Update: check out the wireframes of our own upcoming post notification feature.
We love when our websites send automatically a daily or weekly newsletter with our latest posts. It’s more common to see post notifications than newsletters written manually in the WordPress community.
We’re currently working on our own post notifications feature due in April 2012. We want to address the shortfalls of each solution discussed below. We feel there’s a lot of room for improvement. Don’t you too?
Post notifications has several names depending on who’s talking about it:
Email subscription to post updates
Email alerts
Post notifications
Automatic newsletter, or auto newsletters
I personally always called them “email alerts” because Lorelle said so a few years ago. Most of my past clients just used the term “automatic newsletter“, which makes a lot of sense, if you ask me.
Four plugins / services for email subscription reviewed:
Feedburner email alerts
The legendary Subscribe2 plugin
“Email subscription” delivered by JetPack
MailChimp’s Rss to Email: free under 2000 subscribers
This is my own selection. I believe they are the best or most used (no official figures!). You should be satisfied with at least one of them. But there are others. Google around if you think my list is a little short or add ideas in the comments below.
Let’s take a look at each to evaluate the pros and cons.
Feedburner Email Alerts
This is my personal favorite. My past clients were rarely satisfied with its looks though.
It’s still at the top of my list because I lost count of how many I installed myself since my first install 6 years ago.
The concept is easy: any new posts in your RSS feed are sent to your subscribers once a day or week.
This is an example what a typical Feedburner alert looks like :
Pros:
Reliable, with an occasional hiccup
Good deliverability (emails actually get delivered)
Automatically integrated with Google Analytics
Easy and good stats
Cons:
Not newbie friendly (take a look at this tutorial)
Lack of design and layout customization
Can’t import existing lists
Can’t easily resend the activation email to people who didn’t to activate their subscription (export to Excel!)
Translations in languages are unreliable
Send once a day or once a week, no other choice
Feedburner stopped evolving once Google bought it. Even with the new beta interface…
Subscribe2: the only plugin!
Very simple and practical free little plugin. I installed it on quite a few intranets where Feedburner can’t access the RSS feed it needs. This plugin has been getting quite a few downloads everyday since its beginning.
Screenshot of the basic out-of-the-box looks of an email from Subscribe2, which we use internally ourselves:
Pros:
Very easy to set up
You can send to your site’s users
Highly customizable frequency and scheduling
It’s maintained and updated
Double opt-in isn’t forced, which is great for intranets
Notifications can be enabled for comments too.
Stats available in Google Analytics (only)
It’s free, but consider donating!
Cons:
Difficult to customize the looks (no themes)
Some of its emails are in simple text and not HTML. There’s an extended version that does take care of that.
You can’t send to hundreds or thousands because there’s no queue to send in batches. There’s is a paying solution though.
You’re forced to send emails through your host. There’s a hack to send via SMTP, but it’s not ideal.
JetPack’s email subscription to post and comments
JetPack is a suite of plugins and services of WordPress.com blogs made available for your own WordPress site that you host yourself. They recently added post notifications, which is a service more than a plugin.
JetPack’s subscriptions’ emails always look the same regardless of the site:
Pros:
The easiest to install…
… there’s only a widget to configure!
Good deliverability
Users can pick their own frequency of notifications to: immediate, daily or weekly
Notifications are also available for comments, which is an alternative to the ever so popular Subscribe to Comments plugin, which we use on this blog.
Cons:
You can’t configure the design or layout
You can’t import an existing list
You can’t exclude posts from categories of your choice
No stats
In English only
MailChimp’s RSS to Email
MailChimp converts the RSS of your site into post notifications, just like Feedburner. I’ve only set it up once myself, but this is a popular solution for many in the WordPress community. It’s free as long as you have under 2000 subscribers.
MailChimp offers the most flexibility in terms of design. This example is a notification from Yoast’s popular blog on WordPress :
Pros:
Most flexible in terms of design
Good deliverability (avoid spam filter)
Many plugins available to help integration, like subscription form widget
Allows you to import lists of subscribers
Good variety of stats
Cons:
Not that easy to install and configure
You need to learn another application
MailChimp logo displays at the bottom of your newsletters
Lowdown: what to go for?
For simplicity‘s sake: JetPack
For simplicity and stats: Feedburner
For a subscription site (aka members): Subscribe2
For maximum flexibility: MailChimp
To be informed when Wysija rolls out its own “automatic newsletter” feature, simply subscribe to our plugin updates newsletter in the footer below.
We hope you’ll be as impressed as we are excited about building it right!