After a few years of paying for email newsletter services such as GetResponse and Aweber, I decided to switch to using a free WordPress plugin. This is for a free reasons – saving money, more control, annoyance at reduced features and increasing monthly fees, and so on.
Luckily there is a great WP-Autoresponder plugin for WordPress, and it’s free.
Before you switch over there are few things you’ll need to do before you cancel your account with your provider.
1. Export the users from your provider
Most providers such as GetResponse allow you to export your users into a comma-separated (csv) file (eg. will kriski, myemail@aol.com). There’s usually a lot of information saved for each user but all you will need is their name and email address. You might have different lists for different websites/segmented lists. Export each one separately if you need to.
2. Install the plugin, set up the newsletter, autoresponder series
You can install the plugin directly from WordPress now, just go to ‘Add new’ and type in autorersponder in the search box, then install WP-Autoresponder and set up the newsletter and autoresponder (links in menu of plugin)
3. Import the users from your paid provider.
Go the Import/Export menu item for the Autoresponder and import the csv file you exported above. You might want to set up different newsletters if you’ve segmented your list.
4. Export/import the users from your WordPress blog subscription
5. Delete any users that bounce back after you email them
Since you’re now using your own hosting provider to email you will receive the emails that can’t be delivered. Copy the email address in the search box (on the subscribers page) and once you find each one, delete it from your system. I had a list for many years so there were some invalid email addresses on it.
If you already had users who subscribed to your blog in WordPress (or joined as members to a membership site), you’ll have to transfer them over to your new newsletter(s) (separate from regular users). I use the free WP-Export Users plugin. Export your users (using the fields ‘display name’ and email address) making them comma-separated. Cut and paste the list into a plain text file, then import them as you did for the paid provider file.
Emails will go out if you have an autoresponder set up for ‘Day 0′ so if this is a problem, don’t set up the autoresponder before you import the lists. Also users won’t have to double-opt in (confirm their email address) which is great because you don’t want to have to get them to reconfirm again.
Good luck and let me know if you get this working.