While WordPress is the world’s most popular web content management solution, one critical area usually needs more than what you get out of the box — sending emails.
This is especially true for ecommerce stores, membership sites, and Sensei-powered courses that rely on sending notification emails, password resets, and transaction receipts. Emails sent by WordPress are often marked as spam if they get delivered at all.
This isn’t WordPress’ fault. Email sending is hard due to how much spam and malicious uses there are out there, so the industry has created a growing number of ways to authenticate email senders and combat bad actors. As a result, most servers and managed hosts aren’t optimized for email sending, and you will need a separate service or customization to get emails working.
That’s where MailPoet comes in. In this guide, we’ll share the benefits of configuring MailPoet to handle emails for course creators and some of the ways it integrates tightly with Sensei.
What is MailPoet?
MailPoet is a service from Automattic (the same company behind Sensei, WordPress.com, and WooCommerce), that helps with email marketing and sending. It is easy to use and allows creators to send out newsletters, automated emails, and marketing campaigns.
Most importantly, you can choose to enable MailPoet’s Sending Service to improve deliverability and avoid your emails landing in spam folders.
The Sending Service and many of MailPoet’s features are completely free for up to 1,000 list subscribers and sending 5,000 emails per month.
The Sending Service will handle all transactional emails from your website like new comments, course completed notifications, password resets, and more.
Sensei + MailPoet Integration
Sensei LMS and MailPoet integration is easy. Once set up, your email marketing and online courses will link automatically, allowing you to communicate with your students efficiently. There are no settings or further action on your part needed.
The integration works by automatically creating lists in MailPoet for each course and student group in Sensei LMS. Students in a course are added as subscribers to the corresponding list in MailPoet, and the same goes for members of a group. This allows you to easily target your email marketing efforts to specific courses or groups of students, ensuring that your messages are relevant and engaging.
For example, you can send a single mass email to students enrolled in a course right from the WordPress dashboard.
When using the integration between Sensei LMS and MailPoet, you can easily identify the lists in MailPoet that were created by Sensei LMS. These lists will have the prefix Sensei LMS Course: or Sensei LMS Group: before the course/group title in their name. This makes it easy to distinguish between lists created by the integration and those you may have created manually in MailPoet.
MailPoet + WooCommerce
For those selling online courses, products, memberships, or subscriptions, MailPoet is designed to greatly improve your email options with WooCommerce integration.
Some reasons why WooCommerce users should use MailPoet are:
- You can grow your email list using forms or by letting shoppers opt in during checkout.
- You can design your emails using a visual, drag-and-drop interface or one of the many responsive templates.
- You can send automated emails to welcome new customers, upsell products, recover abandoned carts, or notify them of new blog posts.
- You can customize your WooCommerce transactional emails to match your brand and include extra information.
- You can segment your subscribers based on their behavior, purchase history, location, subscription status, and more.
- You can track your email performance with basic or detailed engagement statistics.
To sum up, the integration between Sensei LMS and MailPoet offers a convenient way to connect your email marketing with your online courses. By creating lists in MailPoet for each course and student group in Sensei LMS, you can send targeted emails to specific groups of students. This integration can help improve communication with your students and support their learning experience.
You can download MailPoet here to get started.
