WordPress comes with built-in mail feature which uses PHP’s mail function to send out emails. There are several WordPress newsletter plugins which allow you to run a fully functional newsletter using this feature. Recently one of our users asked us: “if it is possible to send out email newsletters using WordPress plugins, then why do we recommend using an email service provider like Constant Contact or Aweber?” In this article, we will explain why you should never use WordPress to send newsletter emails.
Why You Should Take Your Email List Seriously?
Your email list is one of the most reliable communication tool. It helps you bring back users to your website. It helps you increase sales, promote products, and build trust around your brand.
If you are not already doing it, then you should start building your email list right away.
You will notice that almost every serious marketer, blogger, and expert will recommend that you use an email marketing service such as Aweber or Constant Contact rather than using WordPress for email newsletters. Let’s take a look at why.
Reliability
When you send out emails using a newsletter plugin which relies on PHP and WordPress mail functions, there is a great chance that your emails will land in your user’s SPAM folder.
Email providers (gmail, yahoo, etc) have spam tools which would mark your email as SPAM for a number of reasons.
For example, the email server receiving your email will look for an SPF record to determine whether the server sending email is allowed to do so or not. It will look for suspicious behavior, words, and phrases to rule out spam.
The spam catching tools will also check their databases for your IP address. On shared WordPress hosting, your website is sharing the same server IP address with several other websites.
Any sign of abuse by one person on that server can trigger spam catching databases which will make your email delivery doubtful. There are countless other factors that are checked by spam catching algorithms, and it is very challenging to satisfy all those.
On the other hand, professional email service providers work day and night to make sure that their emails are delivered to your user’s inbox. They follow a strict set of rules and apply it to all their outgoing emails to ensure it reaches the destination and not ends up in junk mail.
They have highly trained engineers, developers, and support staff that works round the clock to make this possible. They are also approved and known bulk mail service providers with most major ISPs and email services. When a user’s email server receives email from a white-listed server, they know it is reliable and not spam.
This reliability alone is the single most important factor that should be enough to convince you to use a professional newsletter service.
Email Limits and Delays
Most hosting providers have limits on the number of emails you can send at a time. It is possible that your newsletter plugin or script will try to queue outgoing emails, but there will always be a chance that something might go wrong, and your outgoing email queue may not even process. For large email lists, your web host may even consider this as an abuse of their services.
On the other hand when you are using a professional email marketing service, you don’t need to worry about these limitations. They have servers spread all across the world sending hundreds and thousands of emails every day. They have flexible plans which allow you to easily upgrade as your email list grows.
Ease of Use
Email service providers like Constant Contact and Aweber allow you to easily create and send emails to your subscribers. They have extremely easy to use tools to create and design your emails.
They also have API integration which makes it easy for you to connect your email list with other useful WordPress plugins like OptinMonster, Gravity Forms, etc.
By running your own newsletter you miss out on all these tools that make things easier. Instead of focusing on your website, you will be spending time struggling to do things that can be easily done in minutes using a proper email marketing service.
Stats and Analysis
Professional email service providers offer you integrated stats and analytics about your campaigns. You can see the number of emails landed in user’s inbox, how many of them were opened, and the number of clicks you have received. This allows you to improve and adjust your campaigns accordingly.
When sending out your own newsletter though a newsletter plugin, you have no way of knowing how many emails reached to user’s inbox, opened, or clicked. You will have to spend a lot of time trying to integrate Google Analytics in your campaigns and landing pages, and still the data you would gather will be limited.
Another reason to use an email service provider is that some of them offer you diagnostic and analysis tools. You can use those tools to see how your campaigns are doing. If your emails are getting marked as spam, then you can figure out what’s triggering the spam check tools to flag your emails.
Compliance Issues
Email marketing is huge and so is spam. To deal with spam, ISPs and email marketing services have introduced and implemented new legislation, requirements, and protocols. When you are using a professional email service to send out your newsletter, you don’t have to worry about all these things. These email service providers work very hard to make sure that your emails reach their destination.
On the other hand, if you are sending out your own newsletter you are less likely to know if there is something new happening in the email spam protection world.
