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Building an email list is one of the most important things for online business. Why? Because emails are one of a great way to increase your conversion rate. Also, by having a large email list – you can communicate with your users more conveniently
But how do you build this valuable list? There are a lot of ways to build an email list but if you are using WordPress, An email marketing plugin automates the entire process of getting subscribers and sending emails to them. It saves you time.
With an email marketing plugin, you can generate leads, segment your contacts, and nurture them into customers – all within WordPress. In this article, I’ll share the best WordPress email marketing plugins.
Before going to depth, let’s recap some basic things.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a highly effective digital marketing strategy of sending emails to visitors and customers. Effective marketing emails convert normal visitors into customers and turn one-time buyers into loyal customers.
Why Email Marketing is Important?
So, you have got the basic idea about email marketing – but maybe you are still wondering why everyone emphasizes email marketing?
There are many reasons you should make email marketing as your top marketing priorities. The top 3 reasons are:
1. Email is a great communication channel: According to OptinMonster, at least 99% of consumers check their email on a daily basis. The data of statista reveals that roughly 281 billion emails were sent and received each day in 2018, the figure is expected to increase to over 347 billion daily emails in 2022.
2. You own your email list: On any social media platform your post, fans, and followers may be suspended or deleted at any time. But in email marketing, this can never happen. You own your email list and no one can take this away from you.
3. Email marketing has better ROI: People who buy products marketed through email spend more time than those who do not receive email offers. Email marketing has an ROI of 4400%. The average order value of an email is three times higher than that of social media.
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Email Marketing Really Works! Here’s Proof
Email marketing has shown time and time again to be one of the most dependable marketing methods for different-sized businesses. It’s proven as a constant provider of a high return on investment like other social media marketing.
The following case studies will help to show that email marketing is alive and well, and should be included in the marketing plan of every business.
Zumba Fitness
Each year, Zumba Fitness hosts an Instructor Conference, in which instructors at its 200,000 locations are encouraged to attend. In 2014, Zumba created an email that included a compilation video of past Conferences that was primarily targeted their instructors to kick off their Instructor Conference sign up.
The specialty of email video was the call-to-action at the very end when an invitation with the recipient’s name appears. It resulted in a huge 50% click to open rate which is 100% better than most companies will ever see. According to MailChimp statistics, the average open rate of a company with over 50 employees is only 20-25%, which means Zumba Fitness beat the average by over 100%.
Craghoppers Basket Abandonment
Craghoppers is a travel clothing company. The company used Redeye’s dynamic tagging system to help track items that shoppers had in their cart before abandoning their purchase.
Then the company sends an email to these potential customers within 24hrs and once again 3 days later. This campaign achieves an ROI of +3088%, and of all the emails sent to those who had abandoned their carts, 10% ended up during purchasing.
A successful email list means more $$$
List of the Best WordPress Email Marketing Plugins
Let’s look at some of the most popular plugins to see how they can help your business or blog.
1. HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing plugin that helps businesses grow better. This plugin enables businesses to better attract, engage, and delight customers.
It has some built-in free tools like CRM, email marketing, live chat and chatbots, ad management, reporting, forms, and more.
This plugin has a beautiful drag-and-drop builder and is natively integrated with WordPress. You can send up to 2,000 emails per month for free.
Some of the great features are:
- Organize contacts with details about their business and relationships in HubSpot’s CRM
- Collect leads with a built-in landing page, content marketing, form builder, and website tools
- Followup on contacts with email automation
- Build marketing workflows that help you target leads based on their interactions with your WordPress site
- iOS and Android apps are available for CRM and Sales features
Pros: HubSpot is easy to use and has integrations with 300+ tools. Having all the data on your contact list makes your email marketing personalized and actionable.
Cons: If you need advanced marketing automation, it’s not included in the free plan.
2. MailChimp for WordPress
MailChimp is by far the most popular WordPress plugin to integrate MailChimp. MailChimp itself is an excellent email campaign service and currently is the leader in emails.
