How to Send Your Newsletter Subscribers A Welcome Message

On The Confident Man Project, I wanted to send my new newsletter subscribers a Welcome message including a link to a bonus audio download that I promised them in the subscription box.

There are two ways to do this:

Using an Autoresponder

Create an autoresponder triggered by new newsletter subscriptions, and attach your welcome email to it. With this approach, the subscriber gets both a confirmation email, and a welcome email.

Here are the steps:

On the WordPress dashboard click Mails → Autoresponders

Add an Autoresponder Named newsletter, Slug newsletter, Description New newsletter subscriber. Make sure you select Active, and choose the Event Subscription activated. Then click Add Autoresponder.

Now go to Mails → Add New and write the Welcome email that you would like to send. For the recipient, under All choose one of the Newsletters. At the bottom of the page, look for Autoresponders, and Link to: autoresponder newsletter. Leave the schedule settings at 0,0,0,0,0. Click Add. Don’t worry that nothing seems to happen yet.

Save the email as a draft. Notice at the bottom that the autoresponder you added has been saved. Don’t hit the Send button, or you’ll send it to all your existing subscribers. Emails linked to autoresponders only ever exist as drafts. They get sent automatically when the autoresponder triggers.

If you have disabled background wp-cron, in MailPress 5.1.1 your Welcome message will be sent the next time your cron task runs, instead of immediately that the person subscribes. This may confuse you during testing, but they’ll get the email soon enough.

Editing Your Template

With this approach, you edit your MailPress template to include your Welcome message in the confirmation email. I prefer this solution since the subscriber only has to deal with one email instead of two. The downside is that you have to hack some simple PHP in your template.

Using a text editor, open confirmed.php in your active template.

Replace the text in the Subject: line in the comment at the top of the file, with the text you’d like to send in the email Subject:. Don’t worry that it looks like a comment; MailPress will find it.

Replace the contents of $_the_content with the content of the email you want to send. You can use HTML markup, but be careful to quote “ with a backslash. If you get it wrong, the link in the please confirm email will give a blank page and the confirmation email won’t get sent.

For example, if you want to email a link you’ll need to say:

$_the_content = "Here is <a href=\"https://buildyourblog.net/bonus.mp3\">your bonus</a>";

You can make the string as long as you like. Include line breaks with <br />.

If you get stuck, simplify the string and keep re-testing by deactivating your test user on the MailPress Users list, and clicking the activate link again until you get something that works, and gives you the result you want.