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Email newsletters have been around for a decade. This marketing tool, however old, is a critical way in which news websites can grow their audience and gain more traffic.
Here is how I would define a subscriber: a reader that appreciates your content and willingly wants to read more of your content as you go on producing it. In a time where publishers fight to convert flybys into repeat visitors, a subscriber is far more valuable. A subscriber is open to getting your content pushed to them and is more likely to read it as well.
Subscribers are open to receiving regular newsletters to get important news and your perspective on it. Sending these regular newsletter helps keep subscribers engaged and builds brand recall. Subscribers are also highly likely to convert for digital subscriptions for paywalls. As a result it is important to build a subscriber base and keep them engaged with newsletters.
Newsletters can be sent to subscribers weekly, monthly, or even daily. You can promote your articles in an efficient manner and fuel audience growth simultaneously. Apart from traffic generation, here are the benefits of newsletters; publishers can send important announcements about their brand, communicate new features of the website, and share discounts and offers through this medium.
While a newsletter brings heaps of benefits for publishers, it is important for news websites to offer rich content to its subscribers via these emails. These newsletters can contain weekly news digests, useful guides, recent expert interviews on varied topics, major upcoming events, and a whole lot more.
If you haven’t aced your subscriber game yet there are several plugins for WordPress that can help you. In this article we will cover plugins that will help you collect email ids from potential subscribers and also automate the entire newsletter sending process.
We will cover some of the best email collection plugins right at the start to help you collect emails from website visitors. You can collect emails by showing pop-ups on the website, opt-in fly-ins, in-line opt-in forms, below content opt-in forms, or even widget area opt-in forms. Here are some of the best WordPress plugins to help you build an emailing list.
1. Popup Builder
Popup Builder plugin helps in creating pop-ups for your news website which helps collect emails from your readers. It allows you to choose the design of the pop-up, where the email and when the sign-up window shows up on the website. There are several customization options as well, you can select from different themes and even add animations to the pop-up to draw reader attention.
Popup Builder also has a newsletter plugin which allows you to send newsletter from WordPress directly. You can also automate it to send a welcome email to a reader when they subscribe. The Popup Builder plugins is priced starting at $49.95 yearly.
2. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a very popular plugin for creating pop-ups to get email IDs from your website visitors. OptinMonster offers varied templates for publishers to choose from and a visual editor to tweak colors and fonts. Since it offers a lot of templates to choose from, you can find one that suits your needs and implement it quite easily. Publishers can also target these pop-ups based on specific pages, category sections, and URL query / anchor tags.
This plugin also allows you to set exit-intent and retargeting parameters to help reduce the amount of flyby visitors. OptinMonster also offers popups based on the region the user is coming from (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc). Paid plans start from $9 per month.
3. Icegram Engage
If you are looking for a wide variety of pop-up options Icegram Engage will fit the bill. This plugin allows publishers to capture leads using pop-ups, slide-ins, header and footer action bars, and toast notifications for their newsletter. There are multiple templates ranging from subscription to offers that Icegram Engage offers to publishers. It also offers triggers such as exit-intent, percentage of scroll, and on-click to grab reader attention based on their actions.
Icegram Engage is primarily a form builder and needs to be integrated with an email service provider (ESP). This plugin is capable of integrating with many popular ESPs such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, AWS,Sendgrid and a lot more that provide HTML code to users. There is a starter pack that is free to use, but premium features come with a cost. Plans start from $129 per year.
While we’ve covered the best plugins for collecting emails from subscribers, the following plugins focus more on creating newsletters. These plugins offer ready-to-use templates and automate the email sending process. We’ve enlisted the ones we found to be most productive and beneficial to news websites.
1. Sender
Sender not only lets publishers design dynamic popups and newsletter signup forms, but also lets you create newsletters and send automated emails/ SMSes to readers.
The plugin comes with a drag and drop builder, custom email templates gallery, custom HTML editor, and responsive template designs. This very useful newsletter plugin is available for free, but premium features come with a starting plan of $10 per month.
2. Mailster
Mailster also focuses on creating newsletters and sending automated emails to subscribers. The WordPress plugin offers more than 400 free and premium design templates. It integrates with varied email service providers like SendGrid, SparkPost, Gmail, AWS, Mailjet, Mailersend, Mailgun, and more.
There is also a new RSS-to-email feature which lets new articles get automatically imported into an email and sent to subscribers. The publisher just needs to set up an automation campaign to use the RSS-to-email feature. Mailster also offers time zone based email sending and subscriber analytics as well. The plugin offers six months of technical support and six months of automatic updates with its $89 premium plan
3. Newsletter
This plugin is yet another effective email marketing tool for list building, creating newsletters, sending them, and tracking them as well. It comes with an easy-to-use drag and drop composer to create newsletters, advanced targeting options, analytics and email tracking options, among other things.
Email and marketing integrations include Gravity Forms, Elementor Forms, Contact Form 7, WooCommerce, WP Forms, SendinBlue, Amazon SES, SendGrid, SparkPost, Mailgun, and ElasticEmail. This popular WordPress plugin is available for free, but to get access to premium features, news websites will need to subscribe to a premium plan. Paid plans start from $69.
4. Jackmail
Jackmail is also an efficient plugin option that you can consider for creating and sending newsletters. It helps you generate automatic newsletters when you publish a new WordPress post or schedule a recurrence.
It comes with a homemade Email Builder and offers drag and drop composing for ease in designing. Jackmail also synchronizes with other WordPress plugins like Ninja Forms, WooCommerce, and more. Premium plans start from $89 per month.
Narrowing it Down
Choosing the right plugin for pop-ups is crucial and we’ve narrowed it down to the best three plugins in the market. A catchy pop-up presented at the right time has the potential to convert flybys into subscribers. If you haven’t created a subscriber base yet , now is the best time to create one since the benefits are innumerable. OptinMonster is the best option if you are willing to pay the premium it charges, but if you wish to do things on a budget, Popup Builder offers the best value.
We’ve also put together four of the best newsletter plugins to help you reach out to your new subscriber base immediately. Sender and Mailster stand out thanks to their drag and drop editors which make it easy.
Looking for different plugins for your website? Check out the best WordPress plugins for you blog.
