MailPoet

MailPoet is the perfect software to manage all your email campaigns and store subscribers locally on your WordPress installation.

How to Enable the Extension

Mailpoet has both a free and a premium version. The premium version comes with your X/Pro copy. But before you can enable the premium version, you need to install and activate the free version.

To do that, go to Pro > Validation or X > Validation. Scroll all the way down to the Approved Plugins section and look for MailPoet. Click Install.

Once installed, the Install button will change to Activate. Click that button and it will activate the plugin. You will then see the status change to Installed and Activated.

Now that you have the free version installed, you can now proceed to install the premium version. To do that, scroll up till you find the Extensions section. Then look for Mailpoet Premium and click Install.

Just like in the free version, once installed, the Install button will change to Activate. Click that button and it will activate the plugin. You will then see the status change to Installed and Activated.

When you have MailPoet installed and activated, you should see a MailPoet menu item on the WordPress dashboard.

However, since installing both the free and premium versions were done on the X or Pro Validation page (where installation happens without page reloads), you need to reload the page before you can see the said menu item.

Add a Newsletter

MailPoet comes with everything you need to run successful email marketing. We will show you how you can achieve a basic setup which will get you started in the right direction. You can always alter options and extend functionality.

In the Emails tab of MailPoet you can choose if you want to create a Newsletter, a Welcome Email, send out Latest Post Notifications or link MailPoet to WooCommerce to trigger emails when products get added or other actions are taken.

For our introduction we will be picking the Newsletter options.

MailPoet will give you a wide range of Email Templates you can choose from. Pick one that suits your needs and press Select.

In the Template Designer you can change the Layout as well as add elements and text. This is basically a builder that lets you create your whole email campaign. Once you have created everything to your needs you can click Next.

In the last step you define all the Email parameters like Subject line, which Lists it will get sent to and the Sender information.

An optional option is to schedule the Email to send it out to your subscribers at convenient time.

Forms

This section lets you create opt-in forms where people can subscribe to your individual lists.

You can create an unlimited amount of forms and customize to which lists they should get subscribed to. By using this you can filter lists and show different forms on different section and for different endusers.

Subscribers

This section is essential for managing all your subscribers. You can see their email and most importantly their status and to which list they are subscribed to.

One essential feature in this tab when you are moving from a different email marketing software is the import option which lets you import lists of subscribers.

Lists

Lists show you all your lists and the subscribers that are assigned to them.

This gives you a great overview on how many subscribers are subscribed to each individual list. You can also create new lists or delete some.

Segments

Segmentation is a best practice in email marketing. Simply put, it is the practice of breaking up an email list into smaller groups based on different criteria, which could be their demographics and the actions they've taken or have not taken (e.g. Opened emails, clicked a link). This makes email marketing effective because you are tailoring your messaging to different groups rather than sending a generic one.

MailPoet Premium gives you the ability to do segmentation. You can manage segments by clicking MailPoet > Segments. To add a segment, simply click the Add New button and you'll see a form that looks like this.

You'll be asked to enter the Name of the segment, give it a description and select a segment. You can create a segment either by Email or WordPress user roles.

For more information about this feature, read this article from the official MailPoet documentation.

Settings

The Settings tab is crucial to ensure proper delivery of the newsletters as well as display settings. We will go through each individual tab and cover the most important functions.

Basics

This section lets you tweak all general settings like the Default sender or setting the Subscribe and Unsubscribe page as well as setting up an Archive for your newsletter.

Sign-Up Confirmation

We recommend enabling this option. It will send an email to your subscribers after they subscribed to your list. You can tweak the test and title of that email and this creates a great opportunity to start a conversation with them and make them feel value in being subscribed.

Send With...

MailPoet lets you use a wide array of sending providers. One rather new addition is their native sending service which can be tested for free but if you have over 1,000 subscribers you will need to pay for that service. If you go with the Other setting you can either use the native web server or use services like Amazon SES or SendGrid.

Keep in mind that using the web server is not reliable as most hosting providers have limits on how many emails you can send out so they might block you at a certain point which makes delivery very unreliable. We recommend using a delivery provider to ensure the highest delivery rate possible and reaching all your subscribers.

Advanced

The Advanced tab has some neat options such as activating reCAPTCHA which is a great way to prevent bots from signing up to your list.

Another important setting there is the Loggin function. If you are having trouble with sending newsletters we recommend switching to logging Everything which will give you a great insight on what's going on and also be of help for our support staff if they need to troubleshoot something for you related to MailPoet.

Further Documentation

MailPoet features a great knowledge base which covers individual topics in detail. You can find it here.

Summary

Hopefully this introduction to MailPoet gave you a better understanding of the main options and features this plugin provides. You now should be able to send campaigns and manage your subscribers as well as tweaking settings within the MailPoet plugin.