice if your store uses WordPress and WooCommerce.

In this guide, we’ve shown you step-by-step how to migrate from Jilt to MailPoet to avoid any interruptions in your store’s marketing.

If you still have any questions about moving your store from Jilt to MailPoet, let us know in the comments and we’ll be happy to help you get your migration working.

This type of paid newsletter approach has gone mainstream with platforms like Patreon and Substack. But while those tools undoubtedly make it easy to create a paid newsletter, they don’t give you much flexibility and they’ll take a 10%+ cut from every dollar you make forever. That 10% can really add up over time, especially as your newsletter grows.

In this post, we’re going to show you a better way to create your own paid newsletter subscription using self-hosted WordPress.

You’ll not only be able to keep more of your hard-earned subscription revenue, but you’ll also have more ownership and flexibility in your platform, which opens up new opportunities that those other platforms can’t offer.

Here’s everything that we’ll cover in this big guide:

• Some real-world use cases of how you can use this type of paid newsletter functionality.
• An example of what you’ll be building in the tutorial.
• What you need to create a paid newsletter subscription service with WordPress.
• A detailed step-by-step guide on how to set up your paid newsletter.

Why create a paid newsletter subscription service?

In a nutshell, a paid newsletter helps you achieve the holy grail of making money on the internet – automatic recurring revenue.

Once you convince a subscriber to sign up one time, they become a recurring source of revenue every month for the life of their subscription.

As long as you keep releasing the same quality of content that convinced them to subscribe in the first place, you’re likely to maintain a large percentage of your subscribers going forward.

Now, you might be saying, “people aren’t willing to pay for subscriptions from creators – I’m not Netflix”. That thinking was pretty popular five years ago, but it’s been proven wrong in 2021.

You can now find tons of examples of successful creators monetizing their content with subscriptions. Let’s look at some…

Examples of successful paid newsletters

A classic example of a paid newsletter is Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, which charges $12 per month for access to premium content and has built a household name doing so.

Scott’s Cheap Flights follows the same model, sending the best cheap airfare deals to paying subscribers, while only giving free subscribers a limited taste.

Companies have also built huge businesses helping creators monetize with subscriptions. Take two popular examples:

• Patreon – check out Graphtreon to see some popular creators and what they’re earning.
• Substack – view some of the most successful newsletters here.

There are heaps of creators making serious money with subscriptions, all from individual subscriptions that usually cost around $3-$12 per month. There’s no reason why you can’t join them.

How much could you make with a paid newsletter?

The attraction of recurring revenue is that it builds up over time.

For example, let’s say you charge $5 per month for access and you get five new subscribers per month. Here’s how much you earn per month.

• Month 1: $25 per month
• Month 2: $50 per month
• …
• Month 6: $150 per month
• …
• Month 12: $300 per month
• …
• Month 24: $600 per month
• and so on

Of course, in the real world, you’d have some subscribers stop paying (called churn). But you’d also see your new subscriber counts start increasing as your newsletter grows. 

By month six, you could be getting 15 new subscribers per month. And by month 12, you could be up to 40 new subscribers per month.

The key lesson here is this:

With automatic recurring revenue, even small increases in subscribers can grow to become a large source of revenue if you remain consistent in creating content.

Yes – it will certainly take time to grow a subscriber base. But once you have that base, you have consistent money coming in every single month, which is a pretty powerful concept.

What can you do with a paid newsletter subscription?

There are a lot of different types of content that you can monetize with a paid newsletter. Here are some ideas – but you can get creative and come up with your own use cases:

• Long-form content/journalism.
• Course content.
• Webinar access.
• Early access to a new feature/content.
• Exclusive content.
• Exclusive deals (e.g. Scott’s Cheap Flights).

Remember, you’re not only limited to the content that you can include in the newsletter itself.

For example, you could send an email to your paying subscribers that includes a special link to a webinar that’s only for them. This lets you get creative and go beyond just the standard long-form content model.

Here’s what you’ll be building in this tutorial

Now that you have some background, we’re going to start shifting into the “how to” portion of this post.

But before we get to the instructions, we want to give you a real example of the type of functionality that you’ll be able to set up and what the “flow” will be like for you and your users.

So – here’s an example from our actual test site, which we set up using the tools and instructions from the tutorial.

Experience for users

With the tutorial below, you can create two types of user experiences:

1. Just a paid newsletter where you only publish content via email.
2. A website/email hybrid where you publish paid content via both your blog and email. Visitors can consume content via either platform (or both).

Our example site is set up to demo the second approach, but you can also implement the first.

When a user lands on the site, they’ll be able to see the first paragraph of each premium blog post, but the full content will be locked behind a prompt to purchase a subscription. Or, visitors can subscribe directly from the sidebar or a dedicated subscription page:

You can also publish some content that’s fully available for free.

On the subscribe page, they’ll see a prompt to pay. If desired, you can offer multiple options, like a monthly rate and a discounted annual rate:

Clicking the option to sign up will prompt the user to check out* using your preferred payment gateway. You can use PayPal, Stripe, and lots of other options:

*In the tutorial, we’ll talk about some ways that you can simplify this if desired.

As soon as they pay, the visitor is now a subscriber, which means that they’ll be able to access the full text of the premium content and receive emails.

Your visitors will also be able to view and manage their subscription details from a dedicated area on your site:

Experience for admins (You)

On the admin side, you’ll be able to manage all of your subscribers from a simple dashboard:

Anyone who has an active subscription will automatically be on your paid newsletter list.

When you want to create an email, you can design the content using a visual drag-and-drop builder and/or insert the full text of a blog post:

You can then send the email to all paying subscribers with just a couple of clicks.

You’ll also have the option to publish the content on your website and restrict access to only paying subscribers.

What you need to create a paid newsletter subscription with WordPress

To create a paid newsletter subscription service with WordPress, you’ll only need two tools on top of your WordPress site.

1. MailPoet

First, you need MailPoet.

MailPoet is what handles all of the email parts of your service. It’s what will help you:

• Create emails to send to your subscribers – you can either use a simple text editor or create more unique emails via the visual, drag-and-drop editor.
• Reliably deliver emails to subscribers’ inboxes using the built-in email sending service.
• Segment your subscribers. For example, you could have one segment for all email subscribers (free and paid) and another for just paid subscribers so that you can offer multiple “tiers”.

Basically, if it has anything to do with email, MailPoet will handle it for you.

2. WooCommerce

While MailPoet can handle everything to do with “newsletter subscription”, the one thing it does not handle is the “paid” part of your newsletter subscription service.

To handle that, you need the free WooCommerce plugin, which is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress.

However, you won’t be using it as a full-service eCommerce platform. Instead, you’ll just be using it to process payments and manage subscriptions.

You’ll also need at least one paid WooCommerce extension – maybe two depending on your desired setup.

To accept ongoing subscription payments, you’ll need the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin, which costs $199.

