Email Marketing: How To Manage Direct Mail With WordPress

I’ve decided to create an email list using a WordPress plugin for web marketing purposes (ebook promotion, direct mailling etc).

Photo Credit: solarseven

I opened a proper thread into the Problogger forum and  others bloggers provided quickly relevant and useful information, as usual.

Skinny said:

I don’t use a plugin- just got a MailChimp account (or use whatever email marketing provider you want) to set up my database and then have the html opt-in form linked on my site- they enter information there and it dumps to my email marketing account with MailChimp.

MailChimp seems a good mailing list manager, and it’s free up to 500 subscriptios as Sid said;

With MailChimp you can have up to 500 subs for free. I am using MailChimp, you can sign up for the free motivational quotes ebook in my sig if you want to check out how the sign up works for a free bonus with a subscription. I customized it a *lot* so that all the thankyou pages etc are on my site – I think it is pretty spiffy =)

It integrates with WordPress, Twitter and others platform . The WP plugin adds  a subscription form in the sidebar and store the information directly into the MailChimp db.

Chickblogger instead was using Aweber, another well known email marketing software but he’s giving up because he find it a little bit expansive;

… I too await some answers. I had Aweber for a while and ratched up some 500 subscribers but had to cancel as the price went up from $19 a month to $29 a month, and I honestly didn’t know what I was doing…

Rhys has a different approach:

The problem is with a dedicated mailing list “Plugin” is that you’d probably get thrown off your server for spamming, so you’re far better using something like Aweber/Mailchimp (my choice). I have written a plugin called WP Email Capture which can be used to display a form on your site, which mimics the functionality of all those Aweber boxes out there (Mailchimp’s sign up form in my opinion isn’t particularly good), which you can then export to other programs

I will say this, if you import into Aweber & some other programs, you have to reconfirm again, however I’ve never had a problem with Mailchimp, and it has a high success rate of delivery.

It’s a nice solution because it let you manage directly email collection, but on the other hand it requires to transfer the  list from the WP db to the mailing list software each time that you need to mail your users.

Syed, the author of WPBeginner, propose to connect WordPress directly to feedburnew with some tricks;

Because of high demand, I got this tutorial written…

You can use WordPress and Feedburner with a few plugins to make your WordPress work as a Newsletter Manager type service that Aweber has.

You guys might want to check it out  – Create a Free Email Newsletter Service using WordPress

Another relevat resource is  A Trek Through WordPress Mailing List Plugins – Email Mailing List Manager by Solomon Rothman, who describe 8  mailing list plugin for wordpress.

I still don’t know what solution suite my needs but i’ll continue to dig around a bit…

Thanks to alll of you for sharing