Kim Gjerstad is one of four founders of MailPoet, an email newsletter plugin for WordPress. According to BuiltWith, MailPoet is installed on over 94K websites at the time of writing. Let’s learn how Kim and his team have used the freemium model to grow their business and the challenges they have faced along the way.
Kim is giving away 10 x Blogger licenses of MailPoet valued at $99 each! To enter, leave a comment under the video and tell Kim your favourite email newsletter solution and why - and it doesn't have to be MailPoet!
Kim has generously awarded all 10 of our commenting listeners (up to and including Nancy) a Blogger license of MailPoet valued at $99 each! Thanks Kim! (February 2015)
Some of the highlights of this episode include:
• refuse to accept CV’s for applicants
• weekly status updates from remote staff
• customers will pay to save time and headaches or make more money
Elevation Round Answers
Here are the answers to the questions in our Elevation round. Watch the interview to get the full scoop.
1. It’s a give and take relationship
2. Over deliver and then word of mouth
3. Select your own clients
4. Keep them short, readable and fun to read
5. Email inbox
6. Set expectations and regular communications
7. Use about.me to present yourself
8. Specialise and don’t try to do everything
You can reach out and thank Kim on his email [email protected].
Kim suggested I interview Ash Maurya author of Running Lean. Ash, keep your eyes on your inbox.
Hint: to enter the competition, leave a comment below and tell Kim your favourite email newsletter solution and why.
12 Responses
Hey Troy, and Kim,
Great Interview, I use to use wysija when it was called that too. My main concern with using newsletters on our site is, as our lists grow, there is a potential that our domain can be flagged as a source of spam (even though it will most definitely not be). I know that people then decided to host the newsletter on a sub-domain or another domain (which if blacklisted, they then use another sub-domain variation, etc) mail chimp do this (us1. campaign-archive1 .com for instance and roll through different sub domains), so as not to tarnish their main brand URL.
What’s your thoughts Kim on sending too many newsletters, and how should we as developers be setting this up for clients and our businesses?
And to answer the competition: My favourite newsletter solution is sendreach(dot)com a marketing solution built by marketers for marketers. Yep I don’t get to do all the great features of the WordPress integration and able to grab my blog posts, but I get unbelievable insight into my users, and can create in depth segments, using social media insights.
Request feature: I haven’t seen this anywhere! I want to be able to create a central newsletter for multiple blogs and audiences, the aim here is to use the cool features of mail poet, to drag an drop content from my blogs into a newsletter, but pull in that data from my other blogs, arrange it into a newsletter, which would have a central archive directory and then send it out to the different lists, separately or as a mass mail-out. Essentially I would be creating a central newsletter for several of my sub brands. Thoughts? Is it achievable?
Another request would be that we can export our finished HTML newsletter. Ie we create an awesome newsletter using mail poet, and publish it, but with no mail out to a list. Instead we then can grab the HTML code, and take that to our favourite external auto responder service, and paste in the raw HTML, and send out from there, the images are hosted by our server, and when a user requests to open it in a browser they are taken to this published archive page.
Hey Lanauze, thanks for the thorough comment, and answering my question about your favorite tool.
1. For reputation, many factors are considered, including domains and sub domains. Subdomains are treated separately indeed.
If your lists are clean, you have your own dedicated IP address, and you manage your unsubscribes properly, you should be good to send from your own server.
You can always use our free tool to check you’re not on any major blacklists (spamcop, spamhaus especially.): http://www.mail-tester.com
With MailPoet Premium, you can view open rates per domain across all newsletters. This enables you to get a hint of deliverability for gmail, yahoo outlook.com.
If you’re sending millions of emails every month, then you’ll need to show interest in your deliverability, or go with a third party service.
Note that MailPoet is planning to send emails soon. We’ll be testing our service shortly, and we’re looking for beta users (free emails in exchange): http://www.mailpoet.com/will-send-your-emails/
2. Feature request 1: yes, many users have asked us for an RSS widget to pull content from other sources. Multisite administrators are eager to see this (<5% of our users). It's planned, but further down the road, since we focus on features that benefit the majority.
