Mailster - Email Newsletter Plugin for WordPress
Pros
- Affordable price
- No limit in number of subscribers
- Has free version
- Detailed statistics for each email marketing campaign
- Auto-responders
- Informative stats dashboard
- Multiple options for delivering emails
Cons
- Only one template available. You need to pay to use other
- Not many customization options available
Do you want to build a list of subscribers? Do you want to be able to track your email marketing campaigns effectively? Do you want to want to get an in-depth insight into targeted emails? If you answered “YES” to any of the questions above, keep reading this Mailster review. It will help you determine if Mailster can help improve your marketing efforts.
Ever wished that you could grow an email list and send newsletters without needing to leave the WordPress admin dashboard?
One of the essentials of running your own business is email marketing. No matter what your website is about, reaching out to potential customers via email is an excellent way to acquire leads.
For all your email marketing problems, Mailster is designed to be the only solution that you need. Mailster, previously known as the MyMail Email Marketing & Newsletter plugin, has been rebranded to promoted its updated, versatile features.
What Sets Mailster Apart From Other Email Marketing Software?
Mailster sets itself apart from email marketing services such as Campaign Monitor (see how to integrate Campaign Monitor in WordPress forms) and MailChimp. While those companies require you to pay a monthly fee and use a separate dashboard for each of them, Mailster allows you to access everything you need right from your site WordPress dashboard. On top of that, you only have to pay a one-time fee.
Mailster doesn’t require an ongoing subscription where you are forced to pay every week or month, so the services you pay for are yours forever. But are the services that are offered up to your standards?
Mailster is a plugin that integrates into your WordPress site, offering you a variety of different services. Think of Mailster as your personal assistant for any email marketing involved with your company.
Mailster Review
The Mailster Newsletter and Email Marketing plugin easily integrates with WordPress. It allows you to start building your list of subscribers in no time. You can create newsletters and start different kinds of email marketing campaigns all from your WordPress dashboard. Some of the handy features that Mailster provides are:
- Auto-responders
- Informative stats dashboard
- Detailed statistics for each email marketing campaign
- Multiple options for delivering emails
- Templates that are ready to be used on various mobile devices
- The ability to schedule emails via cron
Mailster comes in the pro version, which can be purchased from $59 from Codecanyon, or you can use the free version which you can download from the WordPress repository.
Mailster Dashboard
Mailster will give you fully detailed statistics for your auto-responders and email campaigns. Data including bounce rate, the number of clicks, total number of emails sent, the total number of receivers, the total number of emails opened, which countries have the highest numbers of opened emails, etc. can help you determine the effectiveness of your campaigns and make adjustments as needed.
By clicking the “Newsletter” submenu, you have all the essential links and statistics all on one page and arranged concisely:
- Quick Links – View your campaigns, subscribers, lists, and forms in numbers, as well as click links to create or manage your content.
- My Subscribers – View a chart of subscribers and see how many new ones you gain by week, day month, or the past year. This also provides you quick links to add or import new subscribers.
- My Campaigns – View how many subscribers participate in your latest campaign and how many of them open emails or unsubscribe. This also provides you quick links to add new campaigns or autoresponders.
- My List – View how many subscribers you have overall in addition to how many are clicking your emails and unsubscribing. This also provides you quick links to add additional lists of subscribers.
How To Create Campaigns?
With the Mailster plugin, you can create your own customized email newsletters using your WordPress dashboard. It can save a lot of time, which you can use to focus on building better working relationships with your customers.
There are several options that you can use to send emails automatically. When a new blog post is published, when user sign-ups and, when users unsubscribe, etc. are all instances that can trigger these automatic emails.
Emails can also be set up to be sent automatically every time you run a new campaign or at a given preset time. You can also trigger the email on a specific user time or when a particular campaign is set to run. These options provide a lot of flexibility, and you can change them at any time.
“New Campaign” in the “Newsletter” submenu allows you to create a new email campaign. With it, you can design your email template, which is how your email is going to look to your subscribers. With the comprehensive email template creator, you can upload images and logos, choose your color scheme, arrange sections, text, etc.
Using templates in Mailster is easy. You can use existing templates, upload new ones, or create your own from scratch. If you’re using a third-party template, just make sure that it’s compatible with Mailster. Here’s a list of some great Themeforest templates that work with Mailster.