With the plugin, you can charge monthly or yearly (or both – and let users choose). You can also incorporate elements like free trials, which are a useful marketing strategy.

If you also want to cross-publish your newsletter content on your blog/website and restrict access to that content for subscribers, you’ll need to add WooCommerce Memberships to the mix, which also costs $199.

Summary

To recap what we covered above, here’s what you need to create your paid newsletter service and what it will cost:

1. MailPoet – required – free Starter plan for 5,000 emails per month to up to 1,000 subscribers. Once your subscribers grow past that, suitable plans start at just €17 per month.
2. WooCommerce – required – free.
3. WooCommerce Subscriptions – required – $199.
4. WooCommerce Memberships – optional – $199.

The key thing here is that there are no ongoing commissions on the money that you accept. Minus the flat fees that you pay for these tools, you get to keep every dollar from your subscribers*.

*You’ll still need to pay the “standard” ~3% credit card processing fee to a payment processor like Stripe. This is unavoidable if you want to accept credit card payments on the internet and you’ll need to pay it no matter what solution you use.

For comparison, Substack charges 10% and Patreon charges 5-12% of all your subscription revenue forever, which really adds up over time. Those numbers are excluding the payment processing fee, so you’ll actually be losing ~13% with Substack and ~8-15% with Patreon.

How to create a paid newsletter subscription service with WordPress

Now, let’s get into the step-by-step guide for how you can set up this functionality using WordPress and the tools that we’ve discussed above.

For this tutorial, we’ll only assume one thing – that you already have a working WordPress website.

If you’re not sure how to create a WordPress site, here’s the quick process:

1. Purchase web hosting. Here are some WordPress web hosts that we recommend.
2. Use your chosen web host’s WordPress installer to install the software. Most hosts make this pretty easy to find, but you can always reach out to their support if you need some help.
3. Choose a WordPress theme to control the design of your site. You can always come back to this later once you set up your paid newsletter – so don’t stress too much.

Once you have your basic WordPress website up and running, here’s how to turn it into a paid newsletter subscription service.

1. Install and configure WooCommerce

To get started, go to Plugins → Add New. Search for and install/activate the free WooCommerce plugin.

Once you activate it, WooCommerce should automatically launch a setup wizard to configure some important basics for your store. Go through the steps to add some basic details – these choices don’t have any big implications, so don’t stress too much. Just answer the questions to the best of your ability.

When you get to the free features section, you can uncheck all of the boxes except for WooCommerce Payments, Jetpack, and MailPoet (the last of which you’ll set up later in the tutorial):

On the last step, WooCommerce will suggest some themes. If you already like your current WordPress theme, you can just continue with it.

Once you exit the wizard, you can go to WooCommerce → Settings → Payments to set up your payment processor. We recommend WooCommerce Payments. But you can use any gateway that supports subscription payments.

If you need any additional help with WooCommerce, we recommend consulting the support docs, like the getting started guide.

2. Set up WooCommerce Subscriptions

Now, it’s time to set up your subscription payment options.

To begin, make sure that you’ve purchased, installed, and activated the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin.

Then, go to Products → Add New to create your subscription product. When a visitor purchases this “product”, it will give them access to your paid newsletter content (and paid website content, if applicable).

To get started, enter the basic product details. You can give it a title – e.g. “Paid Newsletter Subscription” – and enter a simple description to explain what people will get with their purchase.

Then, you’ll use the Product data box to set up details for your subscription. First, set the drop-down equal to Simple subscription.

Then, use the settings to configure:

• Price
• Billing duration (e.g. every month or every year).
• Duration (you’ll probably want to set this to Never expire)
• Free trial (optional – but you can set this up if desired)

For example, to set up a subscription that costs $5 per month, you’d configure it like so:

If you want to offer multiple payment terms, you could optionally change the product type to Variable subscription. For example, this would let you charge “$5 per month” OR “$50 per year”:

And that’s it! Now, when people purchase this “product”, they’ll automatically be subscribed to your newsletter.

3. Set up MailPoet

Next, it’s time to set up the email portion of your paid newsletter service using MailPoet.

You should’ve already installed MailPoet when you went through the WooCommerce setup wizard in Step #1 of this tutorial. If you haven’t installed it yet, no worries! You can also just install and activate the free MailPoet Starter plan.

When prompted to use MailPoet with WooCommerce, make sure to allow both options so that MailPoet can automatically add your paying subscribers to your email lists:

Now, the user flow will go something like this:

• A user visits your site.
• The user purchases the subscription product via WooCommerce.
• MailPoet automatically adds the user to your email list based on the email they entered at WooCommerce checkout.

4. Send emails to your subscribers

At this point, you’re ready to start sending newsletters to your paid subscribers.

There are two parts to this…

Create a segment for paying subscribers

First, you need to create a segment in MailPoet that only includes users with an active subscription. This will distinguish paid users from free users or users whose subscriptions have expired.

To create your segment, go to MailPoet → Lists and then click New Segment:

Give your segment a name – e.g. “Paying Subscribers”.

Then, under the Segment drop-down, find the WooCommerce Subscriptions section and choose has an active subscription. That will expand another drop-down – choose the subscription product that you created in Step #2 of this tutorial:

Then, Save your changes.

Send emails to that segment

Now, you can use MailPoet’s email builder to send an email that only goes to your segment that contains paying subscribers.

To create an email, go to MailPoet → Emails → New Email. Then, choose the option for Newsletter:

You can then choose one of the templates. For a newsletter, you’ll probably just want a simple text email or one of the blank templates

For the content of the email, you have two options:

1. You can add the content directly to the email.
2. If you’re cross-publishing content between your blog and email newsletter (which we’ll touch on in the next section), you can automatically insert the full text of the blog post in the email.

If you want to add the content directly, you can just click and type:

To insert a post’s content, add the posts widget from the sidebar and choose the post you want to display:

Then, click Display options and choose Full post to display the full text. Make sure to click Insert Selected at the button to add the post.

Even if you’re embedding the full content of a post, you can still include custom content. For example, you could write a custom introduction for your email subscribers followed by the full text of the blog post.

Once you’ve added the content, click Next. Then, enter the basic sender details. Under Lists, make sure to choose your “Paying Subscribers” segment. You can then either send the email right away or schedule it for the future:

And that’s it! You just created your very own paid newsletter subscription service.

Optional enhancements to your paid newsletter subscription service

In the section above, we showed you the bare minimum to set up a paid newsletter subscription service with WordPress.

Now, let’s run over a few useful tweaks/additions you might want to configure. These are 100% optional, but they can further enhance your site’s functionality.

Restrict access to premium content on your site

If you want to also restrict access to some/all of your website’s content, you’ll need to purchase, install, and activate the WooCommerce Memberships plugin.

