Do you have an idea of how many promotional emails are in your inbox right now? Probably not.
As a business owner yourself, you need to frame the question differently. That is to say – how do you ensure that your marketing emails do not end up in the spam folder, or merely brushed aside?
For that, you need a system that strategically targets your customers, offering them precisely what they are looking for when they are looking for it. As you likely know, it is not by accident that you receive discount codes for the items you were browsing for.
So how do you achieve this? It is nearly impossible to keep track of all your subscribers and handle emails manually on your WordPress site. But, that is why the CMS introduced plugins to do the heavy lifting on your behalf. With demand for email marketing shooting up, these third-party solutions come in handy to automate your mail services.
Today, we are focusing on one such top-performer in the market for email customization – MailPoet. The provider offers a simple, intuitive, and robust solution for WordPress that you can use to create beautiful emails and deliver them to the right inboxes.
Here we discuss what features make the plugin an attractive tool for WordPress.
MailPoet at a Glimpse
Categorizing a plugin as an email tool is a little ambiguous these days. After all, almost every tool comes with an email feature integrated into it. But – MailPoet was designed exclusively to enable you to offer a well-rounded email experience to your customers and one that exceeds the standard welcome emails.
It can help you take care of everything associated with emails, from a subscription form to lists, and ensuring that emails are delivered accurately with the plugin’s dedicated SMTP.
In short, MailPoet can be used for the following:
- To create registration forms on your site
- Collect leads and subscribers in an easily manageable database
- Create different email categories
- Segment subscribers into multiple email lists
- Automate email deliveries
- Track the performance of email campaigns
The plugin also comes with an easy email builder that lets you customize the design/layout to ensure that your brand voice is consistent throughout.
Types of Emails on MailPoet
MailPoet is a versatile plugin that enables you to target your emails based on different scenarios. Currently, the plugin can help you create and send three broad types of emails.
Newsletters
Newsletters have become an excellent feature to keep your customers up-to-date about what your online business offers. MailPoet categorizes this as a unique and non-recurring email. You can choose to send it immediately or plan it for a later date and/or time.
You can utilize the in-built design features and create a layout that works best for the respective theme.
Welcome Emails
Welcome emails are among the most engaging ways to make a great impression on a customer. You can trigger it when one of the two events occur:
- When a new subscriber joins
- When a new WordPress user is added in a specific role
These welcome emails can be sent as you prefer – immediately or after a specific delay. Apart from merely sending a welcome message, you can get creative with MailPoet. For example, these welcome emails can showcase your latest posts, most-read articles, or even a coupon for your products.
MailPoet even allows you to extend this welcome experience over a period of time. For instance, you can schedule emails to be sent for a few weeks after joining your site, in the ‘drip-content’ format.
Sending emails for WordPress users is particularly useful if you run a membership website or a WooCommerce store. This is because you can add a new member in the position of the contributor, editor, administrator, etc. This will allow you to send welcome emails that cater to their specific role.
Last Post Notifications
If you have a blog or publish content regularly on your site, you can automate emails with your latest content to be sent to your subscribers. Once again you can send these emails right away or choose to schedule it. Regarding the latter, this can be done on a weekly or monthly basis.
MailPoet gives you tons of email templates to choose your design on. You can choose how many posts you want to include in the email, or narrow down the posts based on only one category. You can also manually select the specific posts you want.
If you opt for the send immediately option, an email will be sent to your customers every time you upload a new post. The plugin further allows you to send specific emails to different groups of customers using the list segmentation.
Note: MailPoet comes with an Automatic Latest Content widget that you can include in the email body. This will allow the plugin to feature the most recent posts on your site, without you having to choose them separately.
Each of these categories also comes with several other features that will guarantee that your emails are useful in enticing your customers to click on, visit, and engage with your site.
MailPoet Features
Here’s a list of some of the main features offered by MailPoet.
Email Templates
The most impressive feature of MailPoet is the numerous design options that it offers. The plugin has over 50 starter email templates, which ensures that there is a design to mirror your brand.
