CircuPress: WordPress RWD email service provider plugin about to drop

CircuPress – host and manage your own email

In what we suspect to be just a few short days away, CircuPress will soon be in the WordPress Plugin repository, allowing WordPress users to create, manage, track, and customize email campaigns from within your WordPress administration panel.

The company says that when Feedburner shut down, site owners were seeking their own self-hosted email solutions, and while some vendors integrated RSS feeds into their email solutions, it required experts to do the work, and there was “no real integration between the the client site and the email service provider.” They seek to change all of that with their plugin that lest WordPress users host the entire email process from beginning to end.

They say it’s so easy that if you know how to publish a post on WordPress, you already have the expertise to make CircuPress work. No learning curve? Awesome.

How CircuPress works

CircuPress is more than just RSS distribution via email. The plugin handles the following four types of emails:

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1. On Demand Emails – offers, sending out quick content, emails you want to send right now
2. Daily Digests – set up a template and send out all content from that day via email, automatically
3. Weekly Digests – same as daily, but money saving since you’re charged by how many emails you send

After sending all of these emails, you also have the ability to track stats of each campaign, viewing sent emails, opened, clicked, unsubscribed, bounced, and abuse reports. If you didn’t write any posts for the digests, the service doesn’t email anything out, so you’re not charged for an empty email. Fantastic.

Additionally, CircuPress has video support in outgoing emails, so viewers won’t see a blank box, and it can actually handle subscription forms that aren’t ugly. That’s a huge win – they created a widget you can simply drag and drop into your sidebar, a template to place the form directly into your theme, and a shortcode so you can embed these forms in pages or posts. What we like about this feature is that you are in control of your subscriber list and can download it any time you want. Not all services offer that.

The bottom line

This tool is for people who know how to install a plugin on WordPress or are willing to hire it out, and the learning curve is low, so for the DIY types, this is a useful tool. For those who don’t understand what a plugin is, we recommend sticking with the tools with all of the bells and whistles, like Constant Contact or the like.