Then, go to WooCommerce → Memberships → Membership Plans → Add Membership Plan:

Give it a name and set Grant access upon equal to product(s) purchase. Then, choose your Newsletter Subscription product that you created earlier in the tutorial.

Under Subscription-tied Membership length, make sure to select subscription length. This will tell the plugin to maintain a user’s membership as long as they have an active subscription:

Then, Publish your membership.

Now, when you want to publish a piece of content that’s only available to paying newsletter subscriptions, you can use the Memberships box in the content editor to create a rule so that only paying subscribers can see the content – other users will be prompted to sign up for a membership:

WooCommerce Memberships has lots of other useful settings that you might want to explore. For example, you could show partial excerpts, customize the restricted content message, automatically restrict entire categories of content, and more.

Offer both free and paid subscriptions with different content

A lot of paid newsletters use a freemium model where free subscribers get access to basic content and paid subscribers get access to premium content.

MailPoet makes this easy to set up. In addition to your paid subscriber segment, you can just create another list to house all subscribers:

• When you want to send free content, you just send it to the list of all subscribers.
• When you want to send premium content, you only send it to the paying subscribers segment.

To help grow your free subscriber list, MailPoet can also help you create email opt-in forms – just go to MailPoet → Forms → New Form to get started:

Simplify your checkout process

As we mentioned earlier, WooCommerce is primarily an eCommerce plugin, so the default checkout process still follows the normal eCommerce flow where users first add the subscription to their shopping carts and then check out.

For a paid newsletter subscription, you don’t really need a shopping cart, so you might want to adjust the checkout flow.

For a simple option, you could use the WooCommerce Direct Checkout plugin, which lets you skip the shopping cart page and send users straight to checkout after they click the button to subscribe.

Or, you can find other plugins that let you completely revamp the entire checkout process. 

A good option is CartFlows, which would let you create a single landing page for your newsletter subscription. Visitors will be able to view details about the subscription and check out from just that page, which creates a more user-friendly experience.

Here’s an example of the type of integrated checkout you can create with CartFlows:

You can easily adapt this to a newsletter subscription without needing any code.

Create your WordPress paid newsletter today!

In 2021, we’ve seen the growth of paid newsletter subscriptions from solo creators or teams.

With WordPress, you can create your own paid newsletter subscription with more flexibility and without needing to pay an ongoing commission to another service.

You’ll keep all the money that your subscribers pay and you’ll retain the ability to add new features to your site, like launching an online course, selling products, creating a discussion forum, and more.

All you need is WooCommerce + WooCommerce Subscriptions to handle the “paid” part and MailPoet to handle the “email subscription” part.

Do you still have any questions about creating a paid newsletter subscription service with WordPress? Ask us in the comments!

By default, WordPress sends emails using the wp_mail function, which is based on PHP mail. While this method kind of works “out of the box”, it’s really not reliable and often ends with your emails arriving in the spam folder…or even not sending at all.

What’s more, WordPress doesn’t come with a built-in tool to send your own emails beyond its built-in emails for password resets and such, so you’re limited in the types of emails that you can send.

In this post, we’re going to cover all the key points related to WordPress sending emails so that you can fix any email issues on your site and get the functionality that you want. Here’s everything that we’ll cover:

• How to check if WordPress is sending emails.
• How to fix problems with WordPress not sending emails.
• How to send marketing emails or newsletters from your WordPress dashboard.
• How to have WordPress send custom email notifications for various actions.

If you already know what you’re looking for, you can click one of the links above to jump straight to a specific section. Otherwise, keep reading to learn more about how to test and configure WordPress email sending functionality.

How to check if WordPress is sending emails

If you’re having problems with your WordPress site’s transactional emails, the first step is to test whether or not your site is sending emails right now. This will alert you to any potential issues (which we’ll also show you how to fix in the next step).

If you’re not familiar with the term “transactional emails”, these are the automatic email notifications for things like password resets and form notifications.

To check and debug issues with WordPress sending emails, you can use the free Check & Log Email plugin.

Once you install and activate the free plugin from WordPress.org, go to the new Check & Log Email menu in your WordPress dashboard.

Enter your email address in the Send a test email field and then click the Send test email button (you can leave the default “standard headers” box checked):

Now, go and check your email inbox to see if the email arrived. If you don’t see it in your main inbox(es), make sure to check your spam folder, too.

There are three common outcomes here:

1. WordPress delivered the email perfectly and it showed up in your regular inbox. This is good, as it means WordPress is effectively sending emails.
2. WordPress delivered the email but it ended up in spam. This means that email sending is enabled on your server, but issues with authentication are causing email providers to flag the email as spam.
3. The email didn’t show up anywhere. This means WordPress isn’t sending emails in the first place (which might mean that your host has disabled PHP mail).

If you’re dealing with outcome #2 or #3, the next section will show you how to have WordPress send email via a dedicated sending service, which will fix both problems at once.

How to configure WordPress to send emails using SMTP

As I mentioned in the introduction, WordPress uses the wp_mail function (based on PHP Mail) to send its emails by default.

While this method doesn’t require any setup, there are two problems with it:

1. Some hosts disable PHP mail in the first place, which means your emails won’t send at all.
2. More importantly, wp_mail lacks any authentication/verification, which means a lot of email service providers will mark emails sent via this method as spam. Because email spam is such a big issue, email providers need to be aggressive in combating it, and one of the best ways is to block emails that lack proper authentication.

The best way to address both problems is to configure WordPress to use a dedicated SMTP sending service. By using such a service, you can make WordPress send email in a more reliable manner and also add the authentication to help your emails arrive in users’ inboxes instead of their spam folders.

Some of the most popular services here are:

1. SendGrid.
2. Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).
3. Mailgun.
4. Gmail (yes – you can use your Gmail account to send emails more reliably).

Or, some WordPress hosts also offer their own SMTP servers, which can be a reliable option for simple use cases. However, for the absolute best reliability for important emails, you should stick with a dedicated email sending service.

To configure your WordPress site to use one of these dedicated sending services, you can use a WordPress SMTP plugin. There are a lot of popular free WordPress SMTP plugins, but two good options to start are:

1. Post SMTP
2. WP Mail SMTP

To set this up, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Install your preferred plugin.
2. Choose your preferred sending service in the plugin’s settings.
3. Add the API key or SMTP server details for your sending service to the plugin’s settings.
4. Send a test email to make sure everything is working.

If you need a helping hand here, we’ve written detailed tutorials for some of the most popular email sending services:

• WordPress SendGrid tutorial
• WordPress Mailgun tutorial 

If you’re on a budget, using SendGrid is a good option because it’s free for up to 100 emails per day, which is enough for most “regular” WordPress sites.

Once you configure your sending service, you can send another test email and, this time, things should go perfectly according to plan.

How to use WordPress for marketing emails or newsletters

By default, your WordPress site only comes with the ability to send transactional emails. Again, these are the emails for things like password resets, new account confirmations, update notifications, etc.

