Email Newsletters For WordPress

As you may have seen in last week’s competition post, I recently created an email newsletter for WPShout. You may have also noticed I ended up using MailChimp instead of a built-into-WordPress solution.

Something which used just WordPress was what I was originally after, so I set out the following criteria:

• Powered by WordPress, ideally with custom post types or a simple admin interface.
• Double opt-in, with a nice bit of code I can put in my sidebar and style for signups.
• Import and export of lists as CSVs.
• Shortcodes or similar for unsubscribe links.
• Some sort of performance tracking.
• Cheap; either a premium plugin or something with low monthly costs.

It turns out this was a fairly comprehensive list of criteria and it wasn’t possible to fulfil all of the criteria.

This left me with two options:

• Use a premium plugin, such as WordPress Email Newsletter, and sacrifice functionality I wanted such as tracking.
• Or use a third party service such as MailChimp or Aweber and not be able to send out newsletters from my WordPress dashboard.

In the end I went with MailChimp as I didn’t want to sacrifice functionality and it’s not too much of a hassle to send emails out from. I went for MailChimp over Aweber simply because I’m familiar with it (and it’s free!).