Cost Effectiveness
Some users might think that if they run their own newsletter using a plugin, then they are saving money. First of all, you need to put value on your time. The time you spend configuring your newsletter plugin is much more valuable than the amount you pay for a good email service.
In fact, you can use one of the best email service, Constant Contact for free for two months. This free trial gives you enough time to setup and start collecting email addresses. By the time your trial ends, your email list will be paying for itself.
Conclusion
Considering all these facts, we strongly recommend our users to use professional email marketing service.
If you must use a WordPress newsletter plugin, then only use MailPoet. Remember, deliverability is still an issue and even MailPoet understand that which is why they allow you to use third-party SMTP services like SendGrid (which cost money).
Which email marketing service do you use? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Curious – this article was last updated in 2016. As plugins have improved (and there are a lot more now!), do you still feel the same way about not using WordPress for sending emails? Thanks!
At this time, yes we still feel this way
I’ve had emails from an entity that uses Constant Contact go straight to my junk folder. Is this a new thing? And there are newer plug-in’s for newsletters. Do they have the same problems?
There are multiple possible reasons an email could go to your spam folder. While there are new plugins, we still recommend an email service provider for sending newsletters.
Great and helpful post. Im searching for a way to streamline some tasks, which led me to your post. I send multiple weekly newsletters for various “departments” in my organization. That same content also need to be posted on our website. Any suggestions on how I can streamline that, so Im not creating the same content twice? I do use constant contact and we are in the process of converting our website platform from Joomla to WP. Thanks in advance, Kathy
Thanks for the informative article. Since feedburner is owned by google, can we not assume that feedburner’s servers are whitelisted by gmail, and since most people use gmail, feedburner is a real alternative to aweber/mailchimp especially if one is not interested in their bells & whistles?
Hi Karma,
Please see our article on why you should stop using FeedBurner.
Using a transactional outgoing server such as sendgrid overcomes ALL of your concerns, without needing to pay a cent.
Also most email sending plugins have all of the other features shown above.
Hi and thank you for your reply. Since your post a lot has changed and quite a few new plugins and also php-server-based software was developed.
sendy, mailwixx, mailster, lether just to name a few and they all can connect to a smtp provider such as amazon ses. What is your take on the newest development?
Hi Jeff,
We do recommend using third-party SMTP providers such as Amazon and Mailgun.
I use zoho mail SMTP to send my site’s mail. Would it not be okay to use a plugin to send newsletter directly from the site since I use an SMTP with an SPF record?
Is still relevant 10/2017. Just wondering. I use MailPoet now and want to make sure I’m using platform to avoid the spam filters.
Hi Sherry,
Yes, it is still relevant.
Can we do this with core php? because i did’nt installed wordpress.
Finally, some of this is falling into place! Thanks. A couple of years ago, I was was using a WP newsletter plugin which was doing a great job . . . until my WP site got infected, which infected a bunch of other sites hosted on the same account. Catastrophe! Later, learned that this plugin had a know vulnerability and had infected 100s of other WP sites! Geezus, thanks for telling me! Obviously, I will never do that again! Ouch!
At the time, I didn’t know anything about MailChimp, et al. How does the plugin get new subscribers addys into MailChimp? If I have MailChimp, do I even need a plug in to harvest new subscribers on WP? At what point does something like Instapage for creating landing pages fit into all of this, or does it?
Any discussion much appreciated. Tks!
Thanks for the info. it seems Amazon SES is the cheapest. Anybody using WP SES Plugin? How is it? Does it have a good interface for sending/receiving mail?
I’ve been using MyMail with Amazon SES as the delivery option. All in WordPress.
It worked well to send emails to 200k subscribers, although there are some delays (it takes up to one day to send).
I’ve also WP SES plugin configured to send all other WP emails through SES. Interface is basic.
While I agree that using WordPress for email newsletters isn’t the way to go for people who are making a living off of their websites, I still think it is a valuable option for people who can’t afford a mailing list but still want one.
