One of our clients, who operates a rather complex WordPress website that acts as a membership portal, asked us recently if we could set it up so that their blog posts were automatically sent out to subscribers. Indeed, WordPress plugins that send out blog content as newsletters do exist. If you’ve worked with I.T. Roadmap, you’ll know we can’t stand saying no to a customer request. But in this case, there are just too many contraindications. Let’s discuss.
Email Needs a Human Touch
If a post is published and then retracted, the plugin might send out the blog post anyway. Or, say you’ve made an error and then go back and correct it later. It might be too late. Another issue is that it’s difficult to control the formatting of these emails. Because the system is automated (in most cases), you would not be able to predict how it looks before it goes out. If a blog post writer uses any kind of nonstandard code or formatting, the results are increasingly unpredictable.
It’s tough to predict what kinds of problems might arise. These types of plugins tend to be free, so there’s not a lot of incentive for their developers to fix bugs. When an email is going out to hundreds or even thousands of subscribers, we feel it’s important to have human approval. The stakes are just too high.
The Risk of Being Marked as a Spammer is Significant
The subscription management is not as good as third-party vendors like Constant Contact (or Mailchimp, etc.). Most email providers—Gmail, Yahoo, and so on—use spam tools that can mark your emails as spam for a number of reasons. Typically, these email services will look for an SPF record to determine whether the server sending out email is allowed to do so. It will also look for suspicious behavior, words, and phrases. Most WordPress blogs are hosted on shared servers, so if even one of the other websites hosted on your shared server, your WordPress outgoing emails can be marked as spam.
For this client, we use a VPS—a Virtual Private Server. That takes care of the problem of someone else on the same server sending out spam. There’s no one else on their server. It doesn’t fully eliminate the risk of being marked as spam, though. If someone unsubscribes to your list and (for myriad reasons), they are mailed to anyway, that puts those emails at risk of being flagged as spam. This could cascade into our server’s IP being blacklisted.
In contrast, professional email newsletter services work constantly to make sure that their emails are delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes. They are known to major email services, and when a user’s email server receives a newsletter from their white-listed servers, they know it’s not spam.
Hacker Exploitation of Your WordPress Blog
These kinds of plugins are also good targets for hackers to exploit to send spam, generating a security risk. While we love WordPress, it’s so popular that hackers are constantly looking for inroads. WordPress seems to put out updates every week, it seems. If a hacker should find a vulnerability in WordPress or an email newsletter plugin, the potential for abuse is substantial.
That said, Constant Contact does have a tool that makes it really easy to send out blog content as an email. There’s a button that says “Insert blog content.” Likewise, Mailchimp also offers a “feed” tag that lets you insert one or multiple blog posts into an email. If you want to send out email newsletters that contain your blog content, this is the solution we recommend. And if you use one of these providers, you also get the benefit of their analytics tools, subscriber management tools, and other marketing tools. If you absolutely could not use a tool like this, the one WordPress plugin that passes muster for us is Mailpoet. Even still, it’s significantly more complicated to use, costs money, and deliverability can still be an issue.
