7 Best WordPress Mailing List Plugins to Grow Your Email List

Are you looking for a beginner-friendly mailing list plugin to grow your email list?

There are a lot of WordPress plugins that can help you grow your email list. But most are too complicated, have a steep learning curve, or need to be more fundamental and offer conversion rate optimization features.

In this article, I’ll share with you the best mailing list plugins for WordPress. I have only picked beginner-friendly plugins that don’t require any technical knowledge. These plugins also contain everything you’ll need to start building your email list.

MailOptin

MailOptin is an all-in-one email marketing plugin for WordPress. It offers everything you need to grow your mailing list. Most other email list plugins on the market have a steep learning curve and require reading the documentation. MailOptin, on the other hand, is built from the ground up for beginners and small business owners. You don’t need to be a marketing expert or a computer genius to create list-building campaigns that skyrocket your email list growth.

MailOptin offers built-in integrations with many popular email marketing tools, including Mailchimp, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, MailerLite, Sendy, Klaviyo, Drip, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Sendinblue, HubSpot, and Zoho. That means you can connect it to your email marketing platform. Whatever email marketing tool you’re using, MailOptin has an integration.

The best part about MailOptin is that it’s an all-in-one plugin. It not only helps you build your email list, but it also allows you to create automated email marketing campaigns. You can set up automated email campaigns sent when an event is triggered.

All other plugins on this list only help you build your email list but don’t offer any tools for email automation.

You can use MailOptin to easily send email newsletters to your subscribers without leaving WordPress. You don’t need to log into your favorite email marketing platform. Instead, connect it to MailOptin, and you can send newsletters directly from your WordPress admin dashboard.

MailOptin also allows you to send automated email digests of your blog. You can set up automatic email campaigns that are sent every day, every week, or every month. MailOptin will automatically generate an email that lists all your latest posts and send it to all your subscribers. You customize the look and feel of the emails using MailOptin’s beginner-friendly email builder.

MailOptin offers six display styles for your lead generation campaigns: Popups, Notification Bar, Slide-In, Widgets, In-Content, and Inline.

Not only that, it offers many different triggers you can choose from for your campaigns. Triggers decide when your campaign will be displayed. For example, if you choose the most popular exit intent, your campaign will be displayed when the user tries to leave your website. Some of the most popular websites use this technique.

Ease of Use

MailOptin is one of the easiest email list-building plugins on the market. It is built for beginners but packs a tremendous amount of power. It might be made for beginners, but it offers all the advanced features you can ask for.

It offers an intuitive builder to create new lead-generation campaigns. It is easy to use and doesn’t require any technical knowledge. To create a new lead generation campaign, you only need to pick a template, customize it, and hit publish! Building an automated email marketing campaign is just as easy. Just choose a template, and customize the design using the Builder.

Features

• All-in-one email marketing plugin for WordPress. It allows you to create both lead-generation campaigns and automated email marketing campaigns.
• Conversion-boosting triggers for lead-generation campaigns include Exit-Intent, referrer detection, device targeting, cookie targeting, and many others.
• A/B testing to help you incrementally improve your conversion rate.
• Content Locking allows you to create subscriber-only content only visible to subscribers.
• Beautiful themes for lead generation campaigns and email campaigns.

Best Suited For

MailOptin is best suited for small businesses that want to harness the power of email marketing without learning to master complex software. The best part about this plugin is that it helps you capture new leads also helps create automated email campaigns. It’s an all-in-one tool with everything you need to grow your business with email marketing.

Popupmaker

Popupmaker is an email list-building plugin for WordPress. It allows you to create popup lead generation campaigns. It can help you improve your conversion rate using popup campaigns.

This plugin offers lots of different targeting options you can use to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns. For example, it allows you to target visitors based on browser, referring pages/websites, device type, screen resolution, date, country, and many other factors.

It integrates with many popular email marketing tools and offers built-in integrations for WordPress plugins such as Contact Form 7, WP Forms, and Ninja Forms.