Also, the analogy made that says it’s better to invest than take time setting the complicated plugin up is plain wrong. If I had an option to do something that would take a little bit longer than a more expensive alternative, of course I’d choose the free alternative and dedicate more effort. If time is money, then isn’t money time too. This attitude towards spending money here and there is horrible. If we were to agree with this analogy then one could also say “No one should track their expenses because it takes too much time”. Well yeah, it takes time but of course it’s worth it because the time that you spend doing something could save you the money!
You’ve got some serious comments and I totally love that because I’m a beginner and I’m trying to figure out if to use Email Subscribers and Newsletter plug in because those guys offer such an irresistible promise, I’m very happy Wpbeginner let your comment though, I’m sure many more would find this useful and also challenge the decision posed on them from the also wonderful article above, are there totally free email service providers, for beginners, Wpbeginner
?
Hi, thanks for this article. Would you say the same for Woocommerce followup emails. I am thinking to use it on my ecommerce store. Thanks in advance.
I’m trying to find a solution for sending emails directly from the blog post (like JetPack), but without being tied to wordpress.com. We need the post to appear on the blog as well as be emailed to subscribers, and I need to be able to have control over the subscriber list. It’s looking like the closest thing that will do this is Mailpoet and/or “Send Posts to Subscribers” plugin. I’m using the former (free version) because I’ve not heard a lot about the latter. Also using the WP Mail SMTP plugin for sending. Is this my best bet? Has anyone heard of the “Send Posts” plugin?
This isn’t a response to Deirdre’s question, but a “+1”; I have the same question.
I’ve found a lot of plugins that send a notification with partial text; I’d like to send a copy of the complete post — either automatically @post time, or have it be easy to send one if someone is familiar with wp at the level of creating blog posts (not site administration). Control over the subscriber list would be great too. Thanks–
How do I stop WordPress from sending out the automated emails so I don’t send out two at the same time.
I have the same question. I set up MailChimp to send out my blog notifications, but now I’m not sure how to disable WordPress from sending the notifications.
Thank so much for this awesome post. It’s helped me no end.
With this resource I’m armed to start blogging!!
wow, it comes to a surprise to me that one shouldn’t use WordPress plugin to manage newsletters. I see 2 problems though: mailing services are way too expensive, and using such a system you cannot really pull data from your WP posts/databases… can you?
I use Mail Poet but the newsletter still goes to SPAM
This is likely because you’re on a shared server and your IP address has been marked as spam. For beginners/small sites, I always recommend setting up a third party SMTP mail server and using that to send your website’s mail.
I recommend SendGrid their free plan allows you to send 12,000 email per month.
Is there a way to have Jetpack but to disable this function?
If my WP is sending auto emails when new posts generate, is it definitely a plugin that I’ve set up at some point in time? I can’t remember now, and I don’t seem to be able to find the culprit. I would love to disable it and start using Aweber as your article suggests. TIA!
Do what you said still apply if we use a dedicated server?
Yes.
I am following often your posts and noticing that every post contains an educative value. I have some trouble when I use default WP email. It will sow the sender name is wordpress in the mail box. what do you suggest to correct this? Doe the plugins you recommand can show the
name of the sender intead of wordpress.
Please see our guide how to change sender name in outgoing WordPress email
What about Jetpack and the subscribe feature? Does it fall into the good or bad category and why?
With JetPack, you can only send your users new posts as you publish them. You cannot send out newsletters like you can do with an email service provider.
Question: I had been using Subscribe2 plugin to send posts as they were published, but we have a lot of subscribers not receiving posts. So, after much trouble shooting, I have
1) disabled the Subscribe2 button,
2) set up a MailChimp account and list and
3) have set up the MailChimp Subscribe plugin to add subscribers to Mail Chimp list… QUESTION: (this is probably so basic, but… ) now, when we make a new blog post, do I need to log in to MAIL CHIMP to actually send a notification of new post // HOW DO I SEND NEW POST NOTIFICATION BY EMAIL? (I have also had the JetPack Subscribe button, but have disabled that I think, so we can get all our subscribers in one place.) This is a small blog, only about 170 subscribers. ( “RINOcracy”)
Refer to this post. It answers your question correctly and it is very helpful. https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-email-subscriptions-for-your-wordpress-blog/
I was using MailChimp but I’m now using MailPoet because it automaticly send all new post in my weekly newsletter.
