What if you were able to automatically email your subscribers to let them know about your WordPress blog post, immediately after publishing it?
No logging into an email platform, creating a campaign, selecting your email list, and hitting “send.” Just simply hitting “publish” from the WordPress admin, and automatically sending an alert to all your subscribers. No extra clicks required!
We’ll compare our solution against the others:
- MailPoet, with post notifications
- Jetpack, the Subscription feature
- Mailchimp, with RSS to email
Whether you’re a small business owner or blogger publishing with WordPress, email marketing is a tried and tested method to build loyalty and increase your bottom line.
Then again, email marketing requires time. In today’s gig economy, we’re either billed or paid (or both) — by the hour. From Fortune 500 CEOs to freelancers, every minute saved is a minute earned. Because time is money.
In this post, you’ll learn how to use the MailPoet newsletter plugin to set up a simple email marketing automation campaign that will email new post notifications to your subscribers — immediately after your posts are published.
Table of contents:
- MailPoet vs Jetpack vs Mailchimp
- The basics of MailPoet to get started
- How to create blog post notification emails in WordPress
- Monitoring post notifications campaigns in MailPoet
- Getting creative with post notification campaigns
1. MailPoet vs Jetpack vs Mailchimp
Let’s start with a quick primer on the fundamentals of email marketing, then I’ll walk you through how to create a post notification email campaign and monitor its stats. Finally, we’ll explore some common use cases for this type of email campaign.
Before we get started, it’s important to note that there are other newsletter plugins out there, such as Jetpack and Mailchimp, that can help you send automated email post notifications. However, both these services have their own set of limitations.
Let’s quickly review the advantages of MailPoet over the competition.
MailPoet vs Jetpack
The Jetpack plugin can send post notification emails to people who subscribe to your newsletter via a typical signup form or via the comment form underneath your blog posts. The comment subscription form looks something like this:

Although Jetpack is easy to setup, you cannot customize the notification emails.
This isn’t a good choice if you want to design your emails to match your site’s colour palette or branding. With Jetpack, all email post notification emails look like this in your subscribers inboxes:

Of course, with MailPoet, that’s not the case. You get to customize your newsletter with a drag-and-drop email builder, as you’ll see later in this post.
MailPoet vs Mailchimp
Mailchimp is undoubtedly one of the leading email marketing companies on the planet. However, when it comes to setting up blog post notification emails, Mailchimp’s process can be a bit… daunting.
You first have to sign up for Mailchimp, verify your domain, configure automated campaigns, design your email… and only then are you able to able to send automated blog post notification emails.

With MailPoet, things are a lot easier! You can create a new post notification campaign, design your email, and schedule it — all without ever leaving the WordPress dashboard.
Here’s an example of a post notification email designed with MailPoet:

Now that you’ve had a sneak peek at what the end result looks like, let’s get started on how to set up automated blog post notification emails.
2. The basics of MailPoet to get started
Lists, signup forms, and emails are the building blocks of an email marketing campaign. If you’re new to the concept, here’s a quick primer:
Email lists
Typically, email lists have two attributes — name and email. You can also create additional attributes — also known as custom attributes — such as first name, last name, and phone number.
Good email marketing campaigns are made up of multiple lists (also called segments). For example, most online stores have two email lists:
- List of people who sign up to the blog’s newsletter, and
- Another list of people who purchase the product (customers).

Upon installing the MailPoet plugin, you’re presented with three lists, as shown above.
- My First List: This is a default list created by MailPoet.
- WooCommerce Customers: If we have WooCommerce installed, MailPoet automatically imports your existing customers to this list.
- WordPress Users: This is a list of your WordPress users.
Fun fact! MailPoet allows you to create unlimited lists! So you can segment away to your heart’s content.
For the purpose of this tutorial, I’ll rename My First List to Instant Post Updates and use it to send Post Notification emails. I’ve also imported a couple of subscribers to this list for testing purposes.
Note: If you have an existing email list, you could import the CSV file it to the Instant Post Updates list by following this tutorial. If you are using Mailchimp, you can import your existing lists via the Mailchimp API.
Newsletter signup forms

Newsletter signup forms work in conjunction with email lists. A typical signup form contains two fields (name and email), which map to the respective attributes of the email list.
Getting subscribers on your list is one of the most important things you can do as a WordPress website owner.
Here’s an example of MailPoet’s signup form:

Creating a newsletter signup form using MailPoet
MailPoet allows you to create unlimited forms, and has a number of different form placement options, including pop-up, slide-in, fixed bar, and below posts/pages.
You can use one of their pre-built templates as the basis for your form, or start from scratch.