With this plugin, you can connect to any of your MailChimp lists and create your own email opt-in forms.
The plugin integrates with other WordPress plugins/features to add list-building functionality to them. You can add a ‘tick to subscribe’ box to comment forms, registration forms, WooCommerce checkout, Easy Digital Downloads checkout and more.
Features:
- Dedicated plugin for use with MailChimp only.
- Basic customization options.
- Mobile optimized forms.
- Integrates statistics from MailChimp into your WordPress dashboard.
- Single-click subscribe feature for comments, registration forms and more.
Pros: MailChimp is trusted, streamlined, impeccably supported and makes email design very easy.
Cons: If you are an advanced user and looking to adjust any of MailChimp’s default settings, the buried data can complicate the process a bit. Also, adding native subscription forms to pages requires some CSS knowledge to understand.
MailChimp is a versatile plugin.
Price: Free, Essential ($10), Standard ($15), Premium ($299) per month.
Download Mailchimp for WordPress
3. weMail – Email Marketing Simplified With WordPress
weMail is one of the newest platforms to send plugins. This is an email marketing plugin that enables the user/users of a WordPress website to send email newsletters with feature-packed email builder. It connects with email sending solutions such as Amazon Web Services, MailGun, SparkPost, etc to send emails.
One of the best features of weMail is that it can keep the cost really low by leveraging other email sending services. Basically it’s MailChimp with your own email sending platform as backend.
With weMail, you can concentrate more on growing subscriber list and email marketing within the WordPress Dashboard.
Key Features:
- Drag-and-drop Editor
- Subscriber Management
- Campaign Reports
- List Segmentation
- Autoresponders
- Bounce handling
- Advanced tracking and analytics
Pros: weMail supports the most popular form builders like contact 7 form, Gravity, WPForms, Caldera Forms, Ninja Forms, weForms, etc. It has built-in native forms like (Slide Up, Inline, Modal, Floating Bar) to capture emails. Handy subscriber management system with a large subscriber limit.
Cons: Still early in the development.
Price: Free
Download weMail – Email Marketing Simplified With WordPress
4. Popups by OptinMonster
OptinMonster is another popular email marketing plugin. Basically, this is a popup tool that enables you to use practically any newsletter provider on your site alongside its own features.
It’s a subscription-based service from the great email marketing service provider OptinMonster. To integrate this service on your WordPress website, you just need to install the plugin.
Key Features:
- Mobile friendly and retina ready designs.
- 65+ pre-made templates to choose from.
- Powerful targeting and segmentation engine.
- User-friendly drag and drop builder.
- Advanced and actionable analytics option.
- Easily integrate with other websites & eCommerce platforms.
Pros: Allows you to rapidly test multiple versions of your signup form, which is extremely helpful to site scalability. It is also to set up and customize according to your business needs.
Cons: Both the free and ‘Basic’ versions of OptinMonster are reasonably limited. You will need to upgrade to pro packages to get the full benefits of the plugin.
Price: In addition to the Free version, the ‘Basic’ OptinMonster plan is available at $9 per month. It also has some advanced plans like ‘Plus’ ($19 per month), ‘Pro’ ($29 per month) and ‘Growth’ ($49 per month).
Download Popups by OptinMonster
5. MailPoet – emails and newsletters in WordPress
MailPoet is an all-in-one newsletter plugin that helps you to grow your email list. It includes a drag-and-drop email editor, integrates with Google Analytics, and works with WordPress Multisite.
Key Features:
- Designer and responsive templates to choose from.
- Solid reliability.
- Option to send emails with the MailPoet’s sending service.
- Translation Ready.
- Helpful and responsive customer support.
- Automatic Welcome email sending option.
- Easy configuration.
Pros: Responsive email templates, as well as the option to send emails via MailPoet’s own sending service.
Cons: Limited translations are available.
It can be used by any industry to send various types of content including
- Blog post recaps.
- Case studies.
- Videos and interactive content.
Price: If you want more features, you can choose either the ‘Premium with Sending’ plan ($10 per month) or ‘Premium Only’ plan ($99 per year).