Ease of Use

PopupMaker makes it easy to create high-performing lead-generation popup campaigns. It offers a lot of templates to choose from that you can easily customize using its WYSIWYG Editor. It also provides an easy way to split-test your campaigns to improve conversion rates.

Features

• Integrations for email marketing tools include Mailchimp.
• Responsive popup design templates that look good on all screen sizes.
• Many different trigger types to choose from, such as Exit-Intent, time-based, scroll, and many others.
• Offers dozens of visitor targeting options you can use to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Best Suited For

Popupmaker is best suited for businesses that only need a solution for creating lead-generation popup campaigns. However, if you need a solution that offers a lot more than just that, MailOptin would be a better choice.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular and oldest WordPress plugins. As the name suggests, its intended use case is for creating contact forms, but you can use it to create almost any form.

It’s completely free and open-source. There is no subscription cost, no add-ons, nothing!

But the free price tag comes at a cost. It’s not the easiest plugin on the list. Contact Form 7 might not be your best option if you want a simple solution.

Contact Form 7 can’t be used to create lead generation forms by default. Instead, you’ll need to use a third-party plugin to send the data collected from Contact Form 7 to your favorite email marketing platform.

If you already use Contact Form 7, you can use MailOptin’s built-in Contact Form 7 integration to send subscriber details to your email marketing platform.

If you aren’t already using Contact Form 7, I recommend going with MailOptin, as it doesn’t require any technical knowledge and is built for beginners. It also offers a lot more features.

Ease of Use

Contact Form 7 is a simple plugin, but it can be challenging to set up if you want to use it to create lead-generation campaigns. You’ll need to use another plugin like MailOptin to connect Contact Form 7 to your email marketing platform.

Features

• A simple contact form plugin that can be used to create lead-generation forms.
• Completely free and has no add-ons or subscriptions.
• You’ll need to use MailOptin to connect your lead-gen form to your email marketing provider.

Best Suited For

Contact Form 7 best suits anyone who doesn’t mind getting their hands dirty. You might gain more control over your lead generation form, but you’ll lose out on many features offered by some of the other plugins, such as Split Testing and drag-and-drop editors.

WP Subscribe

WP Subscribe is a free WordPress plugin that helps you grow your email list with simple lead-generation forms. This essential plugin only supports MailChimp, Aweber, and Feedburner.

It hasn’t been updated in a while now, but that’s nothing to worry about, as it offers basic functionality. Unfortunately, it provides no fancy features such as A/B testing, but it has everything you need to get started.

If you want to use an email marketing provider other than MailChimp and Aweber, you’ll need to look for another plugin.

WP Subscribe allows you to create mobile-responsive, eye-catching lead-gen campaigns easily. The best part about this plugin is that it only offers basic functionality and is very lightweight. That means you don’t have to worry about it slowing your website.

Ease of Use

WP Subscribe is built and designed for beginners. It’s a basic plugin that makes creating and publishing lead-generation campaigns easy and quick. You can connect it to Aweber or Mailchimp.

Features

• Fully customize the design by using custom CSS.
• Only connects to Aweber and Mailchimp.
• Completely free plugin.
• Very lightweight as it only offers basic functionality.

Best Suited For

This is a good plugin if you are just getting started and want to test the waters. However, if you want advanced features, this isn’t your plugin.

Bloom

Bloom by Elegant Themes allows you to create beautiful opt-in campaigns. It offers many different templates and a simple drag-and-drop builder to help you customize them.

It allows you to display targeted opt-in campaigns when a specific event is triggered. You can show your popup when the user is about to leave the website. You can also choose to display a discount coupon popup only to some of your visitors based on demographic targeting.

Bloom isn’t available as a standalone plugin. You’ll need to purchase a yearly subscription to Elegant Themes membership to use it.

Ease of Use

Bloom is easy to learn and offers lots of advanced features. Learning can be overwhelming if this is your first time using a full-featured drag-and-drop builder. It provides a lot of advanced features, such as A/B testing.

