Are you an SME, or a blogger or solo entrepreneur? Are you having a hard time growing your inclination towards costly-but-professional Email service providers or for more affordable WordPress extensions to do your email marketing? There are a lot of talks on this issue, good and bad.

But the choice between an external Email subscription service and a WordPress newsletter plugin is always a tough one. Those who prefer Email marketing services are also those who cite lack of ease of use, reliability, limits and delays, compliance issues as reasons for not choosing WordPress plugins. But not all of these are exactly true about WordPress Newsletters services. If utilized correctly, they can become the hacker of email marketing for your business and the best jackpot deal.

Here we look at 3 of the most powerful and famous plugins that will make you rethink about emailing newsletters with WordPress.

1. MailPoet

One of the most well-known and used email newsletter plugins for WordPress, MailPoet has a distinct set of features that are sufficient for any business. MailPoet version 2.7.10 has a drag-and-drop email designer and form builder though it is very basic and not very interactive. It comes with custom post types, autoresponders and customized themes but it is limited to 2000 subscribers. The free version also allows you to create lists of subscribers by those users that opened, clicked on a link, and those who didn’t open your newsletter. But you won’t be able to trace those who opened a specific link in your newsletter. It also does not show detailed statistics for each subscriber and newsletter.

Though the free version is mobile friendly, it does not come with 24/7 support and automatic removal of bounced email addresses to keep subscribers list clean.

With their sending methods, you can send unlimited emails and remove invalid addresses automatically from your lists without any additional configuration. The free version does not include Google Analytics integration, spam score checker, and also does not show your top subscribers and newsletters.

The Premium plugin is free only when subscribing to a sending plan. Though you don’t have a trial option, MailPoet also gives you 30-day refund after purchase if you are not happy with the service.

For single site the cost is $99.

2. MailChimp

MailChimp prides itself as the Marketing Automaton so that you can leave all the manual and repetitive work for the machine to do while you focus on more important stuffs, like strategy-making! Simply connect your eCommerce store to this plugin and you can create targeted email or ad campaigns, automate helpful product follow-ups, and send back-in-stock messaging. MailChimp allows you to segment your clients in different ways based on behavior, preferences, and previous sales. This way you can create more targeted newsletters.

Like MailPoet, it also has a drag-and-drop design builder and the free version is limited to 2000 subscribers. It lets you collaborate with multi-user accounts. The ready-made templates for subscription forms are very basic. Although you can import as many contacts as you like, if you get a lot of unsubscriptions or spam complaints after sending a campaign your account can be suspended and/or cancelled. Autoresponders, a very important feature, is also not always available, and will only be sent to those who subscribed via the web form.  The free version also doesn’t have spam control. It also has very strict content restriction policies.

What is in the Pro Version?

The pro version comes with Google Analytics. That means you can learn, refine, optimize your email and ad campaigns to grow your business—all in one place. Can send to one list or segment at a time, which can be created dynamically by searching on certain parameters. 

Unlike MailPoet, MailChimp offers Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns to grow your clients and sell more stuff. It integrates with many popular apps, has a pretty good customer support and reliability.

However, MailChimp is relatively expensive. The cost of pro add-on itself is $199/month. For unlimited emails, their subscription plans starts from $20 per month and the cost increases with the number of subscribers.

3. Email Campaign

Email Campaign is different from MailPoet and MailChimp because it’s ideal for SMEs as well as individuals and large enterprises.

The drop-and-drag builder is much more interactive, illustrated, and very easy to use for anyone. The best thing about the builder is that you can preview your changes real time.

The least is that it works with an ERP system called WP ERP, which is a pioneer and the only ERP system on WordPress till today. Email Campaign perfectly integrates with your CRM module and in your WP ERP system. It’s the ideal email marketing extension for your WP ERP, which has vast capabilities.

Its affordability, ease of use, installation, and in-built marketing features makes it the ideal email marketing plugin.

With Email Campaign, you can create personalized, automated and beautifully designed outbound emails. It gives you an amazing experience making newsletters and customer follow ups.

Email Campaign brings to you 20 customizable gorgeous templates and 7 themes to woo your readers and clients. You can even create your templates and themes from scratch!

With its superbly interactive email builder you are able to preview your email’s outlook real time as you edit. You can stylize your content any way you like. Schedule mails so that your clients receive them at their convenient times. With the ability to generate mailing lists from numerous sources and a responsive design to format your emails, creating email campaigns with this extensions will become for you easy peasy!

Email Campaign also comes with UTM parameters that you can use to extract Google Analytics data on your Emails. You can view deep analytics of each campaign – including its status, clicks, opens, unsubscribes, bounce rates and the lists it was sent to.

You can also embed WP posts, videos, and automatically insert custom field information for all recipients. Inserting customized buttons and social icons bars is easy with just one click.

The Social Follow button and its advanced features will allow you to autolink your social platforms to your email newsletters so that your subscribers are easily able to find your pages, follow you and share your content. You can also select multiple icon sets and align them from here.

Email Campaign subscription comes in different packages for the convenience of its users and businesses.

Single Site pricing starts with $149 while 3 sites cost $299. This makes Email Campaign a better deal than MailPoet and MailChimp because it not only covers the features of the former two but also comes with extra capabilities.

Summing Up

The choice between WordPress Newsletter services and the more high-tech external Email marketing providers is a difficult one particularly because. The latter are more equipped with features so you get noticed by your subscribers. That is not to say that WordPress plugins will always land you in spam folders. It’s a matter of whether you are choosing the right plugin for your business.

With its advanced and evolving features, Email Campaign, MailPoet, and MailChimp are all doing great. For solo entrepreneurs and SME’s, these are better options not only because they are more affordable, but also easier to handle for people who are not so highly knowledgeable in technology and setting up email campaigns. These plugins are easy to install, execute and do not require much tech savvy-ness for the average user.

Have you had any experience using WordPress solutions for emailing newsletters? Share with us your story in comments below!