Download MailPoet – emails and newsletters in WordPress
6. OnePress Opt-In Panda
OnePress Opt-In Panda is specifically designed as a content locking plugin. This plugin helps you lock a portion of your content on the website by hiding or shading it and asks visitors to enter their email address to unlock the content.
You have also the option to allow your readers to access the premium content by signing into a social network instead of entering their email list.
Opt-In Panda also gives you the option to cut the locked content from a pages source code.
Key Features:
- 3 different design styles for content lockers.
- Supports the most popular email providers.
- Saves lead in WordPress so you can export and import it into another email provider at any time.
- Subscribe via social networks option.
- The content inside the locker can be hidden entirely or blurred out.
- Customize how the locker behaves – add a close icon, timer interval, cut locked content from source code, etc.
- Unlimited custom fields.
- Built-in reporting.
Pros: It is extremely developer-friendly, optimized for mobile devices, and loads ultra fast.
Cons: Doesn’t offer the advanced analytical features claimed by some of the other plugins.
This plugin can be used in almost any industry, such as
- Informational newsletters.
- eCommerce promotions and offers.
- Blog recaps.
- Case studies.
Price: The free version is available in the WordPress repository. Purchasing a regular license for implementing the complete version of Opt-In Panda will set you back $26.
Download OnePress Opt-In Panda
7. Newsletter
Newsletter is another email marketing plugin built specifically for WordPress. This plugin allows you to add a subscription form, segment your leads using multi-list targeting, and send newsletters to share your blog content.
With advanced features integrated within the plugin, you can create unlimited email and campaign for your users. Not only this but you can add extra features if you wish with their free add-ons!
Key Features:
- Responsive and mobile-friendly form designs.
- Unlimited subscribers and newsletters.
- Translation Ready.
- Integration with the WordPress Registration.
- Free and premium add-ons for a better experience.
- Easy Installation and Usage.
- Helpful and friendly user support.
Pros: Easy-to-customize email templates and subscription widgets. It also offers free extensions for archiving, as well as locking premium content.
Cons: The plugin will utilize your web host to send emails, which can pose potential issues depending on the restrictions of the hosting provider.
Price: In addition to the free version, there are two premium plans available. These are ‘Blogger’ ($65) and ‘Agency’ ($249).
8. Sumo – Boost Conversion and Sales
Sumo List Builder is another WordPress plugin that can be used to grow your user email listing. It offers email marketing, social sharing, and analytics tools.
It is a WordPress email marketing plugin that has easy integration with the best email marketing service providers MailChimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, and Campaign Monitor.
Key Features:
- Pre-designed templates to choose from.
- Mobile ready and responsive design.
- Easy Drag and Drop Builder.
- Powerful targeting tools for most engaged users.
- Easy integration with other email marketing services.
- VIP and dedicated customer support.
Pros: A simple interface, allowing you to tweak your list to meet your specific needs.
Cons: The more advanced plans of Sumo are relatively expensive compared to other email marketing plugin solutions. The free version of Sumo contains mandatory visitor-facing branding but to remove this you’ll need to upgrade the plan.
Sumo List Builder is suitable for:
- Marketing and advertising.
- Personal development businesses.
- Non-profit organizations.
Price: The basic version of the Sumo List Builder is completely free. If you want to upgrade you have to spend $49 per month.
Download Sumo – Boost Conversion and Sales
9. SendPress Newsletters
SendPress is an easy-to-use email marketing plugin. It has all the important features that you need. You can create customized newsletter templates, easy import post content from your WordPress site and schedule sending newsletters.
Key Features:
- Unlimited subscribers plan
- Simple editor
- Sync WordPress roles to newsletter subscriber lists
- Auto Cron option to check whether newsletter sent or not
Pros: Unlimited subscriber capabilities, and the ability to effortlessly sync WordPress roles in conjunction with your newsletter.
Cons: As it uses your web host’s mailing service, it may not be suited out of the box until you change your SMTP server.
