Ask any authors about which email marketing tool they use, and you’ll end up with many different answers.
Among the answers, ConvertKit and Mailerlite seem to be their preferred choice.
It’s certainly not Mailchimp because of the changes they made years ago. You can read about it right here if you’re curious.
And then, we have MailPoet.
Try asking any authors if they have ever heard of MailPoet, you’ll get a confused look from them instead.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m guessing not many authors are aware of MailPoet.
Should you consider using MailPoet when people around you will give you a puzzled look when you mention it?
Of course, the answer is yes, especially if it fits with your workflow.
And if you have a WooCommerce store for selling direct? Then you’d better be paying attention to MailPoet since it can be the best business partner you’ve ever had.
What MailPoet is all about
The way MailPoet works is the same as any other email marketing tool out there.
You can do things like sending emails to your list and setting up an onboarding sequence to deepen the relationship with your audience.
It also has a similar feature to Substack where your subscribers will receive your latest post upon publication.
Want to create a product promotion email like the ones you usually get from retailers?
Well, MailPoet makes it easy to create that type of email too thanks to its drag-and-drop feature.
You can say that you can create all sorts of emails you want with MailPoet.
What makes an email marketing tool like MailPoet a better option for you?
On the surface, MailPoet doesn’t seem to be that much different from any other email marketing platform out there.
So, what is it that makes MailPoet a better option for many of us then?
Well, MailPoet helps with making your workflow more seamless since you can write and send your email campaign straight from your WordPress dashboard.
Yes, MailPoet is a WordPress plugin. And that means you need a self-hosted WordPress site to use MailPoet.
Gone are those days when you have to go back and forth just to send an email campaign.
While it may not be a big deal if you’re sending a notification of your latest blog post, it can be a time-saver when you’re sending an email to promote products in your WooCommerce store.
Even better?
MailPoet also handles transactional emails which is crucial if you’re using WooCommerce.
For those who don’t know, they are emails like order confirmation, new account signup, and order status.
You don’t want people to wonder if their order made it through since they don’t receive any order confirmation from you.
Just to be clear other email marketing platforms such as Mailerlite and ConvertKit offer transactional emails as well.
But this service tends to be a separate service from their email marketing service, though.
You will need to sign up if you want the transactional email service since their plans don’t include this service.
MailPoet is by far the only one that offers both email marketing and transaction email service in one plan.
What you should know about MailPoet
I’ll be honest here – MailPoet is not for the faint-hearted.
Yes, you have the freedom to customize every single page of your email signup process.
That’s the beauty of MailPoet.
But you need to redesign a few things first before you set it into the wild.
Things like signup confirmation email, change subscription, unsubscribe, and re-engagement page.
Of course, you can choose not to do anything since MailPoet already enables a default page for you.
But I recommend you redesign those pages since they look amateurish, with a header and the sidebar enabled on the page.
If anything, you don’t want your audience to divert elsewhere when you have the header and sidebar enabled.
And yes, even if what you want them to do is to unsubscribe from your email list.
The rule for these pages is the same as the landing page – it has to be a blank page, nothing else.
Another thing to note is creating an email signup form.
Like those default pages, you can pick whichever email signup form that makes sense to you, tweak it a little, and run with it.
But it can feel like you want to pull your hair out when you try to design it from scratch.
Thankfully, the drag-and-drop feature is easy to use.
As you can expect, it can be a little confusing at first, especially if you try to match the branding for your email campaign to your website.
Like any other thing, I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it after some time.
Is MailPoet the right solution for you?
There’s no doubt MailPoet is the right solution for you if you’re on WordPress and you use WooCommerce to sell directly to your audience.
Even if you don’t use WooCommerce, it’s worth considering if you want to create a beautiful and professional-looking email newsletter similar to Beehiiv.
Like any other email marketing tool, MailPoet does come with a free plan.
While the free plan doesn’t have access to features such as the autoresponder sequence and detailed analytics on your email campaign, it should be clear enough for you to know what MailPoet is capable of.
If you’re thinking about signing up for MailPoet, you can learn more about it right here:
P.S. I’m in the process of coming up with an ultimate guide on how to use MailPoet to build your email list.
The guide will be technical, of course. But I do my best to make those technical aspects easy to understand even for the non-techie type.
It’s too bad that I don’t have a definitive timeline on when the guide will be available for sale.
So, the only way for you to be notified about the release date is none other than to join my email list.
Perhaps you can use the opportunity to see how MailPoet works in real life since this is the email marketing platform I’m using right now.
Interested in learning how to make MailPoet work seamlessly in your author business? You can sign up here to receive the notification when the guide comes out: