Email marketing is crucial for every site. Without email marketing, you are left to search engines and its ever changing algorithms, or worse, social media marketing which shows a declining organic reach, yearly.
But growing an email list can be expensive. The most generous email marketing platform, MailChimp, only allows two thousand contacts before charging you monthly fees.
The Issue With Regular Email Marketing Platforms
If your blog has moderate traction, your free two thousand subscribers gets filled up in a few months or less. There, you’ll be faced with a decision on whether to continue on free (and have no new subscribers) or move on to MailChimp Premium.
Continuing on with MailChimp, will cost you in the $29.90/mo for the next subscriber. And the price only goes up from here.
That’s why large publications either don’t use email marketing or roll out their own.
But how about using some plugin so self-manage my email list? Personally, that’s a bad idea and can be even more expensive.
While plugins like Mailster, MailPoet and the Newsletter Plugin allows you to self-manage your emails, you’ll be bloating up your site’s database.
And to ensure your emails are delivered, you need to be on some email delivery service such as Amazon SES or MailGun, which may costs more than MailChimp in the long run.
How to Get Unlimited Email Subscribers
In short, there seems to be no easy solution. Until I found the combo of Jetpack and this interesting WordPress plugin I just found, Easy Social Sharing Buttons.
You see, Jetpack always had the option to grow your email marketing subscribers via the Jetpack Subscriptions module. And mind you, there are no limits to the amount of subscribers you can have, unlike MailChimp or Moosend.
Sure, you don’t get to send fancy newsletters nor segment them based on their interest, but I’m not keen on those. I prefer setting up an automated email marketing system that updates my readers with our latest content, and Jetpack Subscription does it well.
Plus, I don’t want to worry about the costs nor the amount of subscribers I could have, before needing to upgrade to the next level. Nor the need to remove non-responsive readers.
How to Get Email Subscribers via JetPack Subscriptions
Jetpack Subscriptions come with two ways to gain email subscribers, namely via Jetpack Comments and the Blog Subscriptions widget. Both solid and adequate for your needs.
But if you want eye catching optins, Jetpack Subscriptions unfortunately doesn’t do that. This is where our second plugin comes in play.
But You Need Optins, No?
I was just setting up Easy Social Sharing Buttons (ESSB for short), when I realised that ESSB did more than just social sharing buttons.
It now has a Jetpack Subscriptions integration that gives us powerful optin forms that Jetpack Subscriptions always lacked. Having found ESSB’s optin forms, I checked various competitors such as Thrive Leads, Bloom by ElegantThemes, OptinMonster, ConvertPro and even Convertful, with the hopes that I could find an alternative to ESSB. Sadly, there weren’t any.
Nonetheless, it excites me to know ESSB’s Jetpack Subscription integration. The next question was, would this work?
How Effective Is This?
I tested out the combo last month during the Black Friday period and saw a 500% increase in the number of subscribers. Perhaps it was the articles. Or perhaps it was the fact that Jetpack Subscriptions made it seamless for readers to subscribe to my email marketing list.
Or perhaps it was the additional conversion rate optimisation tweak I did, in the form of contextual widgets with Extended Widget Options.
Whichever it is, the Jetpack Subscriptions and ESSB combo is a viable alternative to bloggers on a budget or just anyone planning to take advantage of Jetpack’s generous gift to WordPress users.
Conclusion: Unlimited Mailing List Hack is Viable
In writing this article, I checked out a number of prominent optin forms plugins and SaaS solutions. Sadly, only ESSB integrates with Jetpack Subscriptions.
If you like this article and would like to see more optin forms plugins adopt Jetpack Subscriptions, be sure to suggest for this in their roadmap and vote it up. Better still, you can join our nascent WordPress-focused Facebook Group and create a post on the roadmap you’ve voted on. We will definitely join you in voting up Jetpack Subscriptions.
