3 ways to make email easier for WordPress users

Why we love WordPress

WordPress is a software you can use to create your own website, blog, or even an application. It was released in 2003 and quickly became one of the best CMS (content management system) on the web. Currently, WordPress is used for more than 33.6% of all websites on the Internet. In fact, some of the most famous sites are created on WordPress - blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch. News outlets like The New York Times’ blogs and CNN’s on-air personality blogs all use WordPress, too.

WordPress can be downloaded for self-hosted installations from WordPress.org or it can also be used as a hosted service via WordPress.com. There are some slight differences between both options.

WordPress.org, often called self-hosted WordPress, is the free, open-source WordPress software that you can install on your own web host to create a website that’s 100% your own.

• Self-hosted WordPress is available at WordPress.org. If you want to truly own your website, self-hosted WordPress.org is almost always the best option. WordPress.org is the free tool that you can use for no cost if you don’t need any paid themes or plugins.

• WordPress.com is a for-profit, paid service that is powered by WordPress.org software. It’s simple to use, but you lose a lot of the flexibility of the self-hosted WordPress.

In the infographics below you can see the main differences and decide what option is the best for you:

Why choose WordPress.org

At Mailjet, we think WordPress.org is the best option. If you’re not sure yet, let us tell you why we think it’s best to choose WordPress.org to create your site:

• WordPress is free: You are free to download, install, use and modify Wordpress.org however you want to match your needs.

• WordPress is open source: This means that you can also modify it according to your needs. Another amazing thing is that hundreds of users all around the world are constantly creating and improving the WordPress software.

• Wordpress is easy to use and flexible: WordPress enables you to build and manage your own full-featured website using just your web browser - without having to learn how to code.

• WordPress offers a lot of themes: There are customizable WordPress themes for just about every kind of website (whether it’s a blog, business site, or an online store).

• WordPress offers a lot of additional plugins: You can use them to add advanced features like sending emails (go Mailjet!), analytics, contact forms, managing online shop, and much, much more.

• WordPress is secured: WordPress has safety measures to protect your data from any accident or hacking.

• WordPress has a great community: WordPress has an official forum that is a great place to get answers to your questions, and organizes events around the world throughout the year.

• WordPress makes it easy to import and export data: You can import your data from other platforms like Blogger or Tumblr to WordPress, and you can easily export it to move away from WordPress, whenever you want.

So, what are you waiting for? Go get WordPress today to start creating your awesome website.

Mailjet’s email plugin for WordPress

If you’re looking to make your life easier when it comes to WordPress and email, Mailjet is the answer for you. Mailjet is an email solution that easily integrates with WordPress, allowing you to create and send both marketing and transactional emails. Mailjet also enables WordPress users to access very detailed stats.

What’s best, you won’t need to leave your WordPress site to create, send and track you emails. The only thing you’ll need to do is to install Mailjet’s free email plugin for WordPress.

The free Mailjet for WordPress plugin will help you create, send and track beautiful newsletters in minutes. Here are a few of the things you can do with the Mailjet x WordPress plugin:

• Create amazing emails using our drag & drop Email Editor directly from Wordpress.

• Send your emails to your contact list without leaving Wordpress.

• Sync your contacts and contact properties with your Mailjet account, so you can personalize the content of your emails.

• Check your statistics from your WordPress.

Let’s dig deeper into three of the most useful things you can do with Mailjet and WordPress.

3 Ways Mailjet x WordPress make email easier

There are so many things you can do with Mailjet and WordPress once you have the plugin. But, right now we are going to talk to you about three in particular. Let’s start with one which is Mailjet’s superpower - sending beautiful emails.

Send beautiful emails

Mailjet is the best solution to send beautiful marketing and transactional emails. Our amazing online editor Passport will help you create your emails and send them to your customers. Let’s start with the marketing emails.

Marketing emails

As we mentioned, our Passport editor is available for all WordPress users that installed our plugin. We have a large template gallery with loads of options for you to choose from and customize, or you can create your own template from scratch. It will take you only a few minutes to create your newsletter and then the only thing left to do is send it to your list of customers.

