What’s the difference between lists, subscribers, and emails

  • Resolved labosuri

    (@labosuri)


    2 years, 6 months ago

    I’ve read the documentation for the plugin and I’ve been trying for two days to make sense of lists, emails, subscribers, subscribed, and unconfirmed users but I can’t quite understand what each is and how they are used together.
    1. What do I need a list for and how do I use it? From what I understood, a list can be added to a subscription page on the website and can also be added to an email. The email is then sent to the subscribed users.
    2. I assume that a subscriber is a member of the website. So what is subscribed? Is that someone who agrees to receive emails from my website?
    3. Is ‘unconfirmed’ a subscriber who has not opted in to receive emails?
    4. The WordPress users list automatically adds new users that sign up to my website. Are they now subscribers? Do they need to opt in? And if so, do they still need to subscribe to receive an email?
    5. If I trash the WordPress user list and create my own, how do I get them all to confirm without resending a confirmation email one by one?
    6. Is it possible to disable Sign-up confirmation and create my own confirmation email? I’ve created a welcome email which links to a subscription page on my website where users can manually select a subscription to a list. I can define it to send when a new wordpress user is added to my site, but how can I send the email to existing users who were added in the past and haven’t already received the email?

    I have so many more questions, but I’ll wait until I understand the basics here.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

  • Hey labosuri,

    Those are some great questions! From the nature of these, I can only assume that you may be a little new to how these things work. No worries, we all have to start somewhere. I remember when I had those same type of questions floating around in my head.

    Let me answer a couple of those questions for you, if I may…

    First, a LIST is a collection of subscribers that you put together for a specific purpose. Everything really hinges on those lists. For example, let’s say that you want to have a list of people who subscribed to a specific newsletter on your site. You could create a list of ‘newsletter subscribers’ and then set up a series of ‘Welcome’ emails that go out to that list when you like. That could be immediately, upon subscribing, then another one 2 hours later, then the next one 1 day after, and another email that goes out 3 days after they subscribe, etc.
    You could create another list for people who BUY a certain thing (product, course, etc.), and have a series of customer emails you send out with follow up support, other offers, etc.

    You can also create Newsletter blasts that go out to the subscribers of that certain list (or several lists, if you like).

    USERS VS SUBSCRIBERS:
    This is a little tricky to understand at first. WordPress USERS are different than your MailPoet SUBSCRIBERS. I’m sure there’s a way to add a checkbox somewhere to set up your site to also register one as well as the other. But a WP USER has certain privileges to do things on your site that a MP SUBSCRIBER wouldn’t (depending on the specific role, etc.).
    TIP: If you have your site set up so that ‘anybody can register’ in the Settings>General tab>Membership, make sure that the ‘New user default role’ is no higher than ‘Subscriber’
    That ‘subscriber’ role is different than the MailPoet subscriber.
    You obviously don’t want just anyone to have high level privileges on your site. Security and all that, you know.

    CONFIRMED VS UNCONFIRMED
    As I see it, I’m pretty sure that this means that the confirmed subscribers have clicked the confirmation link in the confirmation email that is sent out to confirm their optin. This is mandatory if you’re using MP’s email sending service.
    If you don’t want to use this feature, you may use a 3rd party SMTP service. I personally prefer MailGun for that.
    If you wanted to do that so you could avoid the mandatory optin crap, you’d configure MailPoet’s settings on the MailPoet>Settings>Send With>Other>Configure tab.
    Then enter the things you need to enter there.
    But that’s a whole other can of worms.

    I need to wrap this up, but for now I’ll just say this:
    The best way to learn all this stuff is by playing around with it and learning as you go. If you do that, you’ll be super sharp and comfy with this stuff in no time.

    I also suggest that you use a different site than your main business site to experiment with everything. Learn on that other site before you start screwing things up on your main site. On your test site, you can create lists, set up a few emails, set up ‘Welcome’ emails and see how those work vs the ‘Newsletters,’ etc.
    Then, once you feel you have a good grasp of things, come back to your main site and get busy!

