MailPoet Review

Introduction

Before MailPoet, I hardly did any email marketing. Email marketing was either expensive or frustrating. Sometimes, it was a combination of both. In doing this MailPoet review, I’ve found an email marketing software that solved most of these issues with its in-depth integration with WordPress and great deliverability rates.

To be fair, it might not be for everyone. Please read and comment if you find the review of MailPoet, useful.

Things to Consider Before Subscribing to an Email Marketing Software

For digital marketers and bloggers, email marketing is an effective form of retaining traffic. While social media continues giving diminishing returns, email marketing is a cost effective method to overcome the problem.

With an average opening rate of 21.3% and an average conversion rate of 2.62%,[^1] growing your list email subscribers is one of the best ways to grow a blog’s readership.

Before you get started, you need to decide between signing up for an email marketing software or buying a newsletter plugin. While looking similar, they are different and cater to different crowds.

A deeper question to consider though would be, how serious are you on producing quality written content regularly?

Email Marketing software can be expensive, especially if you have a lot of subscribers. Without fully utilising it, you’ll be looking at a marketing cost instead of a tool to generate revenue.

Presenting MailPoet

MailPoet, the hybrid WordPress Email Marketing Software

MailPoet is an email marketing software similar to MailChimp. It claims to be the best and easiest to use email marketing software for WordPress.

With 300k active installs and in its third edition, MailPoet integrates deeply with WordPress. It features a powerful drag-and-drop email designer in the WordPress dashboard, making it easy for you to compose beautiful newsletters.

Compared to MailChimp, MailPoet is a hybrid SaaS and WordPress plugin. That means, while the heavy lifting is done by MailPoet’s servers, your email subscriber lists are stored within WordPress itself.

One stark difference with MailChimp is MailPoet handles not just bulk emails, but transactional emails. This includes password resets, contact form emails and WooCommerce orders.

Who is MailPoet For?

MailPoet is great for bloggers, digital marketers and online store owners. If you actively produce quality content, need email marketing automation and great deliverability rates, MailPoet is ideal for you.

MailPoet is NOT suitable for website owners on a tight budget. If you are not prepared to invest in the service, perhaps a newsletter software using Amazon SES suits you better.

Pros & Cons of MailPoet

Pros of MailPoet

• Integrated Drag & Drop Email Designer
• In-depth Email Marketing Automation for WordPress Sites
• Great Email Deliverability (98.5%)
• Supported by Most WordPress Optin Forms
• Does Transactional Emails

Cons of MailPoet

• Pricier than Email Services like Amazon SES and SendinBlue
• Strict Anti-Spam Enforcement
• Keeps Subscriber Lists in Database

Features & Benefits of MailPoet

Integrated Drag-and-Drop Email Designer

One major reasons why I recommend MailPoet is the integrated drag-and-drop email designer.

While drag-and-drop email designers are common among email marketing software, they are not integrated with your WordPress site. This means, you need to take extra effort to send out a newsletter.

Plus, as your latest posts are parsed via RSS, only limited information is sent over to these software.

In comparison, with MailPoet, I can easily adjust my newsletters to include stuff like post categories, author, excerpt or full text and so on. And I can easily pull images from the blog instead of uploading them separately to an external service like MailChimp.

An integrated drag-and-drop email designer will make your newsletter creation, more efficient.

In-depth Email Marketing Automation for WordPress Sites

But you don’t want just email delivery. MailPoet comes with in-depth email marketing automation for WordPress that rivals GetResponse Plus and MailChimp.

This includes in-depth WooCommerce integration that delivers programmable abandoned cart emails, welcome emails to first-time purchasers as well as upsell/cross-sell emails to your opted-in customers.

This is important, as manually doing all these is hard work. With marketing automation, you get to improve your customers’ loyalty with minimal effort.

Great Email Deliverability Rates – MailPoet delivers 98.5% of All Emails

If you go down the path of SMTP services like Amazon SES, Pepipost or Sendinblue to deliver your bulk emails, you get really affordable prices. The downside though, is delivery. Would your email end up flagged by some overzealous email hosts?

Sending via these services often mean maintaining a pool of dedicated IP and sending reputation. This adds extra costs and complexity and may not be worth the effort.

In comparison, MailPoet makes it easy to send bulk email newsletters. With a delivery rate of 98.5% and the ability to send up to 50k of emails per hour, you can be sure your readers won’t miss any important or urgent news.