With the right tool, however, you can also add the ability to send marketing emails and/or newsletters – all without needing to leave your WordPress dashboard.

To add this ability, you can use the free MailPoet plugin.

With MailPoet, you’ll be able to create email opt-in forms and manage your subscriber lists. Then, you can send one-off or automated emails that you build using a simple drag-and-drop editor. And again – the unique thing here is that you’re able to do all of this from your WordPress dashboard.

To help make sure your emails reliably make it to your subscribers’ inboxes, MailPoet also builds in its own email sending service to replace wp_mail. With this sending service, MailPoet will handle delivering and authenticating your emails, which means you can benefit from improved deliverability. It also means that you don’t need a separate email sending service, so you can skip the previous section if you decide to use MailPoet.

How to get started with MailPoet

To get started, you can sign up for a free MailPoet Starter plan, which includes access to the MailPoet Sending Service.

Follow the install and set up instructions provided (or you can use this guide).

Once you’re all set up, you can go to MailPoet → Forms → + New Form to create your first email opt-in form. This is a form that your visitors can use to join your mailing list/newsletter:

You can choose from different form types such as pop-ups or in-content forms. Then, you can customize your form using the native WordPress block editor.

Once subscribers have started joining your email list via your form, you can start sending emails to them by going to MailPoet → Emails. You can create newsletters, welcome emails, or latest post notifications.

If you have a WooCommerce store, you’ll also be able to create eCommerce-focused emails, like abandoned cart reminders.

When you choose an email type, you’ll see a bunch of pre-made templates, ranging from simple text-based emails to more stylized designs:

Once you choose your starting point, you’ll be able to customize your email content using a visual, drag-and-drop builder, including inserting dynamic information (like a subscriber’s first name):

When you’re happy with how it looks, you can send your email to all your subscribers or just a specific list.

Bonus: Have MailPoet send your transactional emails, too

In an earlier section, we showed you how to use a WordPress SMTP plugin to configure WordPress to send its transactional emails via a dedicated sending service.

If you’re using MailPoet, though, you can skip using a separate SMTP plugin because MailPoet also includes a built-in feature that lets you configure MailPoet to use its sending service for both your marketing emails and your transactional emails.

To enable this feature, go to MailPoet → Settings → Advanced.

Then, find the Send all site’s emails with… setting and set it equal to The current sending method – MailPoet Sending Service:

Once you save your changes, MailPoet will use its built-in sending service to deliver all of your site’s transactional emails.

How to customize and add new WordPress notification emails

If you want some help staying on top of what’s happening on your site, another useful way to work with emails is to configure WordPress to send email notifications for key actions on your site.

This is especially useful if you work as part of a team, as you can set up notifications for actions such as one of your authors publishing a new blog post.

To set this up, you can use the free Better Notifications for WP plugin. This plugin lets you do two things:

1. You can edit or disable all the default notification emails that WordPress already sends.
2. You can create your own notification emails using a WYSIWYG editor.

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you can go to the new Notifications area in your WordPress dashboard to control your site’s notification emails. To add a new notification, click the Add New button.

In the Notification For box, you can choose from a long list of actions to trigger a notification email. This includes a ton of different stuff – some examples:

• New post published
• Post updated
• User role changed
• New category created

You can also choose which user roles to send the email to. For example, you could only send it to admins.

Then, you can enter the email text in the WYSIWYG editor. You can also use the Find Shortcodes button to insert dynamic information in the email:

Once you save and enable the notification, WordPress will start sending emails when your notification trigger is met.

Note – make sure to also use MailPoet or an SMTP plugin (like we detailed above) to make sure your email notifications make it to your inbox.

Make WordPress send email reliably today!

The default way that WordPress sends emails is limited and only works for a small set of transactional emails. What’s more, in many situations, you can’t be confident that your WordPress site will send emails in the first place…and even if it does, those emails might end up in spam.

To check if WordPress is sending emails, you kick things off by using the free Check & Log Email plugin.

If you’re having problems, the best way to improve the reliability of your site’s email is to use a WordPress SMTP plugin and a dedicated email sending service.

Or, if you want to go beyond transactional emails, you can use the free MailPoet plugin to send marketing emails and newsletters without leaving your WordPress dashboard. MailPoet also includes its own built-in email sending service to ensure reliability, along with a feature to enable the service for transactional emails, too (which eliminates the need to use a WordPress SMTP plugin).

Finally, if you want to have WordPress send even more transactional emails, you can also use the free Better Notifications for WP plugin to create your own custom notification emails – just make sure to pair it with a sending service via MailPoet or a WordPress SMTP plugin.

Do you still have any questions about how to work with WordPress sending emails? Let us know in the comments!

The core WordPress software does a lot of things well, but email isn’t one of them. If you want to grow an email list, send emails to your subscribers, or even just make your WordPress site’s basic transactional emails more reliable, you’ll need the help of a plugin.

Thankfully, there are tons of great plugins to improve how WordPress works with email, no matter what features you’re looking for.

In this post, we’ve collected and compared your top ten options so that you can go straight to the plugins that will help you the most.

We’ll start with a few important thoughts on choosing the right plugin for your needs and then we’ll get right into a detailed comparison of the top 10 email plugins for WordPress.

Important considerations when choosing a WordPress email plugin

Before we get to the plugins, let’s quickly run over some important factors to consider as you browse the list and choose the right plugins for your site.

First off, “email plugins” is a pretty generic term, so we can’t actually be sure what you’re looking for. Do you want a plugin to…

• Grow your email list?
• Send marketing emails from your WordPress dashboard?
• Create a simple newsletter?
• Improve the reliability of your site’s transactional emails? (e.g. password resets and form notifications)
• Send custom notification emails?

All of those things could be considered “WordPress email plugins” and if you search for “email” at WordPress.org you’ll see plugins that cover all of those different use cases. For that reason, it’s important to understand exactly what you want out of a WordPress email plugin.

Some of the plugins on this list only focus on one of those things, while others can perform multiple actions, such as both creating email opt-in forms and letting you send emails to your subscribers. We’ll be sure to note all these differences while going through the plugins.

Second, if you are looking for a plugin that lets you send emails from your WordPress dashboard, another important consideration is how that plugin actually sends those emails. By default, WordPress sends its emails using WP mail (based on PHP mail), which often ends with emails arriving in subscribers’ spam folders (or just not sending in the first place).

If you want your emails to make it to your subscribers, you need to look for a plugin that either…

1. …includes its own built-in sending service. This is the simplest option because there’s zero additional setup – you just install the plugin and you automatically benefit from reliable delivery.
2. …lets you integrate with a dedicated sending service. This is a little more complicated because you’ll need to sign up for a third-party sending service and connect it to your site, but it serves the same effect of making your site’s emails a lot more reliable.

