From humble beginnings, WordPress autoresponders have grown into fully-featured solutions, with a number of plugins to choose. Here we discuss 3 best ones: GoodNews!, MyMail and RapidMailer.
Honorable mention:
- Email Newsletter System – nice work on the shortcodes, and visual template editing, and
- Autoresponse Pro – which supportsdifferent SMTP service providers, GMAIL SMTP services and Amazon SES.
Why Not Use Online Autoresponder Services?
With heavyweights such as Aweber, GetResponse and Mailchimp around, why bother with WordPress autoresponder plugins in the first place? While online autoresponder services have been around for a while and are quite reliable, I can think of 3 big advantages in favor of WordPress sutoresponder plugins:
- No Ongoing Costs
I don’t know about you, but I am not a great fan of subscriptions, I prefer one-off payments.With subscriptions, you get progressively penalized with higher and higher fees as your list grows. It doesn’t matter whether you list is responsive or ‘cold’, it matters not whether you’re making any money off of your list or not, you end up paying $500 per month or more just for having a big list. Why do it, if a WordPress autoresponder can do an equally good job for a small one-off fee? - Peace of Mind
Do you know that your account with an online autoresponder service can get suspended or cancelled overnight, for a variety of reasons? It is known to happen, and it can hit your pocket hard, undermine the trust your customers have in you, and bring your sales funnel to a halt. There are no such risks when your autoresponder is installed on your own WordPress site. - You’re in Full Control
With the online autoresponder services you’re NEVER in control. When you want to move people from one service to another, they’re forced to confirm it yet again – and many do not understand why do they have to do it all over again, and you lose a solid percentage of your list. Also, when people purchase your product, why force them into additional confirmations? With some of these services, you even have to ask for permission when you change the subject line of some of the subscription messages, as if you were a fifth-grader. By contrast, when you use autoresponder plugin for WordPress, you’re the boss!
Ideal Entry Level: GoodNews! Autoresponder and Newsletter Plugin
With the price tag set ridiculously low at $18, GoodNews! is the ideal entry-level autoresponder for WordPress. Yet, you get an impressive amount of functionality:
- Unlimited number of autoresponder campaigns
- Unlimited number of newsletters / broadcasts
- Send to multiple lists
- Auto-subscribe users to a list when they sign-up for your blog
- Easy import and export of subscribers
- Create custom fields and use them in your messages
- Single opt-in or double-opt-in
- Embed the opt-in forms into other websites
- Add ReCaptcha human check
- 4 ways to schedule your campaigns
OK, with this much of built-in functionality, why is this and entry-level product, you may well ask. Because there are 2 things that GoodNews! does not possess:
- Email Bouncing
The program does not keep tally of bounced emails. If you want to tell it to remove the emails that have bounced for example 5 times in a row,there’s no way of doing it. This is not much of a problem for small lists, but if you have alist of over 10,000 people, over the period of years it may mean hundreds of bouncedemails. - Stats
GoodNews! does not include a built-in statistical engine, so you do not know how many emails have been opened, and how many clicks have been generated. For this reason, I shorten all the links using goo.gl, which gives you accurate stats. Appending ‘+’ or ‘.info’ to a link shortened with goo.gl gives you detailed statistics on the number of clicks, traffic sources, countries, browsers and platforms. Here’s an example:
As a way of full disclosure, you should know that GoodNews! autoresponder plugin has been designed by my C Point team. Since I have a vested interest in it, you should take everything I say about it with a grain of salt.
Verdict: inexpensive and straightforward, GoodNews! is an excellent choice for lists of up to 10,000 subscribers.
Rock-solid Solution: MyMail
What I like about MyMail is that it tracks so many things: opens, clicks, unsubscribes, bounces, countries and cities. Apart from sending the regular autoresponder sequences, you have some neat additional options:
- Send an email on your subscriber’s birthday
- After the birthday email has been opened, send the birthday coupon
- Automatically send messages on Christmas and other specific dates
Another feature that I really like is ‘Know Your Subscribers‘ – which is cool and perhaps a little scary as it gives you all sorts of info on individual subscribers.
Other features:
- Essentials
- Retina support
- SMTP support
- DomainKeys Identified Mail Support
- Dynamic and custom Tags (placeholders)
- Tracking
- Opens
- Clicks
- Unsubscribing
- Bounces
- Countries
- Cities
- Autoresponders
- Campaign Scheduling
- Six autoresponder types
- Newsletters
- Auto-create web version of each newsletter
- Auto-send the latest post to subscribers
- Embed newsletter with shortcodes
- Forward via email
- Opt-in Forms
- Unlimited subscription forms
- Sidebar widgets
- Single or double opt-in
- Social
- Share via Social Media Services
- Editing
- Revisions support (native)
- Multi language ready
- Automatic in-line styles
- Support for background images
- Quick Preview
- WYSIWYG editor with code view
- Unlimited color variations
- Image embedding (optional)
- Managing Subscribers
- Import and export
A great thing about MyMail is that it is compatible with Layered Popups. These opt-in popups are animated, can be activated with a click or automatically after the specified number of seconds, and even have analytics and A/B testing, allowing you to reach the optimal conversions. Another great thing about Layered Popups is that people can sign-up with their social media accounts.
Verdict: MyMail is a powerful, fully-fledged autoresponder, in active development and well-supported.
Complete Paid-lists Business Solution: Rapid Mailer
Note: After this review has been published, it has come to my attention that not everyone has had a stellar experience using Rapid Mailer. In addition, there are posts at https://wordpress.org/support/topic/beware-of-rapid-mailer and https://wordpress.org/support/topic/quick-cache-and-imsc-rapid-mailer-cache-pages-not-generated Until all the issues are resolved, I am NOT recommending Rapid Mailer any more.
Rapid Mailer has much of the same features that MyMail offers, including being mobile-friendly, having a powerful editor, and the ability to broadcast blogs. However, it has 3 features that set it apart from other autoresponders for WordPress:
Paid Lists
- This means that you can charge subscribers to sign them up on specific lists. This includes both one-off and recurring payments, and the supported payment processors are PayPal and 2Checkout. In my view, this functionality is huge, because it gives you an entire self-contained business-in-a-box.
- Group Segmenting
The success of your email marketing campaigns depends largely on reaching the targeted audience. In thisrespect, Rapid Mailer is super-flexible, allowing you to split your lists, migrate thesubscribers from one list to another, and group your leads and lists in a variety of ways. - Better Deliverability
By making sure that your messages are Can Spam compliant, you increase the deliverability big-time.
Here’s the video illustrating the Rapid Mailer capabilities:
Other features that I find handy:
- Importing of existing users into specific lists
- Themes for branded mailings
- Excellent real-time at-a-glance statistics
- Squeeze page integration
- Social Media integration
Verdict: With paid lists and easy list segmentation, Rapid Mailer is an entire business-in-a-box.
Get More Info and/or Download MyMail ($67 for 3 sites)