Supported by Most WordPress Optin Forms

While there are new email marketing software being launched regularly with exciting new features, most aren’t supported by leading WordPress Optin Forms.

As a WordPress developer and user, my concern would be in-depth integration with plugins such as OptinMonster, Thrive Leads and Bloom.

Though most Email Marketing Software have their in-house optin forms and widgets, their lead capture capabilities and features pales compared to say, OptinMonster, GetSiteControl or Convertful.

Why get a powerful email marketing software when your lead generation capabilities are limited?

MailPoet comes tightly integrated with all major WordPress Optin Forms, making it an easy recommendation for WordPress users.

Does Transactional Emails

Transactional emails separate MailPoet from other email marketing services like MailChimp, ConvertKit and GetResponse.

While this might seem trivial, it means cutting down the need for a SMTP service as email deliverability with SMTP services can be spotty.

Why bother with the complexities of transactional emails when you can have it all under one roof with MailPoet?

MailPoet and Anti-Spam

One weakness with MailPoet (if you view this as a weakness), is their strict anti-spam policy. MailPoet will cancel your account and not refund you if you are judged to spam others.

But what is spam, according to MailPoet?

Who Is A Spammer?

At MailPoet, we define a spammer as a user who:

1. sends emails that result in an unacceptable number of invalid addresses (hard bounce), typically when sending to a list that’s over a year old
2. sends emails that result in an unacceptable number of Spam
3. uses a purchased or rented email list
4. uses third-party email addresses, domain names, or mail servers without proper permission
5. uses lists from another website or service you own, even one from another MailPoet account
6. sends emails to non-specific addresses (i.e., webmaster@domain.com or info@domain.com)
7. fails to include a working “unsubscribe” link in each email that allows the recipient to remove himself from his mailing list
8. fails to comply with any request from a recipient to be removed from his mailing list within 10 days of receipt of the request
9. fails to include in each email his valid physical mailing address

MailPoet Recommendations

Here are some reviews by users on MailPoet. MailPoet comes with an average of 4.6/5 stars on the WordPress repository and 4/5 stars on AppSumo

• MailPoet simple saves me a lot of time. It is easy to import my blog posts into my newsletter – Lisa
• I’ve been using MailPoet for about a year, on their incredibly generous free premium plan (under 1000 subscribers), and I’ve been consistently impressed. Not only is the plugin easy to use and beautifully designed, but deliverability is also great. And the support is incredible: friendly, helpful, and transparent. – Will
• I have tried about 30 Newsletter Plugins, they all were somewhat useless. MailPoet was the only Plugin that provided me with the combination of headlines and automatic post import that I need! – mato691
• I’m in the process of setting up MailPoet on my sites, and I can’t wait to import my subscribers from GetResponse into MailPoet. Not only is MailPoet a hundred times cheaper than GetResponse, MailPoet contains a “latest posts” feature that I will regularly use. MailPoet formats the feature image, title, and lead sentence for each selected blog post – sumo-ling on AppSumo

Alternatives to MailPoet

If you require more power and automation, a standalone email marketing software like MailChimp might be more suitable for you. MailChimp comes with features such as landing pages, social media posts, Facebook and Google Ads integration, and much more.

If you prefer to save costs and don’t mind the lack of marketing automation and the hassle of managing your sending reputation, consider a Newsletter Software paired with Amazon SES. This includes software like Sendy, Mautic and BigMailer.

MailPoet Review: The Conclusion

MailPoet is an email marketing software focused on making it simple for you to send out powerful newsletters from your WordPress dashboard.

With great deliverability rates, powerful automations and deep integration with WooCommerce and Optin Form plugins, we highly recommend MailPoet if you are a WordPress user.

MailPoet is having a time-limited lifetime deal on AppSumo where each code gives you a limit of 5k subscribers for life, with unlimited emails. Even better still, you are able to have the same limits for an unlimited amount of sites.

If you need more subscribers, you can stack 10 codes from AppSumo for a grand total of 50k subscribers for life. Personally, I went for 10x codes and am using MailPoet with the Leokoo website.

Though MailPoet comes with strict anti-spam policy, it only affects people who send out spammy or unauthorised emails. You can circumvent this by only using MailPoet with trusted websites. Or managing the email campaigns yourself.

[^1]: https://mailchimp.com/resources/email-marketing-benchmarks/