For the purposes of this tutorial, I’ve used one of the pre-built templates, renamed it Daily Post Updates, and linked it to the Instant Post Updates list. You can also customize the form by adding text, dividers, images or rearranging/adding new fields and styles.

You can place MailPoet forms anywhere on your WordPress site, using the various form placement options. In the above screenshot, I’ve used a ‘Below pages’ form type, and set my Daily Post Updates form to appear on the bottom of every blog post.
Now we’re ready to fit the final piece of the puzzle!
Emails & email marketing campaigns

A campaign is basically one (or more) emails sent to a list at a particular time. They can also be triggered based on certain events.
One of the most common types of triggers is a time-based trigger. “Send a campaign on Friday the 13th at 2:30 pm”. That’s a scheduled campaign.
MailPoet offers four types of email marketing campaigns, including newsletters, welcome emails, post notifications, and WooCommerce emails. Let’s discuss the first two.
- Newsletter Campaigns: The simplest form of a campaign is called a Newsletter. We create an email, select the list, and hit send. The emails are delivered immediately or schedule it at a later time. Trigger: Manual send or scheduled.
- Welcome Emails: Another common type of campaign trigger is when someone subscribes to an email list. In other words, the trigger is fired when a new row (i.e. email address) is added to the list. Such campaigns are called Welcome Emails. Trigger: New addition to list.
So far, we’ve covered 80% of the tutorial. What’s left is how to create a post notification campaign. Can you guess what the trigger is? Let’s find out in the next section!
3. How to create blog post notification emails in WordPress
From what we’ve learned so far, post notification campaigns are triggered when a new post is published in WordPress. Here’s how to create a post notification campaign in WordPress:

Step 1: Head over to the WordPress dashboard > MailPoet > Emails and click + New Email.

Step 2: Click on Set up in the Latest Post Notifications box.

Step 3: Next, set the frequency of our campaign. Since the purpose of this tutorial is to send a post notification email immediately after it’s published, select the Immediately option from the drop-down menu.
However, remember that in this configuration, if you publish two (or more) posts a day, two (or more) emails will be sent to our subscribers. You probably don’t want that.
A good practice is to match the email frequency with your content calendar or posting frequency. For instance, if you publish every day, then you could set the frequency to Once a day at an optimal time.

Step 4: MailPoet comes with over 50 pre-built templates for various email campaigns including Newsletter, Welcome Emails, and Post Notifications.
In this tutorial, we’ve used a Post Notifications template. You can select any template that catches your fancy.
In the following step, we’ll use the Automatic Latest Content content block to create our newsletter.

Step 5: MailPoet has an intuitive, drag-and-drop email designer, with various content blocks and styling options, making it super easy to design email campaigns. You can also use MailPoet’s shortcodes to further personalize your newsletter.
The real magic happens in the Automatic Latest Content content block. Drag and drop it in to your email and select the number of posts it should display. For this tutorial, I’ve selected only one, i.e. latest published post.

You can also filter the latest posts by tag and category. Furthermore, you can customize the elements of this content block using various display options, such as text alignment, showing/hiding the featured image, author, “read more” button and more.
Once you’ve designed your email, click Next (in the top-right corner) to proceed to the last step.

Step 6: In the final step, select the list you’d like to send your blog post notification email. For this tutorial, I’ve selected the Instant Post Updates list.
Choose a relevant subject line, frequency, and sender info. Once ready, click Activate to start the campaign.
Our Post Notifications campaign is now active!
4. Monitoring Post Notification campaigns in MailPoet
After activating your first campaign, how do you verify if your post notification emails are actually sending? Head over to the Post Notifications tab in MailPoet. You should see one active campaign called New blog post!