You get one template by default, but you can make multiple versions of that template to use for your email marketing campaigns. Mailster also provides a helpful knowledge base article that you can use to create your own custom templates.
On the “Delivery” tab, you can set the time in which your email will go out to your subscribers. You can either choose to send the email to all your subscribers at once or send it at a time according to each subscriber’s timezone.
This is rather an innovative feature to get your subscribers’ attention at the right times of their respective days. And it makes sense, too. If you have subscribers from Brazil, for instance, you wouldn’t want to send mail to them and expect a timely response when it is the middle of the night by Brazil time.
Emails that are sent from your campaigns are both desktop and mobile device-friendly, so there is no need to worry that your emails will look incomplete or too small.
Campaign Management
“All Campaigns” in the “Newsletter” submenu lets you see every campaign you ever started; past and present. From there, you can sort each campaign by the following categories:
- Name – The name of each campaign that you have started.
- Status – The current situation that your campaign is currently in. Whether it is currently sending out emails to subscribers, completed, or set to start at an upcoming set date.
- Total – The number of subscribers you assign each campaign to.
- Open – The number of subscribers that open your email, also showed in a percentage.
- Clicks – The number of subscribers who click on the link in your email, also showed in a percentage.
- Bounces – The number of occurrences in which the email is not successfully sent to the recipient.
- Date – The date in which you last edited the campaign.
For campaigns that are currently underway, you can decide to view them, put them on hold via “pause,” or duplicate them. For campaigns that are paused or set to start at an upcoming date, you can decide to start them up manually.
Setting Autoresponders
Autoresponders work similarly that campaigns do. However, these are emails that are sent out automatically at a specific time or after a certain action from a subscriber.
Examples of occasions in which autoresponders are issued are when a subscriber decides to cancel a membership, when a subscriber is celebrating a birthday or after a new blog post has been published on your website.
These are simple and effective ways for you to keep your subscribers posted about new articles, news, press releases, etc. If you are also looking for an email marketing service that automatically emails subscribers after new pages go up, Mailster is excellent for this.
Autoresponders are always active unless you manually deactivate them. They are types of emails that you do not need to pay much attention to, compared to campaigns. Just like with campaigns, you can sort them by name, status, total subscribers, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, bounces, and date.
You can create auto-responders to send out emails to your subscribers automatically. There are many different settings that you can choose. For example, you could opt to send emails to your subscribers, welcoming them to your website a few days after they first sign up.
You could include an eBook or send them a brief guide as a way of thanking them for signing up on your site. You can send them links to your blog articles after they’ve been published. You can choose certain tags or categories to trigger these emails.
Subscriber Management
The Mailster plugin gives you a lot of information about your current subscribers. Some of these details include:
- The date and time of each subscription
- The IP address for each subscriber
- The location of each subscriber
- A photo of each subscriber
- Statistics associated for each individual subscriber
You can confirm pending subscription requests, export lists of subscribers, import lists of existing subscribers, and delete anyone that you don’t want as an active subscriber.
This plugin makes it easy to send targeted marketing to specific people or groups of subscribers. You can create lists of people who are subscribed to different products, services, or email newsletters.
You can separate these groups by categories depending on what they’ve subscribed to or combine data to create lists for people who have subscribed to multiple offerings on your site.
“Subscribers” in the “Newsletter” submenu allows you to view your master list of all email recipients in the database. Even subscribers who have unsubscribed will appear in this list.
For each subscriber you add, you can add their name, their birthday, their email address, and their location. You can also assign them to certain campaigns so that they only get the emails that you need to give them.
You can sort subscribers by name, birthday, the lists or campaigns that they are apart of, the number of emails that you sent, the date that they have subscribed, and their status with your company.
If you already have a pre-existing list of leads, you can easily import them into your Mailster lists for your campaigns. There is virtually no limit to how many subscribers you can have.
You can even view a world map of your subscribers and see how many of them you have in each country or region.“Lists” in the “Newsletter” submenu allows you to manage specific groups of subscribers, so you know which emails are going to which recipients.
