WYSIJA. A play on WYSIWYG, WYSIJA stands for “What You Send Is Just Awesome.” Yeah, it’s tough to remember. But once you check it out, this plugin is hard to forget.
The team of seven people behind WYSIJA is from all over the world; and their plugin has steadily grown over the last year to be a dominant force in the WordPress newsletter space. This free plugin has almost half a million downloads in just over a year, and it has a staggering percentage of 5 star ratings on the WordPress repository.
I first discovered WYSIJA around August of 2012, because I had a client that was looking for a WordPress interface to create their newsletters. This is a common reason for people who try it out. I was really surprised just how easy of an experience they made creating newsletters with their drag and drop interface, especially because my only comparison was Mailchimp, who take their newsletter creation experience very seriously and have a huge team working on the design and form factors.
Similar to Mailchimp, you can send up to 2,000 newsletters per month with WYSIJA for free. For those that are pessimistic of WordPress’ ability to send mail (a worthy concern for many hosts), you can sync delivery with a Gmail Account or over SMTP. There are a ton of other features that integrate nicely with WordPress as well, such as auto-sending newsletters with new posts, batch delivery, CSV exports, email notifications to admins, and integrated signup options for various parts of your website.
Most WYSIJA features are free, but if you want to use WYSIJA with more advanced stats integrations, bounce handling, spam scores, and a couple of other features, then you can get their commercial version starting at $99 per year for a single site, or $399 per year for unlimited sites.
You can see a video with an introduction to the plugin here, even though it’s a year old:
https://vimeo.com/35054446
WYSIJA also just announced a partnership with WooThemes, which integrates a dozen WooThemes theme styles as newsletter templates. If you want to create a seamless design experience between your WooThemes website and your newsletter, this is tough to beat.
I was very skeptical of WYSIJA at first. “Why wouldn’t I just use Mailchimp?” And it’s a valid question. I personally do use Mailchimp, and recommend it to clients all the time. In fact, I’m excited to see they just updated their design. But if you want a service that is integrated directly into WordPress, and has as an extremely enjoyable interface to work with, then you should absolutely consider WYSIJA. I am also enticed by WYSIJA because I know they will always be more concerned about how they work with WordPress than third party newsletter options.
And who knows, maybe if I move my newsletter into the WordPress admin, where I personally feel most at home publishing, then I’d write my newsletter more often.
I’ve seen this a few times and it’s always been in a positive light. I just think that some things WordPress is not meant to do. I love WordPress but it is not the solution for every project you come across.
Can you explain why WordPress shouldn’t be used to send newsletters?
I’ve used this plugin a couple of times and it’s really nice! It should be noted that there’s a coupon code in that WooCommerce post for 25% off, which I used today to buy the premium version of the plugin.
There are two reasons I’m interested in Wysija over Mailchimp, which is also a great product. You can connect Wysija to any SMTP server, and dedicated SMTP services like SendGrid are much less expensive than MailChimp when you’re sending in bulk.
Secondly, a common request from clients is to automatically compile all of the posts from a given week and send them out as a newsletter. Wysija does a really good job of this, and is highly configurable. I think you can do something like this with Mailchimp via RSS feed, but Wysija has tons of great options for how to format the posts and exactly what gets included. All in all, great plugin!
We use mailchimp as well but can’t stand it. Their mail designs are weak at best and the out of the box templates from WYSIJA are light years ahead. Second, mailchimp has that double verification that our end users must approve and WYSIJA is only once. We found so many more people reading our autoresponder with WYSIJA.
It is working perfectly but I am having problem is creating a nice looking subscribe box.
Thanks for the article. I think this plug is the way to go. It’s look super easy to use from word press.
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Try HybridConnect for your subscribe buttons, it works seamlessly with WYSIJA (now mailpoet.)
2000 newsletter / month seems bit low like our blog. Is there any other newsletter plugin which offers free limit between 4K – 5K per month?
@WPDIV, it’s actually 2000 subscribers in total, and not newsletters per month.
Just to clarify!