8 Best WordPress Email Plugins Compared in 2020

Email plugins can help you grow your email lists, improve your site’s email deliverability, and otherwise enhance everything about how you work with emails on your WordPress website. Are you looking for the best WordPress email plugin? In this post, we’ve collected eight of the best options.

Some of these plugins focus on lead generation and marketing emails. In contrast, others focus on improving the reliability of your WordPress site’s transactional emails.

Best of all, if you’re using the best-selling Avada WordPress theme, you’ll also be happy to know that all of these WordPress email plugins work perfectly with Avada. Let’s dig in.

HubSpot is a free WordPress email plugin that helps you gather leads from opt-in forms, popups, and even live chat boxes (including lead generating chatbots).

No matter which of the built-in methods you use to generate subscribers, HubSpot will funnel all of your leads into the free HubSpot CRM (a customer relationship management tool).

With the HubSpot CRM, you’ll be able to segment your leads as much as needed and then send them emails in a few different ways. You’ll be able to:

One of the most notable features that you get is email personalization. Personalizing your emails has been shown to help you boost your open and click-through rates by double-digit margins, which is why you’ll love that HubSpot lets you customize your emails by lifecycle stage, contact information, and list membership.

You can also test different email variations with A/B testing and view statistics to analyze how your subscribers interact with your emails. While HubSpot does let you build email opt-in forms and popups using a drag-and-drop editor, it also offers out-of-the-box integrations with most popular WordPress form plugins, including Gravity Forms, WPForms, and more. Both the HubSpot plugin and CRM are free to use.

Learn how to use HubSpot with the Avada theme.

MailPoet is a freemium plugin that helps you collect subscribers and send them emails right from your WordPress dashboard. That’s the unique differentiator of MailPoet versus a lot of other email marketing services – you never need to leave your WordPress dashboard.

You can grow your email list using built-in opt-in forms or integrations with other WordPress form plugins like Gravity Forms. Then, you can send one-off email blasts to your subscribers or set up automated emails, like a series of welcome emails.

One nice feature is that MailPoet lets you automatically send out a digest of your most recent blog posts on a schedule that you set. For example, you can tell MailPoet to send a weekly digest, and it will automatically populate the email with all the blog posts that you published in the previous week. To design your emails, you’ll get a drag-and-drop builder. If you’re running an eCommerce store with WooCommerce, you can also use the builder to design your WooCommerce emails.

Things get a little complicated when it comes to sending emails. You have two options:

The MailPoet sending service is free for the first 1,000 subscribers and starts at €15 per month after that. Or, if you’d rather handle sending emails yourself, you can purchase a one-off license for MailPoet Pro for $149.

Post SMTP Mailer/Email Log approaches email in a different way than the previous two plugins. While HubSpot and MailPoet help you grow an email list and connect with your subscribers, Post SMTP Mailer/Email Log is focused on a different type of email called transactional emails.

If you’re not familiar with this term, transactional emails are day-to-day emails like:

Think of them kind of like practical emails for helping people use your site, rather than the marketing-type emails you’d send with HubSpot or another tool. While you might not pay much attention to your site’s transactional emails, these types of emails are incredibly important. After all, if your users can’t get their password reset emails, they’re certainly going to feel some frustration, right?

However, despite how vital transactional emails are, the default way that WordPress sends these emails (via the PHP mail function) is usually unreliable. Some hosts just plain won’t send emails this way and, even if your host does support PHP mail, emails sent via PHP mail often end up in spam folders because they lack the proper authentication information that spam filters want to see.

Post SMTP Mailer/Email Log fixes that problem by letting you send your transactional emails using a technique called SMTP. Without getting into the details, all you need to know is that SMTP is a much more reliable way of sending WordPress transactional emails.

Your web host might already support SMTP. Or, you can use dedicated sending services like Mailgun, SendGrid, or even the Gmail API. Once you set things up, Post SMTP Mailer/Email Log also keeps an email log to help you track your transactional emails and catch any errors.

Post SMTP Mailer/Email Log is 100% free and has an impressive 4.9-star rating (out of 5) on over 180 reviews at WordPress.org.

Sendinblue is technically a standalone email marketing service, and it offers its own dedicated WordPress plugin that lets you manage everything from inside your WordPress dashboard.

You’ll be able to:

If you use the plugin, Sendinblue will also automatically handle sending your WordPress site’s transactional emails for you, which improves their reliability and eliminates the need to use a separate plugin like Post SMTP Mailer/Email Log.