Miscellaneous Options
Mailster allows you to create email campaigns and manage your list of leads so that you can easily build business relationships with all of your contacts.
Mailster can also use other third-party plugins. Let’s say, for example, that you have a lot of active subscribers that you want to send a mass email to. You want to ensure the ability to send bulk emails without having issues with emails being undelivered or having a large amount of them bouncing back.
Mailster works with Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES), Mandrill, Sendgrid, and other popular email marketing services. This feature can be integrated while you’re configuring the installation wizard.
Mailster also works well with the WooCommerce. If you have an online store using WooCommerce, you probably want to be able to interact with your customers regularly and be able to add them to your mailing list. Using Mailster in combination with WooCommerce, you can add customers to a list based on the purchase of a product.
Under Mailster Addons section you can extend the functionality of Mailster by installing free add ons like AmazonSES Integration, SparkPost Integration, Mailgun Integration, Mandrill Integration, SendGrid Integration, Mailster for WooCommerce, Cool Captcha for Forms, reCaptcha™ for Forms, Gravity Forms Mailster Add-On (see Gravity Forms vs WPForms comparison), Contact Form 7 for Mailster, Email Verify for Mailster, Kickbox.io Integration, Live! for Mailster, Google Analytics for Mailster, Piwik Analytics for Mailster, Mailster Multi SMTP, Mailchimp Importer for Mailster, etc. See here the full list of free integrations.
Once each order has been completed, customers would then be added to a pre-defined subscriber list based on global settings that you define. If you’re using Mailster to send default system emails from your WordPress site, you can then select different email templates for your WooCommerce email actions such as setting up a new account, new orders, canceled orders, etc.
Mailster Pricing
Even though the ability to do everything from the WordPress dashboard is a popular selling point, one of the best benefits of Mailster is its price.
Most email marketing services charge their clients a monthly fee. This fee can go up as the number of emails sent or the number of subscribers increases.
Mailster only charges a flat one-time fee (currently $59). You’ll never pay more for this product, no matter how many emails you send or how many subscribers you have.
That doesn’t guarantee that you won’t need to spend more money on your email marketing services. You may want to invest in a premium mail delivery service such as Mailgun or SendGrid.
However, you’ll still be spending considerably less than you would by using a dedicated email SaaS. Included with this license are free updates whenever available and six months of customer service. For an additional $20, you can extend that support to six more months; which is a whole year of support in total.
Do I Recommend Mailster?
Mailster is considered, in my opinion, an economical version of a full-fledged email marketing plugin. Creating email campaigns and autoresponders is very simple, and the fact that you can also use other plugins to coincide with Mailster makes things all the more easier.
Paying once and owning it forever is a tactic that can grab lots of WordPress users in, and it does sound like an outstanding deal, but don’t dive in headfirst just yet.
Subscriber and campaign management looks great and easy to use, but I cannot help but notice that the features that are being offered are rather basic and bare-bones.
When designing emails, for example, there is not much customization that is offered to you compared to some other WordPress email management plugins such as OptinMonster (see diferences between OptionMonster and Thrive Leads).
But of course, not all companies are the same. Depending on what you need out of an email marketing tool, perhaps Mailster has enough to keep you satisfied.
Or perhaps it’s better to choose a subscription-based plugin to receive additional and more advanced features such as targeting tools and pop-up animations for emails.
After reviewing Mailster Email Marketing plugin’s features and its many positive customer reviews, it’s evident that Mailster is one of the best WordPress email marketing solutions on the market today.
It’s a perfect choice for bloggers and businesses of any size and industry. The Mailster plugin allows them to create lists, send emails to their subscribers on those lists, and evaluate their marketing campaigns.
One thing to think about is the size of your mailing list. According to Mailster, their send script can send up to 5 emails per second. This adds up to 18,000 emails an hour that can be sent. For most business owners, this shouldn’t be a problem.
However, if you have a very large list of subscribers that you want to send emails to, you may want to use a dedicated email marketing tool that can handle larger volumes (for instance, MailChimp claims that they can handle up to one million emails per hour). Even though most websites won’t come close to that limit, it is something to keep in mind.
As alternative to Mailster, I suggest you check Omnisend review, AcyMailing review, Moosend review, MailOptin review, or SendPulse review.
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