Price: There are four pricing plans available for SendPress Newsletters. These are ‘Personal’ ($39 per year), ‘Standard’ ($99 per year), ‘Business’ ($199 per year) and ‘Developer’ ($399 per year).
Download SendPress Newsletters
10. WP Subscriber Pro
WP Subscriber Pro is another email marketing plugin for WordPress site. This plugin also supports FeedBurner, MailChimp as well as Aweber, thus making this the must-have plugin for your WordPress site.
Key Features:
- Fully responsive and mobile-friendly design.
- Optimized for speed.
- Integrates with popular email marketing services.
- Built-in Widget Support.
- Pop-up animations to choose from.
- Fully customizable plugin.
- 24/7 live customer support.
Pros: This plugin can grow the number and interest of your subscribers with the advanced features to keep them engaged. With a built-in widget area, create eye-catching pop-ups and send emails to all of your users.
Cons: Have to setup own email sending service as it uses WordPress email by default.
Price: License for the single site will cost $19, 3 sites will cost $29 and an unlimited site license will cost $49.
11. Drip
Drip is another popular email newsletter plugin that can also be used as an email marketing automation tool. It is a cloud-based solution.
It offers seamless integration with many 3rd-party tools, so you can easily use customer data into action. For example, with WooCommerce integration, you can send purchase information and other important user information to your Drip account. You can then turn those insights into revenue by triggering automation based on your business goals.
The most unique features are:
- Send emails to subscribers based on pre-set triggers
- Facebook Lead Ads integration
- Plain text emails
- Campaign templates
Pros
- Easy to use very powerful great price
- The automation is top-notch. When it works.
Cons
- It is difficult to bring in your own custom HTML responsive email templates without being a programming expert.
It is suitable for:
- Businesses of all kinds, including publishers
- eCommerce merchants and
- Small businesses.
Price: Drip offers 3 different plans: Basic, Pro, and Enterprise. The Basic plan is $49/month for up to 2500 people and you can send unlimited emails. The Pro plan costs $122/month for up to 5000 people and unlimited emails. Finally, the Enterprise plan for over 5000 people and the price per month varies depending on how large your email list is.
12. Thrive Leads
Thrive Leads is another impressive WordPress email subscription plugin on the market right now. It comes with every feature you’ll need to rapidly grow your email list subscribers.
You can use the drag & drop editor to customize the look exactly how you want them to. You can create as many opt-in forms as you wish and select which pages/categories/tags you’d like to display.
Key Features:
- Advanced opt-in form targeting options.
- Advanced split testing functionality.
- Actionable reporting/statistics.
- Supports any email provider that uses HTML forms.
- API integrations for all popular email providers
- Supports 2 step opt-in forms.
- Supports shortcode placement.
- Supports multiple form fields, radio forms, checkboxes, and dropdowns.
Pros
- Supports a large selection of email marketing services
- Access helpful video tutorials from within the plugin
- Powerful split testing functionality
- Built-in reports dashboard
Cons
- Takes time to get up to speed with all the features and functionality if you haven’t used an email list building plugin before
- Some templates are a little outdated.
This plugin is suitable for
- Personal bloggers.
- Businesses of any size.
- Non-profit organizations.
Price: Thrive Leads is a premium plugin that comes with 3 different pricing plans. Single site license cost $67, 5 licenses cost $97, 15 licenses cost $147.
13. Leadpages
This is a powerful and flexible plugin that allows you to build lead-generating landing pages, email, automated texts, and more. It offers mobile-friendly templates to choose from, which can be further filtered according to your industry and type of campaign.
Key Features:
- 70+ Landing page templates
- Unlimited landing pages, domains, and traffic
- Mobile-friendly templates.
- Built-in split testing, analytics.
- LeadBoxes and LeadLinks.
- WordPress plugin.
- Supports all major mailing list providers.
- Digital asset delivery.
- Incredible customer support.