You can pick up a layout that works with your theme so that you can showcase the same design style across all platforms. Furthermore, the drag-and-drop editing makes it exceedingly easy to customize as well.
You can make these beautiful layouts more engaging by adding images, product features, blog posts, and linking them to your website. You don’t even have to copy-paste any elements. Instead, you can directly select them from the editor.
WordPress Signup Forms
It goes without saying that in order for your emails to work effectively, you first need a database of subscribers. Instead of relying on another plugin for this, MailPoet will help you create custom WordPress signup forms.
You can choose what fields you want to include in the form. Apart from the name and email address, there are also options to request customers for additional info, such as their birthday or location.
You can customize these signup forms further by changing the layout or position. These could appear as a pop-up, a sticky bar, at the bottom of your page, or even show up as a widget on your site.
In case you need to place it elsewhere, you can also add the form to your web pages using iFrame, PHP, or MailPoet’s own Gutenberg block.
Note: MailPoet offers an extensive collection of third-party integrations for forms. At the moment, there are 19 add-ons that will help you create and customize forms without the need for any coding.
List Segmentation
Every powerful email campaign strategy relies on targeted marketing. This means that you need to modify your messages based on customer behaviour and interactions with your site. Using MailPoet, you can now create custom segments of your subscribers.
You can send emails based on who opened your messages or include personalized messages for those who visited specific pages. There is no limit to how many lists you can create in MailPoet, giving you ultimate control of how you categorize your visitors.
A worthwhile feature here is that you can include these lists in the subscription form itself. This gives your subscribers a choice to decide when they want to receive emails from you.
Filter Inactive Subscribers
Unfortunately, not every subscriber on your list will be regularly engaging with your site. As such, sending messages to inactive subscribers is a mere waste of your resources.
In the long run, it can actually harm your sender score as well. For those who don’t know, a low email sender score could mean higher bounce rates and lower open rates, which is something you want to avoid.
MailPoet comes with the functionality to automatically detect and remove inactive subscribers from your email list. This will improve your deliverability, which in turn can boost your click-through rates.
Email Deliverability
Along the lines of the previous point, it is necessary to emphasize that improving your email deliverability is one of the top priorities of MailPoet. With a 99% global delivery rate, the plugin ensures that all emails arrive at the inbox and not your customers’ spam box.
The plugin also functions quite fast and can handle up to 50,000 emails per hour without slowing down any other features. To reduce the bounce rate, MailPoet will also brush up your email list regularly to avoid email addresses that are no longer in use.
MailPoet also has a built-in SMTP service, ensuring that you do not miss any WordPress transactional emails. The plugin guarantees that all email services to and from your site will run smoothly without any interruptions.
In case there is an issue with how you send or receive emails, MailPoet will automatically revert to sending emails with your host.
Email Analytics
When a plugin boasts such exemplary features, how do you know whether these are actually benefiting your business or not? That is where MailPoet’s email analytics come in. The plugin offers reports that provide deep insight into the user experience you are providing with your emails.
At the surface, you can find out how your email campaigns are performing, and collect valuable data on the open and click-through rates. This should give you a bigger picture of what elements you got right, and which campaigns need more work.
Further down, you can even find out which customers are opening your emails, and which links get the most visits. This way, you can tweak your call-to-action, email subject lines, content, and design – to offer a better user experience.
In addition, MailPoet can also be integrated with Google Analytics to receive a meaningful perception of who your subscribers are and how they engage with your site. You can use this data to better segment and target audience categories with personalized emails.
Import Your subscriber List
Have you been using another email plugin for WordPress? MailPoet can easily import your lists through a CSV file upload. This also offers CSV import and export support so you can switch between plugins.
MailPoet + WooCommerce
If you are sending targeted emails, it is likely that you have products to sell through your website. And, not so surprisingly, MailPoet integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce as well. The plugin’s features are more or less the same when it comes to WooCommerce, only that it adapts to the store’s requirements better.
