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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!).

Yay! 🎉 You made it to the end of the article!
Alex Denning
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Don't Build WordPress Plugins Into Your Themes
December 5, 2011 1:26 pm

[…] my site! And hey, there are sites like mine out there which show you how to do things like building a WordPress powered email newsletter without plugins […]

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