Pros: Very easy to generate gorgeous and impactful landing pages, as well as advanced analytics that can help you better inform your marketing campaign. There is also flexibility for creating interactive Call To Action (CTA) buttons.
Cons: Live chat features options are not available.
It is best suited for:
- Large-scale online publications with limited content to subscribers.
- Any eCommerce business, or a promotional site like photography, eBook publishing, etc.
Price: There are three paid plans are available. ‘Standard’ ($25 per month), ‘Pro’ ($48 per month), and Advanced ($199 per month).
14. ALO EasyMail Newsletter
It is a free WordPress plugin that enables you to collect email subscribers and send newsletters from your WordPress dashboard. You can send, import and export subscribers list and track open rates.
Key Features:
- Write and send HTML/text newsletters, simple like writing posts.
- Batch sending using the WordPress Cron system
- Create and manage mailing lists
- Bounce management
- Support multilanguage
Pros: The plugin lets you to quickly import and export registered user data from a CSV file. It also makes the process of managing, adding, and deleting subscribers very simple.
Cons: Doesn’t present much by way of analytics or scalability.
This is best suited for small operations, including:
- Personal blogs
- Small businesses
Price: Free
Download ALO EasyMail Newsletter
SMTP Plugins
SMTP services offer an easy and secure solution if your WordPress emails aren’t getting delivered. There are tons of popular services available in the market. For you, I’ve narrow down some popular ones.
WordPress sites basically rely on email for various things like:
- Registering a new user account
- Retrieving lost passwords
- Any notifications for password changes, new posts, comments, and tons of other things
For eCommerce sites, it can be even more important that users get their emails. You want to make sure that customer order confirmations and invoices, shipping notifications, delivery confirmations, and more order-related information is getting right through.
There are quite a few problems with the default mailing system WordPress uses and it actually fails quite often.
For successful and secure email marketing, you must need a high-quality SMTP service.
WP Mail SMTP
It is one of the best WordPress SMTP plugin that allows you to easily send WordPress emails using any SMTP service provider. It offers easy setup for other SMTP providers like SendGrid, Mailgun, and Gmail with the free version; Amazon SES and Microsoft SMTP come with the Pro version.
Key Features:
- White-Glove Setup
- Email Log
- Manage Notifications
- Amazon SES
- Gmail / G Suite
- Office 365
Pros
- WP Mail SMTP brings all different SMTP providers together into one single platform.
- Works with all major email service providers.
- Native Microsoft and Amazon SES integrations in Pro version only.
Cons
- It does not support WordPress multi-site.
It is best suited for:
- Large-scale online publications with unlimited content to subscribers.
- Any eCommerce business, or a promotional site like photography, eBook publishing, etc.
Pricing: There are four different pricing plans available. Pro version starts at $49/year, Elite version $99/year, Developer $199/year and Agency at $399/year.
SendinBlue Subscribe Form And WP SMTP
SendInBlue is an all-in-one email marketing plugin that includes various features to build and manage an email list. With this plugin, you can create forms, manage lists of subscribers, create and send email marketing campaigns, and measure your success over time using the included reports.
The plugin also includes a transactional email. Using the wp_mail function, you’ll be able to send transactional emails using SendinBlue’s SMTP server.
Key Features:
- Easy integration with SendinBlue.
- Auto-installation of the automation script.
- Powerful statistics and analytics feature.
- Drag and Drop email design tool.
- Advanced segmentation for easier access.
- Unlimited custom fields.
Pros: This plugin comes with responsive email design templates and outstanding real-time tracking capabilities.
Cons: Lacks certain third-party integrations.
SendInBlue can be used by:
- Blogs.
- Service-based businesses.
- eCommerce websites.
- Non-profit organizations.
Price: The standard version of SendInBlue is free with unlimited contacts. More advanced plans are Lite ($25 per month), Essential ($39 per month), Premium ($66 per month). You also have the option of tailoring an ‘Enterprise’ plan to meet the needs of your business.
Download SendinBlue Subscribe Form And WP SMTP
Mailgun
Mailgun is another popular email marketing plugin for developers. It has powerful APIs that make it easy to send, receive, and trace transactional emails. It is also an easy-to-scale SMTP service.