    I hope this helps, and take care!

    -Tony

    Thread Starter labosuri

    (@labosuri)

    Hi Tony, I really appreciate you taking the time to write such a detailed response. Thanks a lot!
    I have been testing the plugin for the last two days with lots of trial and error. I have an SMTP service set up and I’ve managed to send emails.
    Here’s the part that’s not working:
    I want to disable the MailPoet’s opt in but what I’d like to do instead is set up a welcome email that contains a link to a subscription page on my website, enabling them to select a checkbox to receive a weekly newsletter. I already have the welcome email set up. What I haven’t managed to do is send the email when a new user signs up to the website, even though I’ve defined the email to be sent when a new user is added to the site. The email just isn’t sent (and after extensive testing I noticed that no emails are being sent now at all except for a test email in the Settings menu). So after reading your post which helped me understand a few things, this is now what’s holding me up. Do you have any idea how I get a welcome email to actually send out when a new user signs up to the site?

    Hey there,
    Glad you found my response helpful!

    After reading your question, here’s a couple questions for you:
    Have you set up a specific list in MailPoet for this purpose yet?
    Have you set up a ‘Welcome’ email for when someone subscribes to that list? (or in your case, when someone is added to the site as a user)
    If so, did you set it up so that the specific email that you want to go out will go out *immediately* when someone subscribes to that list?
    Have you made your settings so that you don’t need a confirmation email?

    Here, try this. Go to…

    Settings>SignUp confirmation>No; Confirm.
    Try going to: Emails>New Email>When a new WP user is added to the site>(make sure the role matches the WP role that people sign up for, probably subscriber); Immediately…
    Click Next, pick your email template, tighten it up how you want, click Next, confirm your settings, and activate.
    That should work.

    Hope this makes sense. Gotta run!
    -Tony

    Thread Starter labosuri

    (@labosuri)

    Hi,
    Here are my answers to your questions:
    1. I set up a specific list, let’s call it Digest.
    2. I set up a welcome email that is defined to send when a new wordpress user is added to the site, in any role, and to send immediately. I then activated the email. I’ll add here that it seems that the plugin get’s stuck after I click Activate. I get the three big dots as if it’s processing the request but it never finishes.
    3. I disabled the Sign-up Confirmation option in the Settings tab.
    4. I added a new user to my website with the role subscriber.
    5. The status for the email in Mailpoet shows that I have 3 scheduled and now when I click on it, it shows me that I have 3 unprocessed items, including one for the new user I just added. So it seems it’s getting stuck.

    Thread Starter labosuri

    (@labosuri)

    .

    • This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by labosuri.
    Thread Starter labosuri

    (@labosuri)

    I’ve managed to get it to work, albeit sporadically. I got it to send once, but when trying again, it won’t send. Is something preventing it from sending too frequently? It’s impossible to test this as it doesn’t work regularly.
    On top of that, when trying to activate an email, it gets stuck with the big three dots (picture in link).

    https://ibb.co/4Tdzw48

    • This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by labosuri.

    Oohhhhh man!
    I wish I knew what else to tell you here.
    But at least you’re in the right place to get support!

    One last thought I have for you to try is – in the settings, confirmation of ‘Send with” page (sorry, just relying on my memory at the moment), do you have it set to send by running a Cron job, or by user visitor to the site?
    I think Bruna had helped me before with an issue where my emails weren’t going out by setting it to do the “by site visitor” way.
    See if you can try that while you wait for an official MailPoet person to help, instead of lil’ ol’ me, just trying to act like one lol

    I really hope you get this worked out soon!

    Tony

    Thread Starter labosuri

    (@labosuri)

    So I tried that, still no luck. It gets stuck after activating an email. I’ve started another post on this specific subject and hope that they’ll find a solution. Thanks again, really appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to help me out!

    Hi there @labosuri,

    Thank you fo opening a separate thread ??

    I’ll close this one to avoid any confusion.

    @tonypearl Thanks for helping out ??

    Cheers!

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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