MailPoet enables you to target customers at every stage of their journey, from creating their account on your store to check out. You can even automate the signup form to appear on your WooCommerce checkout page to encourage customers to register for your newsletters to receive product updates.
All new subscribers will be added to your WooCommerce customer list by default, allowing you to segment and create targeted-email campaigns later.
WooCommerce Email Customizer
Those who use WooCommerce already know that the email functionality is not on par with its other features. MailPoet can bridge the gap for you with its built-in email customizer dedicated to WooCommerce. You can refresh the look of your emails using the pre-designed templates and add your brand’s themes to them.
First Purchase
The ultimate user experience you can offer is to make every customer feel special. Your customer service should begin by sending a personal thank you message for shopping with you.
Setting up the first-purchase emails is a breeze with MailPoet. All you need to do is choose the design with the message you want, and schedule it when you want the email to be triggered.
Follow-Up Emails
Not only can you send an automated email when a customer makes their first purchase with you – but you can then elect to send follow up emails. This has the potential to enhance their user experience.
These emails can include exciting content such as your latest blog post, a product tutorial, discount codes, or product recommendations. You can automate when the emails are to be sent out, and case base the segments on products or product categories.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Want to encourage your visitors to retrieve their abandoned shopping cart? An email might do the trick.
Set up automated WooCommerce abandoned cart emails using one of the pre-built email templates. You can also send multiple recovery emails scheduled for different delays.
Even if the subscriber isn’t logged in on your site, MailPoet can identify the address and send them that much-needed nudge. The plugin will automatically stop these emails as soon as the customer completes the purchase.
Measure Your Email-Related Revenues
Go one step further and find out how fruitful your marketing efforts are. Run email analytics on your WooCommerce store, and gain in-depth reports on your email ROI. You can find out how much revenue each email brings in, all from the WordPress dashboard itself.
MailPoet Pricing
MailPoet has two sets of pricing plans based on whether you want to include the sending service or not.
With MailPoet Sending Service
Regardless of which plan you choose, all features of MailPoet are absolutely free for up to 1,000 subscribers. You can send unlimited emails to your subscribers, track emails, and get expert help from the MailPoet support team.
For over 1,000 subscribers, the price varies from 15 euros to 350 euros per month. The specific amount will ultimately depend on the number of subscribers.
If your subscriber count is over 70,000, you can reach out to the team for a custom plan. You can also opt for yearly plans that will get you a slight discount.
Without the MailPoet Sending Service
- Blogger License for 1 website at 149 euros per year.
- Freelancer License for 4 websites at 249 euros per year.
- Agency License for unlimited websites at 499 euros per year.
In case you are joining MailPoet with over 1,000 subscribers, then you can take advantage of the 30-day money-back guarantee to try out its features first-hand.
Why Should you Use MailPoet?
Let us sum up the pros of MailPoet:
- Email customization with the drag-and-drop builder
- Integrations with form and web page builders
- Segmentation and automated scheduling for emails
- Offers high email deliverability rates
- Extensive documentation and easy access to customer support through email and support forms
MailPoet certainly poses a strong argument in its favour. On the other hand, if you look at some of the other main players in the email customizer space, you might find that MailPoet does lack in certain areas.
For example:
- No advanced customer segmentation
- No split testing
- Limited customization of emails
MailPoet Review: The Verdict?
MailPoet certainly simplifies email marketing for its users. The plugin is easy to set up and use – and offers a full range of attractive functionalities.
It can effectively run WooCommerce email campaigns and present you with ROI reports. Its pricing is also quite flexible. You do not have to compromise for a bigger plan to gain access to its features, as you will be paying based only on your subscriber count.
MailPoet touches the most important segments desirable to send targeted emails. However, some users might feel the need for more acute filtering to categorize customers.
If this is not an issue for you and your website, MailPoet has the ability to be an ideal digital business associate heading your email department.
MailPoet
Pros
- Drag-and-drop builder
- Integrations with form and web page builders
- Segmentation and automated scheduling for emails
- Offers high email deliverability rates
- Good Customer Support & Documentation
Cons
- A little pricer than other options
