In the last week or so I have looked at WordPress plugins which promise to increase your newsletter subscription rate.; namely Pop Up Domination (review) and Subscribers Magnet (review). Both of these plugins require you to use a newsletter provider such as Aweber or MailChimp

However iThemes have released the beta version of Email Buddy – a plugin which lets you build an email list using WordPress.

Cory Miller explains:

EmailBuddy is an email newsletter solution for WordPress. Building email lists around your blog, or your products and services, is a vital marketing function. Despite the popularity of social media like Twitter and Facebook, email marketing is not dead. You can’t rely on people coming back to your site or knowing about your new launches. Simple text-based group emails are extremely effective at getting your message out to the right audience. With EmailBuddy, you can do that and more!

I do like the idea of emailing subscribers from my own site rather than using a service. Though I’m not sure if any such solution will offer the same quality, performance and reliability of services such as MailChimp.

However in the long run a solution like this could save you a lot of money (all good email marketing services charge a monthly fee).

At the moment the plugin is only available to those who purchase the PluginBuddy Developer Suite from iThemes – which will set you back $197. The developer suite does come with other great plugins like BackupBuddy though.

You can read more about EmailBuddy at the link below.

Good luck,
Kevin

Link: EmailBuddy