Key Features:
- Powerful sending infrastructure.
- Fast, accurate email validation.
- Managed email delivery for high volume senders.
- Send an email with a few lines of code.
Pros
- Very powerful
- Supports testing method
- Excellent for developers – has a RESTful API with libraries and code examples in curl, Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, C#, Go
Cons
- Support is not up to the mark.
- Lacks beginner-friendly features.
It is suitable for
- eCommerce store
- Small consulting business
- Membership website, or
- Something else entirely
Price: The free plan includes up to 10,000/month and up to 100 validations. You can choose Pay-As-You-Go pricing or sign up for a regular plan. Their pricing starts at $79/month.
SendGrid
SendGrid is a cloud-based SMTP service provider that lets you send and receive bulk emails without managing an SMTP server. You can also create email marketing campaigns!
Key Features:
- Sending Email
- Parsing Email
- Tracking Events
Pros
- Seamless integration with WordPress through plugin
- Responsive and quick customer support
Cons
- Paid plans might be expensive for new businesses
SendGrid can be used by
- Startups
- Enterprises
- High Volume senders
- Marketers
- Ecommerce
- Developers
Price: The free plan includes 100 emails/day. Paid plans start at $14.95/month and the number of emails is up to 50,000/month.
Yandex
We previously covered how you can integrate Yandex for free business emails. Guess what, you can send your newsletters through Yandex’s SMTP server too. All you need is to sign up for free.
Best SMTP Providers Pricing
| Amazon SES | SendinBlue | SendGrid | Mandrill by MailChimp |
| Free: up to 62,000 emails per month, but special conditions apply here. You can only take advantage of the free tier if you’re an Amazon EC2 user. | Free: up to 9,000 emails per month. Limited to 300 emails per day. | Free trial: valid for 30 days, during which you can send up to 40,000 emails. Then send 100 / day for free, forever. | Free trial: 2,000 free email credits (sends) in total. Once those are gone, you need to upgrade to a paid MailChimp account and start buying more Mandrill credits to continue sending emails. |
| $0.10 per 1,000 emails + $0.12 per GB of attachments sent. $1 per 10,000 emails | $25 per month: up to 40,000 emails monthly. $6.25 per 10,000 emails | $9.95 per month: up to 40,000 emails monthly. $2.49 per 10,000 emails | $40 per month: up to 25,000 emails. $16 per 10,000 emails |
| $39 per month: up to 60,000 emails. $6.50 per 10,000 emails | $19.95 per month: up to 100,000 emails. $1.99 per 10,000 emails | $60 per month: up to 50,000 emails. $12 per 10,000 emails | |
| $66 per month: up to 120,000 emails. $5.50 per 10,000 emails | $79.95 per month: up to 180,000 emails. $4.44 per 10,000 emails | $80 per month: up to 75,000 emails. $10.67 per 10,000 emails | |
| Unlimited number of contacts stored on all plans. | You can have up to 2,000 contacts stored without additional fees. Then, every 10,000 new contacts is +$10 / mo. | All of the tiers above have been calculated by me based on Mandrill’s needlessly complicated pricing model, more on which below. Also, MailChimp’s main monthly membership has been included in the pricing above. |
Final Words
Email marketing is highly effective to increase leads and conversions. If you want to share the latest news, promotions or offers with your customers, then this is the best choice for your online business. With the proper plugin, you can do this easily.
Expert Recommendation
Most of the plugins covered here are industry standard and have great support. All popular email plugins share one important feature – advanced tracking and analytics that’s crucial for proper lead segmentation.
MailChimp and SendPress Newsletters might be the go-to plugins for any new WordPress user, and that’s okay. The former is one of the more popular plugins options offering Google Analytics integration and a mobile-friendly interface.
weMail is a great new plugin that combines the best of Mailchimp and also keep the cost minimal.
Consider your budget, the features you need and give a few different options a try before deciding.