Of course, those are only the important email-specific considerations. You’ll also want to consider all the important criteria in any WordPress plugin such as:

• Price
• Support
• Updates
• Ease of use
• Etc.

With that in mind, let’s get to the ten best WordPress email plugins!

Nine best WordPress email plugins in 2021 and beyond

1. MailPoet

MailPoet is a native WordPress plugin that offers an all-in-one solution for newsletters and email marketing.

Without ever leaving your WordPress dashboard, you’ll be able to create your own custom opt-in forms and pop-ups, add your subscribers to one or more lists, send them one-off or automated emails using a drag-and-drop editor, and view statistics to see how your emails perform.

You can use MailPoet for simple text-based newsletters or you can create beautifully designed emails using the editor (and some handy pre-built templates).

If you’re running an eCommerce store, MailPoet also has a bunch of dedicated WooCommerce features to help you send product recommendation emails, abandoned cart recovery emails, and more.

Finally, MailPoet includes its own built-in sending service, so you can be confident that your emails will make it to your subscribers’ inboxes without any configuration on your part. Or, you also still have the option of using your own email sending service – it’s up to you!

Key features:

• Native WordPress plugin – do everything from your WordPress dashboard.
• Use the WordPress block editor to design custom opt-in forms to grow your lists.
• Drag-and-drop email builder, including pre-built templates.
• Send one-off emails or create automation sequences like automatically sending an email when you publish a new post.
• View analytics to track opens, clicks, etc.
• Built-in email sending service to ensure reliability. Or, you also have the option to use your own SMTP service.
• Option to use the MailPoet sending service to also deliver your site’s transactional emails in addition to the marketing emails or newsletters that you send.
• Dedicated WooCommerce features to customize emails, send abandoned cart emails, and more.

Pricing:

MailPoet is available for free at WordPress.org.

If you want to use MailPoet’s built-in email sending service (which we recommend), the MailPoet Starter plan is free for up to 1,000 subscribers and 5,000 emails per month. Once you cross the 1,000 subscriber mark, or you want access to advanced features such as multi-condition segmentation and enhanced analytings, the paid plans start at €9 per month.

If you’d like to use your own sending service, the Creator plan starts at €7 per month.

Suitable for:

MailPoet is good for individuals and businesses who are looking for an all-in-one native WordPress email marketing solution. Unlike a lot of plugins, you don’t need a third-party email marketing service. Instead, you’ll still get access to all those advanced features without leaving your WordPress dashboard.

MailPoet is also a great option for WooCommerce store owners, as it includes a number of eCommerce-focused features.

2. WP Mail SMTP

WP Mail SMTP is a popular plugin that helps with one specific aspect of WordPress emails – your site’s transactional emails. It does not help you grow an email list or send marketing emails to subscribers, but it does help you make sure your site’s transactional emails successfully land in people’s inboxes.

As a reminder, transactional emails are those emails for things like password resets, form notifications, order confirmations, etc.

WP Mail SMTP includes dedicated API integrations for some popular email sending services including SendGrid (tutorial), Gmail, and Mailgun (tutorial). And if you’re using a service for which there isn’t an API integration, WP Mail SMTP also offers a generic SMTP option so that you can enter the credentials for any SMTP server (like the free SMTP server that many web hosts offer).

Key features:

• Use a dedicated email sending service to deliver your site’s transactional emails.
• Dedicated API integrations for popular providers including SendGrid, Mailgun, Gmail, and more.
• Generic SMTP option to use any SMTP server.
• Option to send a test email to make sure your service is working.
• Email log to track which emails your site is sending (in the Pro version).

Pricing: 

WP Mail SMTP has a free version at WordPress.org, which is all that most sites need. The Pro version adds the email log feature as well as more dedicated integrations for Amazon SES, Microsoft SMTP, and Zoho Mail SMTP.

Suitable for: 

WP Mail SMTP is focused on one thing – improving the reliability of your site’s transactional emails.

3. Newsletter

Newsletter is another popular native WordPress plugin that, as the name suggests, helps you create and send newsletters without leaving your WordPress dashboard.

In that respect, it shares some similarities with MailPoet. You can use Newsletter to create opt-in forms, add subscribers to lists, and then send them emails using a simple drag-and-drop composer.

For more features, there are a number of free and premium add-ons for automation sequences, reports, targeting, additional opt-in types, and more.

However, Newsletter doesn’t include its own sending service, so you’ll need to integrate it with a dedicated service such as SendGrid or Mailgun.

Key features:

• Native WordPress plugin – do everything from your WordPress dashboard.
• Create opt-in forms.
• Add subscribers to one or more lists.
• Drag-and-drop email composer.
• Send one-off emails for free or automatic emails with a premium add-on.
• No sending service, but works with SMTP plugins and has premium add-ons to connect to sending services.

Pricing:

The core Newsletter plugin is available for free. For the advanced features, you can purchase a bundle of all add-ons for $65.

You’ll also need a dedicated email sending service, which might cost additional money depending on how many emails you send.

Suitable for:

Newsletter can be a good option for people looking for a lightweight native WordPress email marketing plugin that lets you do everything from your WordPress dashboard. Just remember that you’ll need to pair it with a sending service to make sure your emails make it to your subscribers.

4. Newsletter Glue

Newsletter Glue is a newer option that’s focused on helping bloggers and writers send simple newsletters. It lets you design your newsletters using the native WordPress block editor and then send them out to subscribers.

One of the unique things about Newsletter Glue is that it lets you publish a complete blog post straight to your newsletter, which lets you create your own sort of Substack system where you can cross-publish content to both your blog and newsletter.

Newsletter Glue doesn’t include its own built-in sending service or list management – you’ll need to connect to an email provider via the built-in API integrations and manage your subscriber lists from that provider. 

Key features:

• Write and design your newsletters using the native WordPress block editor.
• Cross-publish blog posts straight to an email list with the check of a box (like Substack).
• Publish your newsletters to your site (if you aren’t already writing them as blog posts).
• Free version lets you use Mailchimp to manage your lists and deliver your actual emails.
• Pro version adds support for ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor, GetResponse, MailerLite, Sendinblue, and Sendy.
• Dedicated blocks to insert blog posts, author bylines, and more (Pro version).

Pricing: 

Newsletter Glue has a free version that works with Mailchimp. To unlock more providers and access the premium blocks, you can upgrade starting at $57.

You’ll also need to factor in the price of your email service, which you need to manage subscribers and send emails. This will depend on the service that you’re using, the size of your list, and/or the number of emails you send.

Suitable for:

Newsletter Glue is best for writers and publishers who are looking for a simple way to send primarily text-based newsletters and/or cross-publish complete blog posts directly to newsletters like Substack allows.

5. Newspack Newsletters

Newspack Newsletters is a brand new offering from Automattic that fills the same space as Newsletter Glue, which is why we’re featuring it next. If you’re not familiar with Automattic, it’s the same company behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce.