You’ll also be able to optimize your emails using analytics and A/B testing, as well as include basic email personalization.

The Sendinblue plugin is free, but you’ll need a Sendinblue account to use it. Sendinblue lets you send up to 300 emails per day for free. If you want to exceed those limits and get access to some premium features (like A/B testing), the paid plans start at $25 per month.

Like MailPoet, Newsletter is a WordPress email plugin that lets you grow your email list and send newsletters without leaving your WordPress dashboard. You can place email opt-in forms in your content or sidebar. Then, you can use a drag-and-drop builder to design emails to send to your subscribers.

With premium add-ons, you can also:

Unlike MailPoet, though, Newsletter does not offer a sending service. If you want to ensure that your emails don’t end up in users’ spam inboxes, you should integrate Newsletter with an SMTP sending service.

The Newsletter plugin is fully compatible with the Post SMTP Mailer/Email Log plugin from above, so you can use that plugin to connect to an external SMTP service, and Newsletter will automatically send its emails utilizing that service.

The core Newsletter plugin is free. To get access to automated emails, integrations, and reports, you’ll need to use some of the premium add-ons. You can get a bundle of all 20+ premium extensions for $65.

Jackmail is another WordPress-specific plugin that lets you build an email list and send newsletters right from your WordPress dashboard.

Unlike the Newsletter plugin, it includes a built-in SMTP service to ensure stable email deliverability. You don’t have the option to use your sending service like MailPoet offers, though. You can grow your email lists using built-in forms and widgets or integrations with popular WordPress form plugins. Then, you can use the drag-and-drop email builder to design your emails, including an option to start from 40+ pre-made templates.

You can send manual emails or create automatic triggers, like sending a newsletter whenever you publish a new post or sending a digest of your latest content on a set schedule.

Once you send some emails, you’ll be able to analyze their effectiveness using built-in analytics for opens, clicks, read time, and more.

Jackmail lets you send up to 3,000 emails per month using the sending service. To access some premium features and expand the sending limit, Jackmails paid plans start at $69 per month.

EmailOctopus brands itself as the “cheapest way to send your email marketing campaigns.”

How does it keep costs down? By using Amazon’s SES service to send emails, rather than trying to build its own sending service. EmailOctopus is technically a standalone email marketing service. Still, it offers its own dedicated WordPress plugin that helps you connect it with WordPress.

The WordPress plugin includes a built-in form builder to help you create opt-in forms. The forms are barebones, though, so you might want to use a separate WordPress form plugin that integrates with EmailOctopus. For example, Gravity Forms offers its an add-on.

Once you grow your email list, you can use the separate EmailOctopus interface to send emails using a WYSIWYG interface. You can also set up autoresponder sequences and basic email marketing automation rules from that interface. You’ll then be able to analyze the performance of your emails from a dedicated analytics dashboard.

The EmailOctopus plugin is free, and you can send up to 10,000 emails per month to 2,500 subscribers for free. The free version includes EmailOctopus branding in those emails, though.

To remove the EmailOctopus branding and increase the sending limits, you can subscribe to the Pro plan starting at $20 per month for up to 50,000 emails.

With over 22,000 sales, Mailster is one of the most popular WordPress email plugins at the Envato marketplace (which is also where you’ll find the Avada theme).

Mailster lets you manage almost everything about your WordPress email marketing efforts without leaving your dashboard. The only thing that you need to add is your SMTP sending service like Mailgun, SendGrid, or Amazon SES. Or, if your web host supports it, you can also use your own host’s SMTP server.

You’ll be able to create your email opt-in forms and segment subscribers into unlimited lists. You can then design emails using a drag-and-drop editor and have them delivered via your SMTP service of choice.

In addition to one-off campaigns, you can also set up automation rules, like automatically sending a digest of your latest posts on a particular day of the week. Mailster doesn’t support A/B testing, but you will get detailed statistics to analyze open rates, clicks, and more.

Mailster costs $29 with standard Envato licensing (lifetime updates for a single site and six months of support).

So which email plugin should you use? Well, that depends on your specific needs, as they all have value. You might even want to mix-and-match them in some scenarios.

For example, you could use HubSpot to grow your email lists, manage customer relationships, and send marketing emails. At the same time, you could also use Post SMTP Mailer/Email Log to improve the deliverability of your site’s transactional emails.

And again, no matter which of these plugins you choose, you’ll be able to pair all of them with the Avada WordPress theme.