7 Best Email Plugins for WordPress

With effective email plugins, you can fix and enhance email deliverability, grow your subscriber list, send notifications, and even power your email marketing campaigns.

How Do I Integrate Email Into WordPress?

To make the most of WordPress’ built-in email capabilities, integrating email lists, notifications, and even marketing campaigns, you’ll need the help of specialized plugins.

Of course, there’s no shortage of choices when it comes to WordPress email plugins. So, to help make your search easier, we’ve done the legwork for you. We’ve narrowed the field and shortlisted the best email plugins for WordPress emails and newsletters.

7 Best Email Plugins for WordPress

Let’s dive in!

1. WPForms

WPForms is the best form builder plugin for WordPress. With over 5 million active installations, it allows you to set up unlimited forms and easily create custom email notifications. The best thing about WPForms is that it is the most user-friendly contact form-building tool. It requires minimal time to create visually appealing forms.

Key features include:

• Easy drag and drop form builder
• Form entry management and
• Instant notification system
• Easy tracking of all entries
• 600+ templates
• Mobile-friendly forms
• 30+ extra addons to extend your form functionality

WPForms Lite (the free version) allows you to easily add multiple recipients to your contact form. This is awesome because most contact form plugins make this complicated to set up. Each form can be set up so it captures users’ email addresses and adds them to your CRM.

Other great features include the Form Abandonment addon. This addon sends a notification even when the form isn’t submitted.

That could help you recover lost leads or get valuable survey information that was only partly filled out.

With the partial information, you can still nurture leads by sending them cart abandon emails to unlock more conversions.

Also with WPForms Pro, you can let your visitor choose between recipients on your form. This is called a conditional notification, and it’s a great way to add multiple departments or recipients to a single form.

Cost: WPForms Lite is free and supports one notification per form. You can use the basic plan for $39.50 for the first year or upgrade to Pro for $199.50 for the first year to get all of the extra notification features.

2. WP Mail SMTP

WP Mail SMTP is one of the best WordPress email plugins. Why? If you’re having issues with WordPress not sending emails or emails going to spam, WP Mail SMTP is the solution.

WP Mail SMTP is different from the other plugins on this list as it doesn’t focus on creating emails. Instead, it focuses on improving the deliverability of emails that you send on your site. These are called transactional emails, and these emails are for contact form submission notifications, password resets, welcome emails, order confirmations, etc.

WP Mail SMTP bypasses the default WP Mail function and forces your site to use SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) settings instead. Because WP Mail SMTP adds authentication to the emails, the deliverability of your site’s outgoing emails is greatly improved.

You also get the ability to control WordPress notifications with this plugin. In fact, you can even change WordPress admin email and override the From Email settings for other plugins using WP Mail SMTP.

Key features:

• Replace WP mail with a dedicated email sending service
• Dedicated API integrations
• SMTP option to connect to any SMTP server
• Test email function
• Use any Gmail account to send emails from WordPress

Pro features:

• Email logging
• Open & click tracking
• Email reports
• Weekly email summaries
• White glove setup

Without WP Mail SMTP, your site’s outgoing email could be blocked or marked as spam. WP Mail SMTP ensures your emails are authenticated properly and sent via trusted third parties like SendLayer, Sendinblue, or SMTP.com.

The best thing about WP Mail SMTP is the Setup Wizard: it walks you through the entire process.

Cost: There’s a free version of WP Mail SMTP that lets you use popular email providers such as Gmail, Sendinblue, and SMTP.com. The Pro version unlocks all advanced functionality and costs $99/yr. A Developer and Agency version exist for business applications, ranging from $199-$399/yr.

3. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the #1 email subscription plugin for WordPress. It allows you to capture emails anywhere on your site with popups, notification bars, and forms. If you want to pair it with your newsletter signup or lead capture form, you can easily embed forms from WPForms in your popups.

It also helps you create various different opt-in form types including full-screen welcome mats, notification bars, and slide-in notifications. This allows you to adapt your marketing tactics to suit your site and the way your customers respond.

For example, OptinMonster has exit-intent popups. These popups automatically appear when users move their mouse to click off your site. They’re useful to help gather those final email list signups by offering a special incentive, discount, or product.

OptinMonster also makes it easy for you to see the campaigns and pages that generated the best conversion rates. The best thing about OptinMonster is its ability to show the right message at the right time, helping you to grow your email marketing list faster.

Key features:

• Beginner-friendly
• Dedicated WordPress integration plugin
• A gamified “spin the wheel” opt-in
• Integrates with multiple email marketing services
• Dozens of pre-built templates
• The visual drag-and-drop builder
• Powerful analytics and A/B testing

OptinMonster optimizes over 2 billion sessions each month by offering a wide array of targeting and personalization options, and that’s why marketers prefer using this tool.

Cost: You can start using OptinMonster for free. The paid plans range from just $9/month for the Basic plan (billed annually) to $49/month for the Growth plan. The most popular option is the Pro plan which runs at $29/month. Remember, all plans come with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

4. MailPoet

MailPoet is a WordPress-focused email automation tool that lets you create newsletters inside WordPress.

It includes a full drag-and-drop editor for easy newsletter creation and intuitive subscriber management tools.

It also integrates directly with WooCommerce, so adding products to your newsletters in its editor is a breeze if you have an online store. Updating subscribers on your latest blog posts and news is also hassle-free due to MailPoet’s automation.

Key features:

• Easy list management
• Drag and drop builder
• Handles one-off or automated email campaigns
• Dedicated WooCommerce integration

Cost: The free plan comes with unlimited emails, which you can send to 1,000 subscribers. Premium plans are available from $15/mo, or purchase the premium plugin for $149 and connect it to your chosen plugin.

5. Postie

Postie creates a WordPress post by sending an email. You can create, edit, and send the intended post via email using your regular email client.

Posting blogs by email is helpful if you want to write posts wherever you go. WordPress has its own post-by-email feature, but Postie has many more options.

Key features:

• Supports IMAP or POP3 servers
• Control settings for status, post format and type, category, and tags
• Edit headers and footers from email
• Gallery support
• Templates for images, videos, and audio files
• Email replies can be posted as comments on your blog post.

Cost: The core plugin is free. Download Postie from WordPress directly and if you like it, there’s an option to send donations. Additional addons are available from $5 – $49.

6. Newsletter

Newsletter essentially does exactly what it says on the tin. It creates and sends newsletters directly from your WordPress site. With it, you can expand your subscribers to lists, create opt-in forms, and use their simple drag-and-drop creator to send emails.

The free subscription includes unlimited subscribers with statistics, unlimited newsletters with tracking, subscription spam check with domain/IP black lists, and archive and locked content addons.

Upgrading to a premium account unlocks a variety of pro addons. You can integrate WooCommerce, Amazon SES, and Contact Form 7, add the geolocation capability to target subscribers by location, and track newsletter links with Google Analytics.

Cost: The standard plugin is free. Paid plans start at €69 per year.

7. Subscribe2

Subscribe2 is a WordPress email plugin that allows your to automatically send emails once new content has been published on your blog. You can either send your email subscribers 1 post at a time or create an email digest containing multiple posts.

Important: use this plugin with WP Mail SMTP so that you can send your emails through a transactional email provider. Why? Subscribe2 sends all notifications at exactly the same time, and, by using it with WP Mail SMTP, you won’t run into sending limits. Of course, this depends on the email provider you choose; we recommend SendLayer.