As the name suggests, Newspack Newsletters is part of Automattic’s Newspack initiative, which is a suite of features designed to help news organizations and media companies get more from WordPress.

Like Newsletter Glue, Newspack Newsletters lets you write and design your newsletter using the native WordPress block editor. You can use most of the core blocks including buttons, columns, groups, and more. 

Newspack Newsletters doesn’t include its own list management or sending service, though. You’ll need to integrate it with a dedicated email sending service such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact.

Key features:

• Write and design your newsletters using the native WordPress block editor. Almost all of the blocks will work in your emails, including the column block.
• Start with pre-built newsletter templates or design your own from scratch.
• Dedicated blocks to insert your latest blog posts or include advertisements.
• Connect to Mailchimp or Constant Contact to manage your lists and deliver your newsletters.
• Send emails without leaving your WordPress dashboard.

Pricing:

The Newspack Newsletters plugin is currently 100% free. However, you’ll need to factor in the cost of your email marketing service, which you need to manage subscribers and deliver emails. This will depend on the service that you’re using, the size of your list, and/or the number of emails that you send.

Suitable for:

Newspack Newsletters makes a good option for news organizations or media publishers who are looking for a simple option to deliver newsletters. While there’s nothing saying you can’t use it as a regular blogger, it is part of Automattic’s Newspack project so its features and development will probably focus on news organizations.

6. Sendinblue

Sendinblue is a standalone email marketing service, but one of the reasons it deserves a spot on this list is because it has one of the most detailed WordPress integration plugins of any email marketing service.

It offers a complete solution for email marketing, as well as other marketing tools such as a CRM, text messages, live chat, and even a landing page builder.

If you’re running an eCommerce store powered by WooCommerce, Sendinblue also has a dedicated WooCommerce add-on plugin.

Key features:

• Dedicated WordPress integration plugin to perform most email marketing actions from your WordPress dashboard.
• Drag-and-drop email builder.
• Send one-off emails or set up automation sequences.
• Detailed list management and segmentation.
• Use Sendinblue to deliver your site’s transactional emails, as well.

Pricing:

The Sendinblue plugin itself is free, but you’ll need a Sendinblue account to use it. Sendinblue has a free tier that lets you send up to 300 emails per day to unlimited subscribers (but includes Sendinblue branding).

After that, paid plans start from $25 per month.

Suitable for:

Sendinblue can be a good option for people who are looking for more of an all-in-one digital marketing platform that also includes a CRM, text message marketing, and more. Though it is a standalone tool rather than a native WordPress email plugin, it does “feel” a lot like a native WordPress solution thanks to its integration plugin.

7. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is focused on doing one thing really well – creating conversion-optimized opt-in forms to help you grow your email lists.

It does not let you send emails or manage subscribers by itself. Instead, it lets you create the forms that feed into your email marketing service, including some other tools on this list like MailPoet.

By offering this singular focus on opt-in forms, OptinMonster is able to do them really well. You’ll be able to create a ton of different form types, target them by content or user behavior, trigger them at specific times, and lots more.

You’ll also get analytics and A/B testing to improve your forms.

Key features:

• 9+ different types of opt-in forms including popups, inline forms, slide-ins, content lockers, full-screen welcome mats, notification bars, gamified “spin the wheel”, and more.
• Pre-built opt-in form templates or start from a blank slate.
• Design/customize your opt-in forms using a drag-and-drop builder.
• Detailed targeting rules – target by content or user details such as geolocation, “new vs returning visitors”, and lots more.
• eCommerce-specific targeting rules to target offers by the items in a shopper’s cart, the value of their order, and more.
• Flexible trigger rules, including exit-intent.
• Integrates with most popular email marketing services/tools including MailPoet, Mailchimp, AWeber, and lots more.

Pricing:

OptinMonster’s paid plans start at $108 for your first year, though you’ll need a higher-tier plan to access the more advanced targeting rules, triggers, and features like A/B testing.

Suitable for:

OptinMonster is best for people who are looking for a heavy-duty list-building tool that connects to most popular email marketing services and allows for personalized, highly-targeted opt-in offers.

It can be a bit pricey, though, so you should only pay the money if you’re going to take advantage of its advanced marketing features. For simple opt-in forms where the most advanced targeting you’ll use is content targeting, you can find cheaper options. Speaking of…

8. Hustle

Like OptinMonster, Hustle is another email plugin that’s specifically focused on helping you grow your email list, rather than sending emails or managing subscribers itself.

It lets you create different types of forms including popups, slide-ins, inline/after-post forms, widgets, and more. You can customize your forms using a simple editor and then target them to specific content/users and use triggers to control when they appear.

You’ll also get built-in statistics to track conversion rates.

Key features:

• Create different types of forms including inline forms, popups, slide-ins, and more.
• Pre-built templates.
• Customize your forms using a simple interface (it’s not drag-and-drop, though).
• Target your forms to specific content.
• Target your forms using user information such as number of visits, referrer, logged-in status, and more.
• Integrates with most popular email marketing services including MailPoet, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and more.

Pricing:

Hustle has a free version at WordPress.org that will work for most sites. It gives you most of the features but limits the number of forms you can create. For example, you can create three popups, three slide-ins, etc.

For unlimited forms and some other advanced features, Hustle Pro costs $60 per year or $6 per month.

Suitable for:

Hustle is a good option if you’re looking for a more budget-friendly solution (vs OptinMonster) for email opt-in forms. The forms still look great and it still gives you a good number of advanced targeting rules, but it’s a lot more friendly on your budget.

If you took the price out of the equation, OptinMonster is a more advanced tool. However, for most WordPress users, Hustle is still a better option because it gives you all the important features at a much lower price point (or even for free).

9. MC4WP (Mailchimp for WordPress)

As the name suggests, MC4WP is focused exclusively on helping you connect your WordPress site to Mailchimp.

With the free version, it’s a pretty basic connection, just letting you create opt-in forms that add people to Mailchimp lists. But if you purchase the premium version, you’ll get a lot more advanced features such as user sync, WooCommerce activity sync, and more.

All in all, a really solid WordPress email plugin if you’re already using Mailchimp for email marketing.

Key features:

• Create opt-in forms for Mailchimp.
• Add checkboxes to your comment and registration forms to let people join your lists.
• Sync WordPress users to Mailchimp.
• Sync WooCommerce data to Mailchimp.
• Reports to track your most effective opt-in methods.

Pricing:

The core MC4WP plugin is available for free at WordPress.org, but it only lets you create a single form. To create more forms and access lots of additional features, the paid version starts at $59.

Of course, you’ll also need a Mailchimp account, which might cost money depending on your usage.

Suitable for:

MC4WP is great if you’re already using Mailchimp and want a plugin to help you integrate your WordPress site with Mailchimp.

However, because it’s 100% focused on Mailchimp, it’s obviously not a viable option if you’re using another email marketing service.

