Should You Send Email Newsletters Directly from Your WordPress Site?

How you send emails to your subscribers could make or break your email marketing efforts. While it may seem logical to use a WordPress newsletter plugin to send emails directly from your site instead of a professional email marketing service, doing so could hurt your campaigns.

In this article, we’ll discuss the significance of email newsletters to your WordPress site. Then we’ll explain some reasons why you may or may not want to send newsletters directly from your WordPress site.

Let’s get started!

The Relevance of Email Newsletters

In the age of social media, email marketing may sound like a relic of the past. On the contrary, this marketing strategy is still highly relevant to successful businesses. While social media has its own appeal, email newsletters accomplish some things Facebook et al. can’t.

Firstly, email deposits promotional content right into your subscribers’ inboxes. There’s no guarantee your followers will see your social media posts in their crowded feeds, but emails are sent individually and more likely to be seen by potential customers or clients.

Additionally, for many people, email is a necessity. It’s possible for your followers to go days without checking their social media accounts. However, email is a vital part of many individual’s work and personal lives. Your leads probably check their inboxes daily.

Despite these advantages, email marketing still requires strategy. It’s most effective when you have a large but curated list of subscribers who are interested in your brand. They’re more likely to open and read your newsletters than people who aren’t concerned with what you have to offer.

Why You Should Send Email Newsletters Directly from Your WordPress Site

When it comes to creating and sending email newsletters, there are several plugins that enable you to do so directly from your WordPress site. MailPoet, Newsletter, and Jackmail are a few examples that provide convenient email marketing solutions.

For many, the most appealing quality of using a newsletter plugin is to send newsletters and monitor subscriptions from within WordPress. Not having to switch back and forth between your site and an email marketing platform saves time and keeps your marketing efforts organized.

Many newsletter plugins, including the ones we’ve mentioned, have templates or drag-and-drop builders to help speed along the process of creating high quality newsletters. These features also help keep your newsletters consistent in layout and design.

Plugins offering automated newsletters enable you to schedule when your newsletters go out. This way you don’t have to worry about sending them yourself. With automated emails you can craft your newsletters at your convenience and still have them delivered on a regular schedule.

Finally, premium versions of newsletter plugins often offer statistical analysis of your emails. Tracking how many of your newsletters subscribers open and click through can show you which marketing strategies are working best for you. You can then focus your energy on crafting newsletters that are more likely to succeed, instead of using guesswork.

Why You Shouldn’t Send Email Newsletters Directly from Your WordPress Site (4 Key Reasons)

Instead of using a plugin to send emails from your site, you might want to consider using an email marketing service instead. While plugins offer convenience, these platforms are often more dependable and accurate. Let’s break down four key reasons why.

1. Plugins Can’t Always Prevent Your Newsletters from Becoming Spam

There’s no way for your email marketing campaigns to succeed if your subscribers never see your newsletters. Spam filters sometimes flag marketing emails and prevent them from making it to your leads’ inboxes. However, this is less likely to happen with services such as Constant Contact, Drip, or MailChimp.

Unlike many plugins, email marketing services work to maintain relationships with email providers such as Gmail and Yahoo. The providers recognize professional email marketing platforms as trustworthy, and their spam filters let emails from these platforms through to inboxes.

Generally speaking, plugins aren’t as successful when it comes to this task. Spam filters block email from servers where they detect suspicious behavior. If you host your site on a shared server, the other sites on the server can influence the outcome of your email marketing campaign. Spam filters will account for their behavior, too.

It’s difficult to satisfy all the requirements spam filters set, but email marketing services make sure they meet the requirements so you don’t have to. If you’re using a plugin though, you risk sending your carefully crafted newsletters straight to spam folders.

2. Your Hosting Provider May Have Email Limits

Another issue that may come up regarding your server is email limits. Some hosting providers put a cap on the number of emails you can send at a one time. If you have a successful email list with several relevant subscribers on it, an email limit could slow your progress.

In some cases, a server will attempt to process your email list in batches. This may work eventually, but it will take quite a long time for all your newsletters to get out. On the other hand, it could also result in errors that prevent some or all of your emails from sending.

Even if your emails do reach your subscribers, your hosting provider may not appreciate you using the server this way. If you exceed your email limits your host could suspend your account, which would cause problems way beyond your email marketing efforts.

3. Automations and Integrations Can Save Time and Money

Like many newsletter plugins, most email marketing services have features designed to save your time, and therefore money. Features including automated email schedules, subscriber personalization, and email builders streamline the newsletter creation and distribution process.

Some services even extend beyond email marketing and can help you create social media content and ads as well. Integrations with other tools and plugins such as WooCommerce and Eventbrite enable you to customize your chosen email marketing platform to suit your needs.

While using an email marketing service may seem like a hefty expense, it’s usually a good investment. With the automations and integrations they provide, you can save yourself a significant amount of time to focus on other tasks, such as planning a new email campaign or other revenue-increasing projects.

Plus, some platforms – including MailChimp – offer plans with limited services for free. You’ll still get more functionality than most plugins, but without the cost of a fully-featured email marketing service.

4. Email Marketing Services Have Built-In Analysis Tools

Many premium plugins offer data analysis for your email marketing campaigns, but several email marketing services do, too. However, professional services are often able to go above and beyond the data available in plugins to provide you with even more information on how to improve your campaigns.

Some email marketing services provide stats on conversion rates and social media shares, for example. They may also offer segmentation so you can see how different types of subscribers react to your newsletters, enabling you to create emails that are more likely to succeed for each of your audience segments.

All in all, email marketing platforms such as Constant Contact, Drip, and MailChimp offer more robust analysis than newsletters plugins can. The data you gather from these services can help you improve more than just your email marketing strategy to help boost all your promotion efforts.

Should You Send Email Newsletters Directly from Your WordPress Site?

At face value, sending newsletters directly from your WordPress site seems like the best route to take for email marketing. The convenience of crafting and sending newsletters directly from your site is hard to look past. The added value of automated emails, newsletter templates and builders, and subscriber statistics make newsletter plugins seem like a sound option.

However, professional email marketing services provide many of the same features. Some even expand on those features to provide integrations and analysis beyond what plugins can do. While they lack some of the convenience of plugins, email marketing platforms are more reliable and won’t impact your hosting provider’s email limits.

A newsletter plugin may work for some who have small subscriber lists, dedicated servers, and can create successful email campaigns without extensive analysis tools and integrations. However, for most, an email marketing service will provide the best chance for successful email marketing.

Conclusion

Using an email marketing service such as Constant Contact, Drip, or MailChimp can help you have a more successful campaign than sending newsletters directly from your WordPress site. Considering how important email marketing is to modern businesses, ensuring your emails get through to your subscribers is not something to ignore.

In this article, we’ve discussed the importance of email newsletters to your WordPress site, and explained how you can use a plugin to create and send newsletters from your site. Then we explained four key reasons why you shouldn’t send newsletters directly from your WordPress site:

1. Plugins can’t always prevent your newsletters from becoming spam.
2. Your hosting provider may have email limits.
3. Automations and integrations can save time and money.
4. Email marketing services have built-in analysis tools.

Do you have questions about whether you should send email newsletters directly from your WordPress site? Let us know in the comments section below!

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