Using the weMail Plugin for Sending Out Newsletters

There are a number of email marketing options that you can use for sending out a newsletter to your customers who have opted in on the site. One of the most recent self-hosted options for email marketing for your site is weMail plugin from weDevs.

After you have installed and activated the plugin on your site it will add a new admin menu called weMail. The first time you use weMail plugin it will guide you through a setup wizard which can walk-through or you can skip the setup wizard and go through the different parts of the plugin settings.

weMail > Settings

General

Company Details
Social Networks
Email Gateways
Double Opt-in
WP Users Sync
API Keys

We are going to focus on the email gateways that are currently supported for weMail which are SparkPost, SendGrid, Mailgun, Elastic Email, Amazon SES. In this example, we are going to use a free plan on SendGrid to send out email marketing emails. First, you will need to create an account in SendGrid. Then after you have created your account in SendGrid you will need to create an API key. You will need to create an API key with full permissions, then you will be able to view the API key, copy the key and paste it into the setting of weMail in the email gateways settings section for SendGrid.

weMail support WooCommerce as well as a number of form plugins like weForms, Gravity Forms, Caldera Forms, Ninja Forms, WP Forms and Contact Form 7. For using say Gravity Forms you can select an existing form and then map which fields from the form you want to record in weMail.

Using weMail supports all of the usual features you would expect for email marketing being able to import existing subscribers into weMail from a CSV file. It is possible to use an exported subscriber list from Mailchimp and then import those subscribers in weMail. You can create a subscriber list it is very easy to be able to create a list in weMail. In order to be able to send out any email newsletter then you will need to create a campaign. The plugin makes it easy to create your first campaign and also includes a number of example campaigns.

It is also possible to use the admin users you have on the site and add them as marketing team members.

The weMail plugin is a solid and easy to use plugin for email marketing which works well and supports a number of integrations and email gateways.