I don’t think there’s a other service offering that.
This is a great post, very useful and really helpful. Thanks a lot, now that I want to start sending newsletters I’ll try Mailchimp.
Does this also mean you shoulnd’t use the Mailchimp plugin for WordPress?
No, MailChimp’s plugin uses MailChimp’s servers to send out emails.
I found your step-by-step guide on setting up an RSS newsletter through MailChimp – so thank you WPBEGINNER and I will work through that! Here is link for others…https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/ultimate-guide-to-using-mailchimp-and-wordpress/
Glad you found it helpful.
Mail Poet with Amazon SES is the best, hands down
Many interesting points of view here. Seems there is this regular suggestion that MailPoet will do everthing people question. Sadly it falls down on one critical issue. It still sends through php mail and fails to present validated mail that mail servers dont reject or mark as questionable. They apparently have rewritten the interface with wp-mail that smtp validation programs like Postman are excluded as a sending or routing device. Yes i love so many things about Mailpoet and its simplicity of use. I just see it as all very pointless if the result ends up in the spam folder and no-one ever sees it!!!! Wasting your time people….
Im just wondering if anyone could give me some feedback on Feedburner
using the email subscription
Feedburner is fine, and the simplest way to achieve this. It’s owned by Google and the deliverability is great.
Please take a look at, Stop Using FeedBurner – Move to FeedBurner Alternatives.
We setup MyMail plugin to use WordPress as the host for newsletters. But we send the emails through MandrillApp.
Boom.
How is this working for you?
This is working perfectly. Yes, Mandrill did make changes in pricing (not free!) so we switched to SendGrid. In WordPress we also setup Postman to handle the SendGrid connection – this sends all WP emails through SendGrid.
Update, for some reason Postman wasn’t getting all the emails out. So we dropped it and are using the Sendgrid plugin. MyMail picked it up and sends through it flawlessly. Since switching we can no longer duplicate any errors.
Maybe someone will find this helpful.
Excellent! Now that Mandrill is no longer free for smaller users, I am using Mailgun. I am having excellent results!
We are also using MyMail and so far it is so good.
This is great. My website is just a month old and I am learning a whole lot thanks to you guys. Great work as usual wpbeginner.
Me too! My blog is barely over two months old and needs a lot of push-out, so i’m always so excited to read blogging advice and suggestions, especially from wpbeginner
Thanks, but we think you will benefit more if you were using self-hosted WordPress.org. Please see our guide on the difference between self hosted WordPress.org vs free WordPress.com blog.
That’s some very limited view of the capabilities of campaigning from within WP. You fail to mention one can quite happily use SMTP protocol from within WP so your first paragraphs are a non issue.
You obviously haven’t tried to configure newsletters from within either – with MailPoet it takes about 30minutes from the installation of the plugin to the ready Newsletter.
With My mail, you probably need about an hour for the basics. Don’t know how you calculate the costs, but no matter how you look at it, that’s much cheaper in the long run than using any of the paid services unless we’re talking tenths of thousands of emails – but that’s either for large companies or spammers – not a typical WP user.
I have a tendency to research all options carefully before settling on anything, and having tried both subscription based all in one solutions as well as self configuration of plugins, I can say that for a medium sized business, the control and cost of sending newsletter from within WP is unbeatable.
Last but not least, you have a legal obligation in the Western world, to protect your clients data. Passing it on to third party services without their consent, is illegal. Sadly, very few companies inform their clientbase upon newsletter signup that all their details will reside somewhere ‘in space’ with another entity. You’re taking a leap of faith assuming someone else has appropriate protection in place, without being sure about it.
I value my time, my money and my reputation – the less people in between my business and my clients, the less chance of data breach or non compliance with the law.
Thanks for that very helpful input Magdalena…
I am looking to start my IM business by first building up my list with free product giveaways(still have to find those)… I will probably do so for three to six months before I start to try and monetize it.
