Tribulant Newsletter is definitely one of the top WordPress newsletter plugins. It’s not a free plugin. But is it worth the money? Short answer: absolutely. It has all that a newsletter plugin for WordPress can offer. It also has unique features that no other plugin offers, such as paid newsletter subscriptions, click tracking through bit.ly, off-site subscription forms, and more!
Read on to learn more about the plugin–what it can and cannot do for you…
Ease of Use and Installation
Installation of Tribulant Newsletter isn’t as easy as some of the other plugins. After purchasing the plugin, you’ll have to obtain a license key and activate the plugin. But don’t worry, there’s a pretty good user guide for that.
Once installed, the plugin is very easy to use, thanks to its professional design. The plugin is packed with features, options, and menus. Yet, things are sensibly labeled and laid out that you don’t feel overwhelmed.
Technical Support and Documentation
Support for Tribulant products–this newsletter plugin included–is provided through multiple channels: live support, community forum, and a ticketing system. The forum isn’t that useful to be honest. It’s best that you just go ahead and submit a ticket for support.
As for documentation, it is great. It is well written and comprehensive. There are step by step instructions, video tutorials, and a full user guide.
Managing Subscribers and Mailing Lists
The nice thing about Tribulant Newsletter is that it mimics WordPress functionality very well. The subscribers management screen is a fully featured user interface in which you see a paginated list of your subscribers. You can search them, perform bulk actions on them, sort them, and more.
Tribulant Newsletter also provides the ability to export and import subscribers. This is done through either uploading a CSV file of import data or downloading the CSV file of export data.
Capturing custom fields for subscribers is possible by first adding a custom field from the “Save a Custom Field” screen and then using the custom field in your subscription forms.
It is also possible to segment your subscribers by mailing lists. Mailing lists can be free to join or paid. You can even create private mailing lists that are not displayed on your site publicly. These can be used for internal communications or for managing mailing lists for clients.
- Screenshot: Tribulant Newsletter “Import/Export Subscribers”
- Screenshot: Tribulant Newsletter “Save a Custom Field”
- Screenshot: Tribulant Newsletter “Manage Subscribers”
Opt-in Form Features
Tribulant Newsletter supports many types of opt-in forms: hardcoded form, offsite form, post/page embedded form, registration checkbox, and of course sidebar widget form.
The behavior and number of fields in each subscription form is determined by the mailing list to which the form belongs.
One interesting and unique feature of Tribulant Newsletter opt-in forms is that they can be embedded on external websites.
Tribulant Newsletter can also make use of great 3rd party plugins to create opt-in forms, such as popups, subscribers from comments, and more!
Scheduling Autoresponders
Like most other things Tribulant Newsletter does, it nails autoresponder functionality! You can assign autoresponders to specific mailing lists and each autoresponder message has its own delay settings. You can turn a previously saved newsletter into an autoresponder message or you can create one on the spot.
Sending Site Content Updates as Newsletters
Tribulant Newsletter is able to send a periodical newsletter that contains the latest posts from your WordPress site. You have a lot of flexibility as to how frequently the newsletter goes out–from “Every 2 minutes” to “Once Monthly”. You can even specify the categories of posts to include, and the specific mailing lists that should receive those posts.
HTML Emails, Themes, and Attachments
Tribulant Newsletter handles email sending better than any other plugin in its category. It is capable of sending nicely themed HTML emails and with attachments.
The plugin ships with 7 premade themes. You can easily create your own theme by peeking at the existing themes and copying the template tags that are used in them.
Tribulant Newsletter claims to send a plain text version along with HTML, but I don’t see any user interface for that.
Bounce Email Management
Tribulant Newsletter offer two methods of bounce email management: email piping and POP/IMAP mailbox. If you use the POP/IMAP method, you can simply specify an address that will receive the bounced email and the plugin will check that address to see if there were any bounces. And then the plugin will perform the necessary clean up.
Email Newsletter Analytics
Tribulant Newsletter provides several email tracking interfaces. You can track subscription rates of opt-in forms, open rates of emails, click tracking through bit.ly. And each one of these is done through a clean interface that’s easy to use and understand.
- Screenshot: Tribulant Newsletter “Subscriber Stats”
- Screenshot: Tribulant Newsletter open rate stats
Money Matters
Tribulant Newsletter costs a one time payment of $55 for the single site license or $275 for the unlimited license. I think (for its features and robustness), it’s a great value for the money. Both licenses give you 3 months worth of updates. If you wanna update the plugin after that, you’ll have to buy update points. They are pretty affordable, but keep in mind that there are no refunds.
I mean like this with wp-autoresponder……”"WP Autoresponder is able to send new posts as emails to your subscribers as you publish the posts. Your subscribers can even choose specific categories from which to receive update notifications. However, WP Autoresponder cannot aggregate several posts in a single daily, or weekly, or monthly newsletter. It can only send notifications for individual posts.”"
1. Can I sent emails to my subscribers that subscribed for different categories/posts/pages/topics
2. Can I sent articles/etc to my subscribers from within my website…….just like the mashable email news options?
Regards,
Paul