How to Issue Newsletter with WordPress

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Newsletter is another channel that can help you connect with your audience. From the Google, you can found a ton of articles about the important to build a mailing list. On NARGA.NET we’re using MailChimp to create and sending the Newsletter to our audience.
In this article, we will show you how can we build mailing list, manage and send it throught WordPress. You can read about the reason why we choose MailChimp instead others email sending services, our experiences to create a responsive and beautiful newsletter layout. This includes the very basics to advanced tricks, recommended services & plugins, secret tips to increase opt-in rates, and much more.

The goals so you can see what we wanted to accomplish:

  • Have a browsable archives
  • Choose the Have each issue on the site and under my control
  • Write in markdown with full control over content sections
  • Have a signup form on past mailings
  • Be able to easily take it and send it with Sendy

Why you should create a newsletter browsable archives?

A simple answer: Browsable archives is the locale where your readers can see and locate articles from past issues
You can create a newsletter’s browsable archives by using WordPress Category or WordPress Post Type features. If you use Category to assorting posts and newsletter issues you will get the feed items involved. In my experiences, I create a new WordPress Post Type to manage all the newsletter issues. I called it as “Newsletter” post type.

add_action('init', 'create_post_type');
function create_post_type() {
  register_post_type('newsletter',
    array(
      'labels' => array(
        'name' => __('Newsletter'),
        'singular_name' => __('Newsletter')
     ),
      'public' => true,
      'has_archive' => true,
rewrite' => array('slug' => 'newsletter'),
   )
 );
}

The above will result new Post Type name as Newsletter identified as newsletter and can browser through https://www.narga.net/newsletter/%issue_number%..
But as I’ve mentioned before, we need A Browsable Archive so I create a theme template file to listing all newsletter post type only.






    
>
    

        

    

        

 'newsletter', 'posts_per_page' => 10);
$loop = new WP_Query($args);
while ($loop->have_posts()) : $loop->the_post();
  the_title();
  echo '
';
  the_content();
  echo '
';
endwhile; ?>

Never Use WordPress to Send Bulk Emails

Unless you own a very powerful server or very high quality hosting services, you can’t send bulk emails immediately, the emails sending has limited and delay by hosting providers.
The next problem is your domain has low authority, there is a great chance that your emails and domain will listing on blacklist or spam databases, all of your emails will be delete or delived into spam folder. Any sign of abuse by one person on that server can trigger spam catching databases which will make your email delivery doubtful.
The third problem is your server management ability, you must be a master of server management to setup it send bulk emails flawlessly before it is going die after the first queue.
It’s hard to monitor what’s happened with your newsletter email, how many of them were opened, and the number of clicks you have received …
On the other hand, professional email service providers work day and night to solving almost problems above. hey follow a strict set of rules and apply it to all their outgoing emails to ensure it reaches the destination and not ends up in junk mail.

Which Email Marketing Service Should You Use?

Below are just some of the providers that we have used to sending newsletter and highly recommend.

MailChimp

The main disadvantage with MailChimpFREE.
As Mailchimp got bigger, they introduced a lot of features that, it lets you send emails, manage subscribers, track emails, view analytics, setup autoresponders, create beautiful email templates, target subscribers, and split test your campaigns.
We still stay with MailChimp because while more expensive per email, the pay as you go option saved a lot of money over the long run.
MailChimp is much better for sending newsletters, and anyone who tries to convince you to do bulk sending from your WordPress installation is almost definitely nuts

Sendy

Another benefit with Sendy is that it’s easy to white label. This makes it a great choice for agencies or web design companies wishing to provide clients with an email marketing platform. For me, the main attraction to Sendy was the affordability and simplicity. Sendy is by far the most cost effective email marketing service, as they use Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) to send emails, which costs about $1 per 10,000 emails.
For a quick summary and comparison, we’ve created the following table.

Service Pricing* Type AB Testing Free/Trial?
Mailchimp $55/month Cloud-based Yes Free up to 2,000 subscribers Go to MailChimp
SendGrid $81.20/month Cloud-based Yes Free up to 400 emails/day Go to SendGrid
Sendy $59 one-off + $0.001 per email Self-hosted No No Go to Sendy

Conclusion

The cheapest option for email marketing is without a doubt, Sendy.co. It’s worth to send bulk marketing email.

In the next week

  • Subscribe Form and plugins to increase the subscribers
  • How to write a beautiful and high quality newsletter
  • … more and more

To be continue…