One of our clients recently asked us to implement a feature for their WordPress blog that would allow them to automatically email out their blog posts to subscribers. In the past, we’ve discouraged this for a number of reasons. But ultimately the customer is always right, so the search is on for the perfect solution. One thing we love about WordPress is that a plugin exists for almost any function you can think of. On the other hand, that means a lot of research to find exactly what you need.
Why You Wouldn’t Want to Send Out Blog Posts as Emails Automatically
- If a post is published and then retracted (whether because of a mistake or because of bad content), your plugin might have already sent out the post, and there’s no way to get it back.
- Subscription management for WordPress transactional emails is not as good as third-party vendors like Constant Contact or Mailchimp. If someone unsubscribes and (for myriad reasons), they are mailed to anyway, that puts those emails at risk of being flagged as spam. If the issue is bad enough, the server address could be blacklisted.
- These kinds of plugins are also good targets for hackers to exploit to send spam, generating a security risk.
- Most importantly, it can be difficult to control the formatting of these emails. Because they are automated, you might not be able to predict how the email looks before it goes out. If a blog post writer uses any kind of nonstandard code or formatting, the results are increasingly unpredictable.
Tools to Overcome These Problems
First, let’s note that several of the top email newsletter apps, such as Mailchimp, offer RSS feed campaign features. That is, they take your blog’s RSS feed and translate it into an email newsletter. While these are nice, they are not full-featured enough for our client’s needs.
We need a tool that will allow the client to:
- Publish a newsletter as an email only when they are satisfied that the blog post is complete.
- Customize the look and feel of the email newsletter.
- Manage subscriber lists using best practices for FCC compliance.
- Achieve high delivery rates.
There are a few plugins that claim to do this, but we think the best one is Jackmail. Jackmail allows you to trigger automated newsletters based on events you specify… so it isn’t necessarily right after you publish the post. It offers a very nice drag-and-drop interface for creating newsletters, and all of its templates are responsive (meaning the layout adapts to the platform its viewed on, whether a smartphone or a desktop computer running Outlook). Moreover, Jackmail has its own SMTP mail functionality built-in, meaning that the emails are handled by the Jackmail server and you don’t need to worry about delivery or being blacklisted.
You can also send up to 3,000 emails per month, 100 emails per day, with their free version. Five hundred members want to subscribe to receive these blog posts, so we may need the paid version… which is only $8 per month for 5,000 emails and no daily limit.
Need help finding just the right WordPress plugin to make your website complete? We can help… contact us.
