WP Minder

Online Marketing

Six Things I Like Best About MailerLite

by Leave a Comment

I’d been a long-time Mailchimp user, but I switched to MailerLite earlier this year and am very happy with that decision.

As I was trying to get more knowledgeable about automation and drip campaigns, I found Mailchimp to be more and more difficult to use. The interface was not as intuitive. There was confusing terminology (“Customer Journey Builder”) that threw me off. Support was less… well… supportive than it used to be, taking a lot longer to respond. And I was going to have to increase my monthly plan fee to access some of the features I now needed.

I was told about MailerLite in a group and signed up for their free trial. I was impressed right away with the simple, efficient user interface. And after the trial I signed up with no regrets.

Here are the six things I like best about MailerLite.

Great support. They have chat support that often answers right away, often even on weekends. Otherwise, they get back to you in email, and I’ve never had to wait more than a couple of hours.

Reasonable pricing. For 1,000 customers or less, their Premium plan is only $10 per month and includes all features.

Clean User Interface. MailerLite has a simple, straightforward user interface without a huge number of options or clutter. It’s a perfect fit for what WP Minder needs from an email newsletter provider, and is just all-around easy to use. Terminology is also as expected (such as “Automation” – it’s obvious what that menu link is for).

MailerLite's dashboard
MailerLite’s dashboard

Easy automation tools. As someone new to drip campaigns, I found MailerLite’s Automation section to be very intuitive.

You build your automation step by step in a flowchart-style interface. It made so much sense the first time I used it. You can include email content, delays, ecommerce purchases (if connected to your website’s ecommerce platform), and actions (like adding someone to a group) in the flow. Very cool.

MailerLite's easy automation workflow
MailerLite’s easy automation workflow

Simple WooCommerce integration. Connecting MailerLite and WooCommerce was very easy, and it opens up new default subscriber segments like “Repeat Customers,” “High-spending Customers” and “Subscribers with Zero Purchases.” These segments and custom fields can be used in automation tools and emails campaigns, too.

The drag and drop email builder is really good. The one in MailerLite works intuitively and includes many different types of content sections. I was never able to get the RSS feeds in Mailchimp’s builder to work correctly or look right, but in MailerLite they come in with no adjustment needed.

Drag-and-drop builder
Drag-and-drop builder

 

What provider do you use for email newsletters and/or drip campaigns? Share in the comments below if you have something you like.

The links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and make a purchase, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own. I only share affiliate links to high-quality, useful products or services that I’ve used for myself or for my clients.

Weekly Links Roundup – Online Sermons, Help Desk Plugins, Before You Hit Publish, Download Managers

by Leave a Comment

Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

Are you the manager of a WordPress site for your church? If so, have you considered putting sermons online? Here’s a guide to doing that, including audio and video recording, getting sermon content into your site, turning your sermons into a podcast and more.

Here is a review of 13 of the best WordPress help desk plugins. Offer product support right within WordPress!  Help desks can make it much easier to manage client support – assign ticket numbers, organize all support requests and followups in a single dashboard (much simpler than using email!) and be less frustrating for both you and your customers.

Here’s a treat from ProBlogger – this video teaches you 23 questions to ask yourself before you publish your next blog posts.

Download manager plugins extend WordPress’ native ability to handle downloads by adding in download tracking, organization of downloadable materials, and user restrictions on downloading content. Here’s a roundup of 15 of the top WordPress download managers.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Blogging Misconceptions, Tweeting for Business, WooCommerce Images, Multisite

by Leave a Comment

Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

If you’re thinking about starting a blog for your business, and are feeling a bit intimidated, here’s something for you. Learn about two misconceptions about blogging that are 180 degrees apart. Is blogging ‘just writing’ or does it really require ‘superhuman effort?’ Turns out that neither of those views is really very accurate, and somewhere in the middle is a more reasonable conclusion.

If you use Twitter to promote your business (or want to start), what should you tweet about? Here are 21 easy ideas for business tweets. Some of these can also be good to use on other social platforms you might frequent for your business, like Facebook or LinkedIn, though the article is focused on short tweetable content.

I’m building a WooCommerce site for a client right now and had some issues with gallery thumbnail image sizing. Here’s a useful and recent post containing all you may need to know about WooCommerce images. If you need a little more focus on resizing those products try this second post on changing WooCommerce image sizes.