Designing your template with our email editor is also really simple, as our drag & drop builder is both easy to use and really flexible, and our detailed documentation goes over everything you need to build your email. For those that prefer coding their emails, this can be done by using HTML or our open-source markup language, MJML.

It will take you only a few minutes to create your newsletter and then the only thing left to do is send it to your list of customers.

The best thing about it is that once you have the plugin installed, WordPress syncs your contacts automatically with Mailjet. The only thing you should have in advance is the contact properties you need already in your Mailjet account, which you’ll need to then be able to personalize your emails.

We’ve covered the marketing emails, but they’re not the only type of emails your brand sends. Your transactional emails shouldn’t be neglected. The times when a plain text email was enough are long gone. Let’s see how you can send beautiful transactional emails, too.

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are something that your customer is always impatiently waiting for, no matter if it is account confirmation email or tracking information. Mailjet gives you the possibility to create beautiful and personalized transactional emails. You can propose similar products or ones that are on sale in a purchase confirmation based on the interest and the behaviour of each recipient.

You can see how to create this type of email on our blog post ‘How to Use Templating Language to Send Truly Personalized Emails’.

You can now send these beautiful emails from your online store on WordPress using Mailjet’s SMTP relay. You should only add a bit of code to your template functions.php file. You can see the code and all the details of how to do the configuration, you can see here.

Now you know how to create amazing and responsive emails, but even better would be to automate them with few clicks, right? Now you can connect two of the most used plugins in WordPress with Mailjet in minutes.

Contact Form 7 and WooCommerce integrations

Our integration with Mailjet includes a direct connection with Contact Form 7 and you can also easily connect WooCommerce with Mailjet via Zapier, so you can route your emails sent from these two plugins to go through Mailjet. We are going to check the details of each now.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is a plugin that allows you to create, customize and integrate any kind of contact form on your WordPress site. Almost any business needs a contact form, whether it’s for asking questions, contacting support or requesting quotes.

Contact Form 7 is the most used plugin of WordPress with over 5 million downloads. Can you imagine how many contact forms are created with it? This is why we decided that we want to make your life easier and automate the emails you are sending through these forms. That’s why we included a connection with Contact Form 7 in our native integration with WordPress.

Activating the Contact Form 7 feature on the Mailjet’s WordPress plugin is pretty easy. Check out how to do it on our recent post about Contact Form 7.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is perfect for you if you have an online store. You can sell digital and physical products, manage inventory and shipping, take secure payments, and sort taxes effortlessly. You keep 100% control over all your data, there’s support for mobile devices, and the potential to scale your sites is limitless. Isn’t it great just imagining it?

WooCommerce is by far the best designed and most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. Routing your marketing and transactional emails from Woocommerce through Mailjet is really easy to do via our integration with Zapier.

And once your emails are sent, how are you going to be able to see what is happening with them? Mailjet offers detailed statistics available directly in your WordPress. Let’s take a closer look at that.

Track statistics

There is more to emailing than just sending campaigns or setting up transactional emails. It’s also about tracking your emails’ performance, analyzing the results, and drawing conclusions to improve your future sending. With Mailjet’s integration with WordPress you have access to detailed statistics directly in your WordPress.

You can filter for a specific date or email status of your choosing, update your list directly, remove blocks or spams from this page, or even create a new one with only click and open rates. You can always download these statistics as a CSV file and use them in another application if you need to, or just store them somewhere safe. Mailjet gives you all the tools that you need to maintain your lists and adapt your sending.

Installing the Mailjet email plugin for Wordpress

So now you know what cool things you can do with Mailjet and Wordpress. Can’t wait to try it? The latest Mailjet for WordPress v5.1 can be downloaded from the WordPress plugins directory.

Setting it up is also really easy.

To configure the Mailjet plugin, first click on ‘Setup account’ from the Installed Plugins page.

You will then be asked to enter your Mailjet API and Secret key here.

Once that’s done, your Mailjet account will be connected to your WordPress and ready to use. See? We told you it was easy!

Let’s wrap it up

We saw that you can connect Mailjet with WordPress and other WordPress plugins with ease. WordPress gives you the power to create and maintain your site, and you can combine it with the amazing possibilities of Mailjet without the need to even leave WordPress - from creating and setting up your emails, to checking your statistics after sending them. What else could you need?

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