Features

• Over 100 templates to choose from.
• Six different display types, including Pop-Up, Fly-Ins, and Widget Area Forms
• Many trigger types to choose from, including Exit-Intent, Inactivity, After Purchase, etc.
• Integrates with many popular email marketing tools, including MailChimp, ConvertKit, MailerLite, and ActiveCampaign.

Best Suited For

Bloom is best suited for businesses looking to purchase the entire Elegant Themes membership. If you also want your website’s Divi theme, it’s a worthwhile purchase. Otherwise, you’re better off with some other plugins on this list. The other plugins on this list, such as MailOptin, specialize in lead generation and offer many more features.

Optin Forms

Optin Forms by FancyThemes is a lesser-known plugin that makes creating opt-in forms for your WordPress site easy. It has a limited number of users, but it’s regularly updated.

It connects with many popular email marketing platforms, including Aweber, iContact, MailChimp, and ConvertKit. It offers five different form designs you can choose from. In addition, you can customize all aspects of the design of your opt-in form.

Ease of Use

Optin Forms is a very basic plugin. It offers five different templates that you can easily customize. There’s no complex drag-and-drop builder. You get a basic form to customize the colors and copy.

Features

• Five different templates to choose from.
• A simple customizer that makes it easy to customize the design of your opt-in form.
• Connects with many popular email marketing providers.
• You can add your opt-in form to your posts and pages using a shortcode.

Best Suited For

This plugin is great if you’re just starting. It’s free and only offers basic features. You’ll, however, someday outgrow this plugin, especially if you’re investing a lot of effort and money in marketing.

weMail

weMail is a relatively new list-building plugin for WordPress. It offers a straightforward interface that is easy to learn. weMail allows you to create opt-in forms such as Floating Bars, Inline Forms, Slide Ups, Popups, and Embedded Forms.

The best part about this plugin is that it helps you build your list but also helps you email your list directly from WordPress. Although unnecessary, you can connect your weMail to an SMTP provider such as Amazon SES, SendGrid, Mailgun, or any other provider. You can then send emails directly without needing a marketing platform like MailChimp.

You may like sending emails directly alone without needing an email marketing platform. It will save you a lot of money, but it’s not worth it. That’s because it’s challenging to maintain a good email sender reputation. If this is your first time hearing that phrase, I wouldn’t recommend sending marketing emails alone.

If you have little experience with email deliverability, stick with a plugin like MailOptin that connects with email marketing providers such as Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Infusionsoft, and many others. These platforms invest a lot of money to maintain a good sender reputation.

Ease of Use

weMail offers a modern dashboard design, a breath of fresh air in the WordPress marketplace. The plugin makes it easy to set everything up. It offers a beginner-friendly editor to customize your email and opt-in form campaigns.

Features

• Send marketing emails to your customers without relying on email marketing platforms.
• Lots of different designs to choose from for opt-in forms and email campaigns.
• Connects with many WordPress form plugins such as Contact Form 7, weForms, Formidable Forms, and WPForms.

Best Suited For

This plugin is best suited for businesses with a lot of email deliverability experience. This plugin can save money if your team has experience maintaining a good email sender score.

Conclusion

The list building plugins for WordPress in this list cater to different needs and levels of expertise. If you run a small business or a startup, the best plugin I can recommend is MailOptin. It’s an all-in-one WordPress plugin for email marketing.

It connects with major email marketing providers such as MailChimp, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Drip, AWeber, ConvertKit, MailerLite, Constant Contact, GetResponse, Sendy, Campaign Monitor, ActiveCampaign, Brevo (Sendinblue), Gist, Klaviyo, Sendlane, Mailster, Vertical Response, Mailjet, HubSpot, Ontraport, Moosend, MailPoet, Zoho CRM, Zoho Campaigns, Keap Max Classic (Infusionsoft), HighLevel, Omnisend, Flodesk, Benchmark Email, SendFox, iContact, Mailgun, E-goi, SendGrid Email Marketing, GoDaddy Email Marketing, weMail, FluentCRM, CleverReach, NewsMAN, Facebook custom audience. It offers a simple editor to help you create automated email campaigns.