Finally… if you have a need to run several WordPress sites on one server and would like to manage them all from a single control panel, WordPress Multisite may be for you. Here is a great and comprehensive guide to Multisite just published last month. Is your company or organization a candidate for the networking tools that Multisite provides? Maybe, if you’re:

  • A company with different departments each with their own website
  • A university or school with various departments and also student/faculty who need their own sites
  • A global or chain business where each location has its own website
  • A gym where each trainer needs their own site
  • Basically any situation where you need a network of sites under the control of one administrator.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Food Blogging, Breadcrumbs, SMTP

by Leave a Comment

This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Okay, sorry – I know I haven’t been blogging weekly in a few months. It was an intensely crazy summer and fall with a lot of unplanned travel related to family, a broken arm and hand, a vacation, a sinus infection and bronchitis. And no paddle boarding. But things are now beginning to settle into a new routine, and I hope to be blogging more regularly. Onward.

My husband recently started a food blog. Well, not exactly… it was more of a way to get about 150 printed recipes we use a lot out of a ragged folder and into digital format so we can find them easier. He used WP Recipe Maker as the recipe plugin – here’s a review of the best 15 WordPress recipe plugins in case you’re interested in trying a food blog yourself. These recipe plugins make it easy to add SEO-friendly recipes with options and features like printing and Pinterest rich pins built in.

And speaking of food blogs – if you include a recipe that’s been published elsewhere, how does that work? Is that a copyright violation, and if it is, how do you avoid that? This post discusses recipe attribution: “when in doubt, always give attribution.”

Let’s talk about breadcrumbs. No, not the ones from your favorite bread recipe… the helpful little string of text and links at the top of a page that tells you where in the website you are at any given moment. Did you know that those breadcrumbs are important for SEO? Not only are they good for human users; they also help Google and other search engines understand the structure of your site.

Finally… ever had problems getting notifications from your WordPress site, like submitted form entries or completed payment notifications? It’s one of the most common issues my clients report, but thankfully it’s also easy to fix. WordPress by default uses your host server’s PHP mail() function to send notifications, but quite commonly the server either isn’t using it or has problems with its setup. So what do you do? You don’t worry about the server at all. Instead, you use the SMTP (outgoing mail) settings from one of your existing email providers, like Gmail or a domain associated with your site. You could also use a 3rd-party service like SendGrid or Mailgun which will likely improve deliverability of site emails, important as your site and audience get larger. Here are instructions for setting up SMTP; my favorite free plugin for this is currently Post SMTP.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Old Blog Posts, PDF Viewers, Landing Pages, Paypal Alternatives

by 1 Comment

This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

If you’re a regular blogger and have been doing it for some time, you’ve likely built up a large collection of old blog posts. Some may be useful “evergreen” content, but many may not longer be accurate or that useful. Should you do something about that? The answer is yes – check out this article on what to do with old blog posts. Start with an objective inventory. This process may be rather painful, but in the end you’ll be left with a blog that’s much more useful to your customers. Think of it this way: if you chose to commit to blogging in the first place, also commit to keeping that content at its best. As an added benefit, this cleanup will likely improve organic traffic to your site.

If you offer PDF documents on your site, did you know that you’re not stuck using the browser (which you have no control over) to display them? There are a few PDF viewers for WordPress that give you lots more control over display and keep your viewers on your site when they click to open the document. Both of the plugins reviewed in this article are commercial, but I’ve used the free PDF Embedder plugin on a few sites to good effect.

Well-thought-out landing pages can make the difference in getting a conversion (like a sale or a signup) or not. They simplify things down to one key idea – what it is you’re selling or asking people to sign up for. Here are 10 examples of successful landing pages to inspire you. And… here are some WordPress landing page plugins to help you construct your ideal landing page for any given purpose.

Finally… do you use Paypal in your ecommerce site? It has over 60% market share, so it’s a good bet. Love it, or hate it? If you’re in the latter category, this post is for you! Learn about the top 18 Paypal alternatives for ecommerce sites. I’m not sure if all of these are WooCommerce-compatible, since it’s quite likely you’re using WooCommerce if on WordPress. Stripe is my go-to payment plugin for WooCommerce, Gravity Forms, and Harvest. Compared to Paypal, their support is fantastic, and I find Stripe’s great dashboard makes it much easier for me to do my accounting tasks.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.