I have been trying to find help on free autoresponders for quite a while now but Google is really not too helpful here…
Have a lovely day
John
Useful comments, Magdalena, thanks.
As you say, reputation is priceless; gaining “time” could be costly in the long run, so it’s a three-way formula, and the last thing you want is a good prospect consigning your domain name to junk.
When I receive mail from MailChimp I do not enable html and I click on nothing, as I have nothing to offer to MailChimp’s data servers (or those of other “professional” mass e-mail providers). I also do not think highly of the sender, as I consider mass mail sent via “professional” mail clients to be spam.
I try then to give my own dedicated, signed-up clients & providers the more personal, direct information service that I would appreciate myself. My target is specific and low-mass and I only mail them when I have something important to communicate (a few times a year at most).
I used Mailpoet in the past, then their prices went stratic, so my last few mailings were with “Newsletter”. All the stats I need are available (opened, read, etc.) but I will take the time to explore some of the others mentioned.
For some, “Time is Money”, but when spent diligently, to me, Time is Investment.
I am using MailPoet for my blog.
MailPoet using SMTP with services like SendGrid, MailChimp.
My question is is there a way/plugin i can call above services using their rest apis e.g. using Sendgrid username, password authentication. Setting above SMTP system is costly as well as takes time.
I use MailPoet too but I might switch to MailChimp soon. For various reasons:
1. MailPoet cannot be used to send full posts by e-mail since only the first image (or featured image) is used. (And if you created a post excerpt, only the excerpt is used.)
2. MailPoet ignores text formatting such as h1. (As well as content like […]).
3. MailPoet always uses the first published version of a post and not the version accessible when the actual newsletter gets send. Very often, I amend a post right after publication due to typos etc. and they get send by MailPoet anyway.
Hey that’s a very important point, Martin. Thanks a lot. Even if there are not typos there could many reasons one may want to edit the article after publishing it the first time. If only the first version is used then it’s a problem. There should be some sort of sync option that can update the article. Facebook also has this issue so far I have noted.
You’re totally right! It’s so important to choose the right autoresponder and I decided to use GetResponse.
First I’d like to say thanks for the great article. I don’t like the generic looking newsletter that gets sent out automatically when I add a new post to my website. I would like to switch over to MailChimp–it seems like this is what a lot of people are using, and recommending, and it looks much more professional.
Since I’m not a pro website designer by any means, I have a really basic question. How do I turn off whatever is automatically setup in WordPress to send out newsletters when you publish a new post? I’ve never made any purposeful changes within WordPress to make it automatically send out a newsletter when I publish a new post, but it does. I’m sure this is easy to do, but can someone tell me how to disable this feature so I can start using MailChimp instead?
WordPress does not automatically send out new posts via email. You must have a plugin installed like JetPack or something. You will need to turn that plugin off to stop emails.
Hello
I have just started using WP and I can see my posts are sent automatically to subsribers.. Just tested it. Do I still need additional plugins to manage that? Also if I want to instal other providers how do I turn this off?
Visit your plugins section to see if there is a newsletter plugin or JetPack plugin installed. You can turn them off to disable this functionality and use other providers.
I’ve used Mailpoet, Mailchimp, Constant Contact and others to distribute about 8,000 newsletters per week to my subscriber list. Of the three, Mailpoet is far superior – for two reasons. 1) I work directly from the WordPress platform, and I can drag and drop posts and images. I can post current and scheduled posts – it works beautifully. 2) It is far cheaper. Mailchimp was costing me $75 per month. Mailpoet, at $99, combined with Amazon SES, free for up to 60,000 emails per month, works out to be less than $10 per month. I also tried Mandrill, free for up to 12,000 emails per month and very cheap increments of 1,000. Mandrill has better reporting and may be worth a few dollars a month extra for some.
Hi Ralph ,
Would you mind telling me which is the best plugin to use Mandrill to send newsletters (I’ve to send text newsletter), I already know Mandrill has WP plugin but that is just for routing emails . It’s not a newsletter plugin?