How to choose the best WordPress email plugin for your needs

There’s no single best WordPress email plugin for everyone. Instead, you should be looking for the best plugin for your needs, knowledge level, and budget. That could be a single plugin on this list or, depending on the features that you need, it could be a stack of multiple plugins each focused on separate goals.

Here are some thoughts on the best plugin to choose for several different scenarios…

• If you’re looking for an all-in-one email marketing solution, consider MailPoet or Newsletter for native WordPress solutions, or Sendinblue for a tight WordPress integration from a SaaS tool.
• If you’re looking for a dedicated solution for email opt-in forms, consider Hustle if you’re on a budget or OptinMonster if you’re willing to pay a premium for advanced marketing features. Both integrate with MailPoet as well as other email marketing services.
• If you’re running a WooCommerce store, consider MailPoet. Or, Sendinblue also offers a dedicated WooCommerce add-on plugin.
• If you want to design simple newsletters using the WordPress block editor, consider Newsletter Glue or Newspack Newsletters. Just remember that you need a third-party sending service.
• If you want to improve the reliability of your site’s transactional emails, consider WP Mail SMTP. MailPoet and Sendinblue also have features to use their sending services for transactional emails in addition to your marketing emails.

Do you still have any questions about picking an email plugin for WordPress? Let us know in the comments!

Well, as we’ll explain in this post, the actual answer is a little bit more complicated than just comparing your open rate against the benchmark. Yes – benchmarks can be useful, and we’ll share the data, but benchmarks should still be just one data point in your analysis.

In the end, the only benchmark that really matters is your own business. Are your open rates going up or down? And how can you optimize your campaigns to boost your open rates to get the most benefit out of your email marketing efforts?

With that in mind, we’re going to do two things in this post:

1. We’ll show you the email open rate benchmarks from five different providers that are, collectively, based on tens of billions of emails. After all, you’re probably primarily here for the data, so we want to deliver.
2. We’ll share some tips for how you can improve your email open rates, so that you can improve your open rates versus the most important benchmark – your site’s current open rates.

Email open rate benchmark studies – what the data says

If you’re searching for email open rate benchmarks, you probably want to see what the data says, so we’re not going to keep you waiting.

The overall average email open rate across all industries and locations from five different data sources is 19.66%. 

Collectively, the total numbers come from tens of billions of emails sent within the past couple of years. We didn’t weight the numbers based on the number of emails sent – we just averaged the overall open rate from each source.

Let’s go through the data in more depth…

Mailchimp benchmarks – 21.33% average open rate

• Source

In Mailchimp’s email marketing benchmarks, the overall average email open rate is 21.33%.

However, the open rate depends heavily on the industry. Unsurprisingly, the highest open rate is for government-related emails, which enjoy an average open rate of 28.77%. The second-highest was “Hobbies” at 27.74%, which is also unsurprising (it makes sense that people are interested in emails about their hobbies).

The lowest industry average open rate was for vitamin supplements at 15.03% (with eCommerce not far behind at 15.68%).

Mailchimp maintains its own public open rate benchmarks based on billions of emails. The data was last updated in October 2019 and comes from email campaigns with over 1,000 sends.

Mailchimp also analyzed other email marketing metrics, such as click-through rates (CTR), unsubscribe rates, and more.

Campaign Monitor benchmarks – 17.8% average open rate

• Source

In Campaign Monitor’s benchmarks, the overall email campaign open rate average is 17.8% for all industries.

Just as with Mailchimp, the industry with the best average open rate was government-related emails at 30.50%. Nonprofits took second place with a 25.2% open rate.

The lowest open rates were for companies in the automotive (and aerospace!) industry with a 12.60% open rate. I’m guessing that’s mostly from car dealerships, and not that people are ignoring invitations to go to space with Virgin Galactic

The food and beverage industry and retail industry were also near the bottom at 13.0% and 13.9%, respectively.

Campaign Monitor built its benchmarks by analyzing over 30 billion emails sent by companies in over 171 countries between January and December 2019.

GetResponse benchmarks – 22.15% average open rate

• Source

The average open rate in GetResponse’s benchmarks across all industries was 22.15%, which is the highest on this list.

One unique thing about GetResponse’s benchmarks is that they also break out the data by country, which is another big variable in open rates. Many European countries had open rates of ~35% or higher:

• Germany – 40.67%
• France – 36.25%
• Netherlands – 35.35%
• Spain – 34.95%
• Italy – 33.24%

On the other hand, the USA and UK were near the bottom, both with identical 18.39% open rates.

This adds another big wrinkle when trying to compare your business against the benchmarks, as you need to focus on location as well as industry.

GetResponse collected its data from over four billion emails sent between January to June 2019. They only looked at active senders with at least 1,000 contacts.

Constant Contact benchmarks – 16.06% average open rate

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In Constant Contact’s benchmarks, the overall average was just 16.06%, which is the lowest overall average of any dataset we looked at.

It’s also the only provider that had an industry in the single-digits – automotive services enjoy just a 9.80% open rate.

The industries with the highest open rates were religion (28.04%), government (25.92%), and primary/secondary education (25.32%).

To collect its benchmarks, Constant Contact analyzed over 200 million emails. The data is current through December 2020.

HubSpot benchmarks – 20.94% average open rate

• Source

In HubSpot’s benchmarks, the overall average email open rate is 20.94%, though it varies by industry.

The lowest industry is “Electronics” at a 19% open rate and the highest industry is “Real Estate”, at a 26% open rate.

HubSpot built its email open rate benchmarks by analyzing the data from 19,033 customers for batch email campaigns. In this case, “batch” campaigns are campaigns with over 1,000 sends.

The data was collected from November 2018 to November 2019.

What’s a good email open rate?

Above, we told you that the overall average open rate is 19.66% across the five different data points we looked at, though it varies quite by industry and country.

So – what does that data mean to you?

If your average open rates are above 19.66%, does that mean they’re fully optimized and you don’t need to change a thing?

If your average open rates are below 19.66%, does that mean your email campaigns are an unoptimized hot mess and you need to hire a new marketer?

The answer to both questions is most likely “no”. 

If you’re above the benchmark, that doesn’t mean you can’t get even higher open rates. 

And if you’re below the benchmark, that doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing something wrong. Sure, there’s probably room for improvement, but the same applies even if you’re above the benchmark.

What is the benchmark, anyway?

While you can see that there are some trends between different benchmark services (e.g. religious emails always have one of the highest open rates), there can be differences, too.

Let’s say you’re in the construction space and your average email open rate is 19%. You want to see how you compare to the benchmark, so you go to Mailchimp and see that the overall is 21.77% for construction businesses.

You’re low! You need to fix things, right?

But then your coworker goes to Constant Contact’s benchmarks where the average open rate for construction is 17.71%. Now you’re beating the benchmark!

