Whether you run a membership site, a local community site, or take care of the WordPress site for your local school, there are multiple reasons why you may want to bulk email your WordPress users. For example, you may want to start sending emails about:
- News and general announcements
- Site maintenance messages
- Information about updates to the site, such as a new section or major changes to an existing one
- Updates to your site’s terms and conditions
- New membership rules or guideline updates
- Changes to account information
- Security information
In this post, I’ll show you how you can easily send bulk emails to all your registered WordPress users with MailPoet in a GDPR friendly manner. For this post, I’ll assume you already have MailPoet installed. If you don’t, you can download it for free.
Sending bulk email to specific WordPress user roles
By default, anyone who signs up to your WordPress site will be a “subscriber” both in WordPress and in MailPoet. Out the box, WordPress has a range of roles which include:
- Subscriber – Default role assigned to all users
- Author – Allows an individual to write posts and pages
- Editor – Allows an individual to write their own posts and pages, and edit others
- Administrator – Access all areas of a WordPress website and install plugins — do anything!
Plugins can also create their own user roles, which means it isn’t uncommon to see user roles such as “customer” (thank you, WooCommerce) and “members,” which various WordPress membership plugins use.
Regardless of the WordPress user role, with MailPoet, the user will always be a “subscriber” within your user email list.
With the MailPoet Starter plan (free for 1,000 subscribers) you can create segments to target specific WordPress user roles or group of users when sending email.
Perfect if you run a large WordPress website and want to contact all authors only, or all editors only etc.
If you want to combine segments, you’ll need to upgrade your MailPoet plan to Creator, Business, or Agency.
How to email your WordPress users with MailPoet in a few short steps
Step 1: Ask permission to send emails (important!)
Since the advent of GDPR, it’s essential that you get your members’ permission before emailing them, otherwise you could face a rather hefty fine.
In other words, you cannot send emails to your WordPress users if they have not previously opted-in to get emails.
Forcing your WordPress users to sign up has 2 critical benefits for your deliverability:
- You’ll never send emails to fake addresses because bots never confirm their subscription
- If your website has been around for more than a year, there’s a good chance some of your WordPress users’ email addresses don’t exist anymore. Sending emails to invalid addresses is a sure way to get you in the spam folder.
MailPoet makes this easy. When a new user registers on your WordPress site, MailPoet will automatically send a confirmation email to the user asking them to opt-in.
Here’s the default confirmation email, which can be modified on the settings page at MailPoet > Settings > Sign-up Confirmation.
And this is the email your users will receive:
Psst! Pro-tip: The confirmation email accepts HTML. Jazz it up by following our guide.
Step 2: Set up a new email
Creating a new email in MailPoet couldn’t be easier. Go to your MailPoet > Emails and click the + New Email button at the top of the screen.
On the next screen where you select your email type, use the standard newsletter, and click “Create.”
Step 3: Choosing a template for your bulk email
MailPoet comes with a nifty range of professionally-designed email templates that you can use to bulk email your WordPress users. For example:
Prefer something more subdued or plain text in style? The template Welcome Email Blank 1 column would be perfect if you want a more “traditional” individually-written email.
The best part of bulk emailing WordPress users with MailPoet is that the emails are fully customizable with the use of personalization shortcodes, which let you personally address your subscribers by their first name or last name, even in the subject line. Tied in with the newsletter designer, you can create a completely custom email template to send.
Step 4: Send your email to your WordPress users
Finally, on the last step of the sending process, select the “WordPress Users” user group from the drop-down list on the final phase of creating your email.
And you’re done! You’ve just created your first mass email to send to your WordPress users in less than 5 minutes.
The WordPress Users list is automatically updated in MailPoet
Out of the box, MailPoet already segments your registered WordPress users for you in a list called “WordPress Users” (covered above) which contains all users who have an account on your site.
If a registered WordPress user edits their user profile, e.g. (last name, first name, etc.), the data is automatically updated in MailPoet.
