The Newsletter Plugin Not Sending Emails? How to Fix

Is The Newsletter Plugin not sending emails reliably?

When sending newsletters, you should use a separate SMTP plugin for better deliverability.

In this article, we’ll explain how to use the best SMTP plugin to send newsletters.

Fix Your WordPress Newsletters Now

Why Is My WordPress Newsletter Plugin Not Sending Emails?

Your newsletter plugin is likely not sending emails because they’re being marked as spam. But before we get into more detail, it’s important to understand how your plugin is sending emails.

The Newsletter Plugin uses wp_mail() to send newsletters from WordPress. So you can use it with WP Mail SMTP to send emails through a 3rd party provider like Sendinblue. That’s a lot more reliable than using your web server to send the newsletters out.

This also fixes your other WordPress emails (like password resets) at the same time.

Other newsletter plugins have their own email settings that only apply to newsletters. This isn’t quite so convenient.

If your newsletter plugin has its own SMTP settings, you may still have email deliverability problems with regular WordPress emails, or notifications from your contact form plugins. In some cases, having multiple plugins with their own SMTP settings can cause a conflict.

For the best results, make sure every email plugin you install is compatible with WP Mail SMTP. We’re going to show you how to set it up with The Newsletter Plugin here, but any other plugin that uses wp_mail() should work the same way.

How To Fix The Newsletter Plugin Not Sending Email

For this tutorial, we’ll assume you set up The Newsletter Plugin on your WordPress website. If not, go ahead and install it now before we start on the tutorial.

1. Install the WP Mail SMTP Plugin
2. Connect to a Mailer Service
3. Enable Email Logging and Weekly Summaries
4. Improve Newsletter Open and Click Tracking
5. View Newsletters in Your Email Logs
6. Check Your Email Reports and Newsletter Statistics

Let’s start by installing WP Mail SMTP.

1. Install the WP Mail SMTP Plugin

The Newsletter Plugin used to have its own SMTP settings, but they’re now obsolete. You’ll see a warning message in the plugin if you try to access them.

To fix this, we’re going to install WP Mail SMTP – the best SMTP plugin for WordPress.

WP Mail SMTP reconfigures WordPress’ built-in email function so you can use an external email service provider. It also has a ton of extra features that’ll help you track the success of your newsletters.

To download the plugin, go to the WP Mail SMTP website and log in to your account. You’ll find the download button under the Downloads tab.

Switch to your WordPress dashboard and upload the zip file. If you need help with this part, learn how to install a WordPress plugin.

After you install the plugin, be sure to Activate WP Mail SMTP. This will start the Setup Wizard so we can set up your email provider.

2. Connect to a Mailer Service

In this step, we’ll pick an email service that’ll be used to fix The Newsletter Plugin not sending emails. It’ll also fix all of your other WordPress emails at the same time.

Click on the Let’s Get Started button to begin.

On the first screen, you’ll be asked to choose a new email provider for your website.

The choice you make here will depend on:

• How many emails you’ll send each month, taking every plugin into account
• What your budget is
• Whether you send any transactional emails, like WooCommerce order emails, in addition to your newsletters.

If you only send out newsletters, you don’t necessarily need a transactional email provider. Newsletters aren’t usually time-sensitive, so it doesn’t matter if they’re not delivered immediately.

However, transactional email providers have other benefits in addition to fast delivery. For example, they’ll be more likely to support bulk email sending, which means sending large numbers of emails all at once. As your list grows, that’ll become more and more important.

If you’re in any doubt, we recommend either SMTP.com or Sendinblue. These email service providers strike a good balance between quality service and cost.

Here’s Sendinblue’s pricing as an example:

Once you’ve decided on a mailer, the next step is to set up your account and connect it to your website.

Click on the link below to open our setup documentation for your new email provider:

3. Enable Email Logging and Summaries

As you move through the Setup Wizard, you’ll be asked if you want to enable 2 important features: Detailed Email Logs and Weekly Email Summaries.

We recommend that you enable both of these options.

• The Weekly Email Summary will help you to keep track of your email deliverability without logging into WordPress. You’ll get an email every Monday that shows you how many emails were sent, and how many failed.
• If you have the Pro version of the plugin, Detailed Email Logs will save the email headers to a log file. If you want to log the entire contents of every email, we’ll show you how later in the tutorial.

Go ahead and select both options here and complete the Setup Wizard when you’re done. You’ll get an automatic test email to confirm that your new email provider is working.

4. Improve Newsletter Open and Click Tracking

The Newsletter Plugin has its own open and click tracking that shows statistics for your email marketing messages.

But you can’t see email open rates and click-through rates for individual newsletters. You can only see combined totals for the last 20 newsletters you sent.

If you want to track the performance of your email subject lines, this data won’t be helpful for that.

We can improve on this with the email open and click tracking in WP Mail SMTP. And the great news is that you can use both types of open and click tracking at the same time.

Let’s enable the additional email tracking features in WP Mail SMTP.

First, head to WP Mail SMTP » Settings.

When the Settings page opens, click the Email Log tab at the top.

First, let’s log the entire contents of the emails – not just the headers. This will allow us to see complete data on every newsletter sent from your site.

On this screen, scroll down a little and check the box labeled Log Email Content.

Next, you’ll want to enable the email tracking features we talked about.

Scroll down a little bit more and check both of these boxes:

This will turn on the email tracking and link tracking in WP Mail SMTP.

Great! Now we’ve fixed The Newsletter Plugin not sending email and we’ve improved your click tracking and open tracking too.

Let’s look at 2 new ways to view that open and click tracking data.

5. View Sent Newsletters in Your Email Logs

With WP Mail SMTP email tracking enabled, you can now see a lot more detail about your WordPress emails. Along with the headers, we can also see opens and clicks for individual messages.

The statistics are updated immediately, so we can check on performance now.

Let’s take a look at the Email Log.

At the top of the email log page, we can see 2 emails from The Newsletter Plugin: 1 test newsletter, and one test email.

Looking a little closer, we can see that both emails were opened and clicked.

And we can open the email log to see all the available information.

You’ll also notice that you have some new features here:

• Print: Print a copy of the email log, or save it as a PDF file
• Export: Export the email log to a CSV or XLS file, or export the entire email as an EML file
• Resend: Send the newsletter to the same person, or forward it to someone else.

Next, let’s look at some new reporting options so you can easily monitor your newsletter deliverability.

6. Check Your Email Reports and Newsletter Statistics

Now you’ve fixed The Newsletter Plugin not sending email, your Email Reports will keep you informed about deliverability and performance.

Let’s take a look at the Email Reports in WP Mail SMTP.

At the top, we can see the email report for all emails sent from this website. This chart displays sent and failed emails as well as email tracking data.

Underneath, we can see information about emails sent from your WordPress site.

WP Mail SMTP automatically groups emails by subject line. That allows you to easily see newsletter performance.

Here’s an example with higher statistics so you can easily see how it works:

Now you have much more information about your newsletter performance. And you can click the Graph icon to make a custom chart for any individual newsletter.

And that’s it! Now you know how to fix The Newsletter Plugin not sending emails with SMTP.

Fix Your WordPress Newsletters Now

Next, Turn Your Newsletter Into a Community

Have you thought about creating an online community based on your newsletter? A community could inspire new ways to promote and monetize your content.

To start building yours, check out our list of the best membership plugins for WordPress.

Ready to fix your emails? Get started today with the best WordPress SMTP plugin. WP Mail SMTP Elite includes full White Glove Setup and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.

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