You’ll never be able to find a perfect benchmark to compare yourself against, so benchmarks are only useful as a very rough guide.

If your open rates are 5% and the benchmark is 25%, then yes – the benchmark is a pretty good indicator that you need to change how you’re doing things. On the other hand, if you already have something that’s in the same area as the benchmark, the benchmark can’t really tell you whether you’re doing well or poorly because there are too many variables.

A good email open rate is better than it was the month before

We’re not trying to tell you that benchmarks are worthless and you should ignore them. Instead, we just want to remind you that the most important benchmark is your own benchmark.

All things being equal, are your open rates getting better or worse over time?

If they’re getting better, you should view that as a success. If they’re getting worse, it might be time for some course correction.

So – how can you improve your own email open rates? That’s the question we’re going to answer in the next section.

How to improve your email open rates – nine tips

What you’re doing to improve your own email open rates is far more important than how you compare to the benchmarks. So – let’s end with some actionable tips on how to improve email open rates.

If you’re already beating the benchmark, these tips will help you leave it even further in the dust. And if you’re struggling to catch up with the benchmark, these tips will give you the knowledge you need to keep improving.

1. Nail your subject lines

When you’re talking about open rates, your email subject lines are the most important content in your email. After all, they’re pretty much the only content your subscribers will see when deciding whether or not to open your email.

Here are some quick tips:

• Keep your subject line short – under 60 characters.
• Play around with “stand out” tactics such as humor, shock and awe, vanity, etc.
• Lead with a discount (if applicable).
• Use numbers and lists.
• Personalize your subject lines (more on this later).

Additionally, make sure to avoid words that will get you flagged for spam or the Gmail Promotions tab.

You can also consider playing around with adding emojis in your subject lines. There’s some data suggesting that this can increase your open rates, though it’s not clear-cut so you’ll want to see how it works with your specific audience.

For a deeper look, check out our full guide on how to write great email subject lines. We also have some examples to inspire your subject lines and some “templates” you can use.

2. Make your preview text work for you

All email clients display your subject line, but many email clients also give you a little bonus text – the preview text.

You need to maximize all the real estate that’s available to you, so you shouldn’t forget about the preview text when optimizing your open rates. In fact, according to a survey from Litmus, 24% of respondents used the preview text to decide whether to open an email.

By default, email clients show the first sentence of your email. However, if you’re using MailPoet, you can enter a dedicated preview line that works in tandem with your subject line to boost open rates.

3. Send your emails at the right time and day

One of the interesting things about Campaign Monitor’s open rate benchmarks is that Campaign Monitor also breaks out the data by day, not just industry.

The difference isn’t huge, but the highest day (Tuesday) has almost a 1% greater open rate than the lowest day (Sunday). There’s also even bigger variance within some industries:

The time of day matters, too. Most office workers regularly check their emails at 10 AM, but they might not be as tuned-in at 7 PM when they’re trying to relax.

Of course, this depends on your industry and target market. If you’re sending emails to college students, they might not be as active at 10 AM as office workers.

The important thing is to recognize that day/time matters and experiment to find the best time for your subscribers – check out our post on the best day to send emails for more.

4. Segment your lists

Segmenting your email list is another useful strategy to improve your open rates. 

With segmentation, you can make sure that you’re sending emails that are optimized to engage with different types of subscribers on your list.

For example, let’s say you have an eCommerce store. It wouldn’t make sense to send the same email to people who make a purchase every single week as you send to people who haven’t purchased in three months, right?

By breaking them into different segmented campaigns, you can send promotional emails that are relevant to each type of customer, which can boost your open rates.

Check out our beginner’s guide to email segmentation to learn more.

5. Personalize your emails

According to some data, emails with personalized subject lines enjoy ~26% higher open rates than those without.

Logically, this makes sense – if people see a personalized subject standing out from a list of generic subject lines, they’ll be more likely to click on it.

Some ways to personalize your emails include:

• Adding a user’s first name. You can do this easily with MailPoet.
• Sending emails based on a user’s activity.
• Segmenting your lists (per the previous suggestion).

For more, check out our guide on how to use personalization in emails.

6. Pay attention to the number of emails you send

The number of emails that you send plays an important role in your open rates – send too often and people might think you’re a spammer, but send too infrequently and people might forget about you. Both scenarios can lower your open rates.

In general, sending an email somewhere between once a week and once per month is a good starting point, though it obviously depends on what you promised people when they signed up. 

If someone specifically signed up to receive a daily digest, then by all means send them a daily email.

For some more thoughts here, check out these two posts:

• How often should you send emails?
• How to not be a spammer (we know you would never intentionally spam! But accidental spamming can be just as frustrating to your subscribers)

7. Use clear and consistent “From” contact information

Using a clear “From” name and email address helps subscribers quickly tell that the email comes from a trusted source (you) rather than some random sender. If they know that they can trust the source, they’ll be more likely to open it.

Some tips:

• Always use your business/brand name as the “From” name. If you want to personalize it, you can use “Name at/from Your Business”. For example, “Kim at MailPoet”.
• Make sure your “From” address is your main domain name.
• Avoid using a “no-reply@” email addresses.

Here’s an example that includes both a personal name (builds a connection) and the business name (instant recognizability):

8. Clean your lists of unengaged subscribers

One huge variable for open rates is how clean your lists are. If you’re sending a big chunk of your emails to people who haven’t interacted with your emails in months (and may not even use the email address anymore), your open rates are obviously going to be a lot lower than someone who’s exclusively sending to engaged subscribers.

This is why it’s a good best practice to keep your lists clean. You’ll save on sending costs, improve your email reputation, and get more useful data. Check out our guide on how to clean your list using Clearout.

9. Pay attention to email deliverability

Your subscribers can’t open your emails if they don’t receive them, which makes email deliverability a silent killer for your open rate.

Deliverability includes issues such as getting stuck in users’ spam folders, bounce rate (soft and hard bounces), and other issues that prevent users from even seeing your emails in their inboxes.

If you’re using MailPoet, we offer a built-in sending service that handles many of these issues for you so that you don’t have to worry about your emails ending up in spam. We also have a huge guide on improving email deliverability.

For some other tips, check out our full post on how to improve email open rates.

The best email open rate benchmark is your own – improve it today

In the end, all of the email open rate benchmark data in the world can’t answer the most important question of your email marketing efforts – are your email marketing campaigns performing as well as they could be?

Yes – you can use the benchmark data to see how you stack up. But in the end, the most important data is whether you can increase your own open rates (and other important metrics such as click-through rates).

With the actionable tips we gave you at the end of this post, you should have the knowledge that you need to start improving and iterating your campaigns to move your open rates ever upward.

And if you’re using WordPress and in search of an email marketing plugin that gives you all the tools you need to maximize your open rates, learn how MailPoet can help you make your email marketing efforts a success. Get started today – it’s free.