Each user in the list gets their own MailPoet subscriber profile too, perfect if you want to assign custom user data.
Just like any other list, the user can also unsubscribe from the mailing list and still remain a WordPress user on your website.
How to prevent spam user registrations
Many membership websites are plagued with fake signups. With MailPoet, new users will be asked to double opt-in to the list to prove they’re actually real people. This will avoid you having an email list full of fake subscribers or bots which will tarnish your reputation as a sender.
Nonetheless, WordPress site admins should actively fight spam signups. It’s a broad topic and one of which there are already great guides, like this one with 6 accepted techniques to stop spam signups.
Our own recommendation to stop fake signups?
- Use Google reCaptcha, which will prevent most automated bots from being able to sign up via your forms.
- Implement account approval. This can be done using a plugin such as User Verification or any Membership plugin.
How to send a welcome email to new users
Once you’ve sent your first email to your WordPress users, it’s time to step up your email automation game.
Autoresponders (also known as welcome emails or notification emails) are a great way to engage with your WordPress users from the off because you engage by email immediately when you have their attention.
There are different types of autoresponders and welcome emails are just one example of using autoresponders effectively in your email marketing strategy.
Interested in learning more about autoresponders and welcome emails? Then check out our guide to Welcome Emails.
Example of Autoresponder emails
The Headspace app has great autoresponder emails with one sent on signup and another after you first mediate. Take a look at these two newsletters I received after signing up for their list:
And then the next day I received this:
As you can see, using personable autoresponders as part of your strategy for bulk emailing your WordPress users can help connect your registered WordPress users to your content and your business.
In these examples, Headspace has shown and encouraged me to get started quickly and easily and then continues to send mail, including reminders that use positive reinforcement based on my first meditation session.
You can also apply these same principals to autoresponders for your WordPress users.
Top 3 plugins to email WordPress users
There are many great WordPress plugins available for sending bulk emails to registered users. Here’s a selection of thress that we have tested and recommend.
1. MailPoet
MailPoet is our newsletter plugin for WordPress and offers a range of templates and features; it’s an easy way to create your emails, as you’ve seen above in this guide. MailPoet’s built-in WordPress users list means it is both quick and straightforward to bulk email all your registered users.
The plugin’s post notification functionality means you can automatically notify subscribers of new posts without having to manually create a newsletter each time.
MailPoet stats:
- 100,000+ Active websites.
- 4.5-star rating out of 549 reviews.
- A free version (including sending), plus scalable paid plans with advanced functionality.
2. Mass Email To users
Mass Email To users is a simple plugin that allows you to bulk email all your WordPress users in one go, which surprised us because of its effectiveness.
You’ll need the Pro version to make use of a WYSIWYG editor and to utilize email personalization (such as first name, last name, etc.).
The free version also doesn’t come with the capability of a user unsubscribing, so may not be the best option for those in Europe due to GDPR.
Mass Email To users stats:
- 1,000+ Active websites.
- 2.9-star rating out of 7 reviews.
- Limited free version with a paid version available with additional functionality.
Despite the poor stats of the plugin, in our testing it worked well and we enjoyed using it overall, hence it’s inclusion in this list.
3: WP Email Users
WP Email Users is a simple and lightweight plugin for mass emailing all your WordPress users. Out of the box, it comes with a full WYSIWYG editor. You can edit HTML and configure it to send with a professional sending services such as SendGrid and Amazon SES.
WP Email Users stats:
- 6,000+ Active websites.
- 3.7-star rating out of 29 reviews.
- Completely free.
Conclusion
Being able to bulk email your WordPress users is a great tool to have in any website owner’s toolkit. As long as you handle the process responsibly and don’t spam anyone, it can be a win-win situation for the user and you as a site owner.
As a site owner, you get an easy way to contact all your users without any hassle. And as a site user, you get to know about important information and upcoming events without having to keep an eye on the website each day.
Don’t forget to check out our ultimate guide to emails in WordPress. You’ll learn a few things, for sure!