2. Secondly, as said so I checked Mailpoet but it doesn’t mention in their site they support Amazon SES?
Looking for your reply.
MailPoet supports all SMTP providers including Amazon SES:
I use mailpoet plugin and have a dedicated server through Bluehost and it works beautifully. I used to have to pay $85 for over 5,000 subscribers through Constant Contact (recent price increase) and now I just pay $99 per year for mailpoet premium plugin. I never did pay for the extra service of having Constant Contact store my images as they changed every issue. I use photos from latest posts/recipes. So, I didn’t have to pay anything extra for that. However, if you do pay that extra fee, mailpoet will save you even more money.
Yes we are using Mandrill! No problems at all…
Could you show me your setup for this? What do you put in for the Mailpoet settings when using Mandrill?
I use MailPoet (aka WYSIJA). You can test the spammyness of newsletters, and I find that my MailPoet ones score very well. I have seen profession mail sender emails in spam boxes too… so there is no silver bullet.
This is one of the best websites that have really useful high quality articles. Thanks for this…
What about using sendgrid or a similar service to handle the email and then you could use wordpress or am I missing something?
Alex, you are correct. This post needs an update.
Have any of you tested out Group Mail already. I have been told it can be easily adapted to send newsletters
I’m using mandrill, but its for transaction emails only! Transaction email: https://blog.mailchimp.com/what-is-transactional-email/
I use Lotus Notes for productivity. I use Eproductivity in Lotus Notes. People at Eproductivity send plenty of email marketing stuff using Mailchimp-like tools.
But I am not able to see a thing. I deactivate HTML in Outlook. Just like every single journalist I know at one of the biggest Spanish speaking outlet. Just like anyone I know.
So basically, Eproductivity is loosing money.
So to make a long story short: I do understand the reason for geeks to go on selling rabbits, and blue clouds, and all that b?llsh-it in their HTML newsletter products (money) but really: it mystifies me the way some companies think their products are been sold just because Mailchimp et al assures them their emails are being opened.
No, sorry, you are loosing money. And killing good taste in the interin (c’mon, those templates should be sent to the moon and buried in its dark side).
MyMail has extremely easy-to-use addon plugins for Mandrill and Amazon SES among others.
It’s almost like having one’s own personal MailChimp built into WP. It also integrates nicely with Google Analytics and Piwik, and the latest Newsletter stats are right on the Dashboard.
I find that for my clients not having MailChimp equals to just one less service they have to login to and get comfortable with.
Hi,
I use MailPoet and Mandrill (a service of Mailchimp) it works well
Have a nice day
(Sorry for my english i’m french)
Hi
I have been using mail poet for a while and love it but it lacks some integration sometimes which can be done easily with mailchimp. So I hesitate to change. I be heard about mad mini as we’ll which gives the opportunity of many ad dons, is easy to use and seems more and more popular but you don’t mention it here.
Would you say mad mini could be a good option ?
Thanks
Yes, it could be a good option. We have personally used Mailchimp so thats why we feel more confident about their service.
Hey..!
I already extracted your website, & you are using Both Apache & Nginx server, Mailchimp SPF etc.
I wonder, why you are not mentioned Mailchimp in this post even you use personally?
Is it not the best one?
If it is not the best one, then what is the reason behind you use it?
I am curious about your opinion.
Thank you
Hi Niranjan,
We do believe that MailChimp is a great email marketing service. Please take a look at our comparison of the best email marketing services.
Why didn’t you say anything about Feed burner email subscription service. It is free and it is not restricted to a limited number of subscribers.
I think it is the most powerful method to communicate with your visitors via email after each post have been added to your blog.
Feedburner is cool but it is not a newsletter service. Surely users can recieve your posts in their inbox but that’s all, you can not send them emails that are not part of your blog posts.
Very nice. Thank you
I use MailPoet with Amazon SES. It’s only $0.10 per 1000 messages sent.
I used to also be tempted to use a plugin to send email to my readers.
It’s just that time I was still unsure of the delivery. For what we send a lot of emails, when in fact all of them go into the spam box.
Finally I use any paid services. Although it was a difficult choice for me.