Whenever a new post is published, you can check the status of sent campaigns by selecting the View history option as shown in the screenshot above.
Video tutorial
Bonus: For all you “watch-and-learn” readers, here’s a video tutorial on how to create blog post notification emails with MailPoet. *Please note – the design of MailPoet has changed since creating this video, but the steps are the same. A new video is coming soon!
5. Getting creative with Post Notification campaigns
We can get quite creative with post notification campaigns, especially by playing with the tag and category filter. For example:
Use Case 1: Say you have a SaaS blog where you post relevant content as well as product updates. Since all your customers should get product update emails, you could configure a post notification campaign. Whenever a new post is published under the “Product Updates” category, all customers would receive the notification email.
Use Case 2: A good way to navigate today’s attention economy is to present consumers with simple choices that save them time. Enabling readers to choose between daily, weekly and monthly post notification updates would help solidify your position as a “pro-customer” brand. You could use MailPoet to create three different post notification campaigns to cater to each of these segments.
You want to learn even more? We conjured up an ultimate guide to newsletters in WordPress.
I hope you have found this tutorial helpful. If you have any questions about how to set up post notification, let us know in the comments below!
This is just the mail plugin I was looking for our club. As the admin, I do most of the blog posts. We do have some members who have “editor” rights and post regularly. However, when they do, their posts require admin review. Is there a way to override this? Otherwise, this is a great plugin!!!!
Carol, if you want other roles to use MailPoet, see this guide:
https://kb.mailpoet.com/article/205-roles-and-permissions
Hi, I really need this feature and I tested it some weeks ago. I got the impression that, with the option ‘immediately’, mails were sent when I
-published a page
– published a post
– updated a former post (example: fixing typos or updating links)
So I feel unsecure using this feature and deactivated it
Is my impression right? How to define a rule that only new posts, no pages and no updates trigger the email sending process?
Cheers, Connie
Hello Connie, you can filter by post types so only post, and not pages, get sent.
If you update a previously published post, it won’t send again.
Is there a way to add a “COMMENT” button that will take you to the comment box on a post like Jetpack does? I realize that the “Read more” and “View in your browser” are alternatives for people in the know, but a comment button is inviting the person to engage and gets them right where they need to be. Especially if they aren’t savvy.
Great question. Unfortunately, we don’t a built-in feature right now.
However, you can always use a custom button with the following URL that redirects to the comments section:
https://BLOG_POST_URL/#respond
Hope this helps!
Thanks for the quick reply.
I tried your suggestion thinking “BLOG_POST_URL” would be dynamic or a shortcode, but it literally tries to go to https://BLOG_POST_URL/#respond.
Am I missing something?
It would be simple if you would expose the “Read more” link so it could be edited,
Nothing?
My apologies. I did not mean
BLOG_POST_URL
as a shortcode, but rather as a placeholder.Your URL for directly taking the user to the comment submission section should be
https://BLOG_POST_URL/#respond
whereBLOG_POST_URL
should be replaced by your post’s URL.I’ll make sure that Kim gets to know of this feature request!
Ok, thanks for getting back.
Having to manually enter the post url manually isn’t really an option. I’ll keep an eye out to see if this ever gets implemented. I really think it’s a worthwhile feature.
Cheers
Happy to help! Thanks for the fantastic feature suggestion! :)
Is it possible to send by mail the full text of a post that has private status?
Those publications came to wordpress by syndication (CyberSEO Lite RSS / Atom Syndicator) or published by mail (jetpack post by mail)
Hey Alex! At the moment this isn’t something that is possible out the box.
By default we only allow posts that are publicly visible to be included in a post notification.
Thanks!
Hi.
I’ve been using the Automatic Latest Content content block feature to send an email once a week for a couple of years successfully until just recently. The last two week it has failed to work. What can I check as a cause?
Thank you,
Thank you so much. That’s helping me so much
There doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to just send a daily email with all the blog posts from the previous day — e.g. if I set the email to go out at 3AM, containing *all* posts from the prior day. The settings only seem to allow for X number of posts. Is there no way to just have a daily email with all of the prior day’s posts?
Your website is well written and has good ideas. But I have a different problem. Maybe poet can help?
I receive an email alert from an automated switch on our association mailbox. This alert comes from AWS with an uninformative text, and worse, an unsubscribe link. Currently this alert email goes to a List Serve which forwards it on to a bunch of neighbors whenever the postalperson triggers by opening the boxes to insert postalmail. This saves many ADA people trips to an empty post box. What i want to do is have our WP site receive the message, change the contents, and send a well worded note to the List Serve for forwarding on to folks on email and texting. Everything works, except a method on WP to receive the Post, process it, and send a single message to the List Serve. Ideas? Thanks!
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