3. Feature request 2: exporting HTML… you can send yourself a preview of the newsletter to your email, and simply copy the source of the email itself. Maybe we’ll include this in the future, not sure.
Thanks Kim,
I’ll keep that all on board.
If you want to see more insight of the deliverables for gmail, use this service http://www.yesware.com/.
Thanks,
Chris La Nauze.
Thanks for the link!
Hey:
I enjoy the interview just to point here that I have been using MyMail from Envato it includes free updates and have all statistics included rather than the premium yearly model that MailPoet has.I will try mailpoet to check if my clients can find more benefit specially in template edition.
I also have MaiChimp, Getresponse and Sendreach but do not work fine to manage email communications for a small business and to be compliant with privacy and data-protection laws in some countries, specially if there are sensitive data related with health by example, many big mail marketing companies are not compliant and not interested on it.
I know you have to be safe in mailing services but the fact that the final customer has this communications under control and relaying as much as it possible in their own resources and policy is most of the time a winner, of course by leaving aside the price issue.
I would like to see if email mail-marketing can be extended to integrate the interactions with social media and messenger chat services further than having a link to pages, profiles and services.
Any way good stuff, thanks for it !
I regularly use Mailchimp for my clients. But they are not bloggers. I create email blast for them once a month to promote deals usually in their bricks and mortar businesses. But I recently started my own blog and was looking for a way to push out my blog post to my list used for lead generation. I settled for gravity forms and an exit pop up that is pretty clunky.I must investigate mail poet looks like it might all be answer from my problems.
What a great episode! Very inspiring tips, Kim! I have been a long-term user of Constant Contact (14+ years), but have been slowly moving customers toward MailChimp. I like that MailChimp is local – here in Atlanta – and really appreciate their clean user interface, free subscriptions for smaller lists and numerous integrations.
With Constant Contact, I initially liked the ease of designing HTML eNewsletters and pasting them into CC to manage distribution & reports. Unfortunately, CC has not evolved to suit my needs in that they have now rolled out a “Toolkit” platform that they encourage partners to upsell. At some point, their marketing structure changed and I no longer benefit financially from the subscribers I’ve brought into the system. Without that added benefit (in the form of a bank deposit each month), I am moving to MailChimp. I prefer designing eNewsletters to compliment the websites I build and would prefer a robust system free of glitches (with the evolution of Toolkit, CC crashed quite often on me).
I would love to try MailPoet as I am almost entirely building WordPress sites now and am grateful to WPElevation for introducing me to your plugin & future stand-alone product!
At the moment, my favourite email newsletter solution is MailChimp. Why? for small lists, it is free, and it was very eddy to set up. I would like to move to MailPoet, as I like the idea of storing my contacts in my system, rather than an external partner, like MailChimp.
I’m also using MailChimp. As mentioned previously, it has a free level for smaller lists – great for smaller clients. And reasonable rates for larger lists. Much cleaner and easier to use than ConstantContact for both the developer and the client.
I only recently ran across MailPoet and hadn’t had a chance to investigate properly. Thanks for the PodCast and the intro/background.
This was a timely discussion. I’ve been looking at moving my mail list from one of the popular outsourced autoresponder providers. I’ve had the sneaking suspicion for sometime that I could achieve the same level of service with more control over one off the most important assets of my business. All with a substantial cost savings by using something like MailPoet. Thanks for the interview!
I’m loving Mail Poet. It does lack some whizbang features that can be found elsewhere. BUT I want simplicity. I love the integration. It’s easy to teach to people.
I use MailPoet and love it. My favorite thing is that I only pay when I use it. When using Aweber / Benchmark Email / MailChimp / etc. there is a monthly charge and you can send X amount of messages per month. I don’t do a good job sending out email communication, maybe once or twice a quarter, so I don’t have a recurring monthly fee, which I like 🙂