While this post is mostly pointed to customers of Arigato PRO, it can be used as guide for everyone who has problems with delivery rates of their outgoing newsletters and auto-responder emails.

Here are two very important steps to take that will greatly improve the delivery of your emails:

Use SMTP. PHP mail works… sometimes. It sends emails but doesn’t construct the envelope too well and generally isn’t too reliable. Setting up SMTP is really easy and takes few minutes. Every paid hosting service provides email accounts with SMTP access. Ask your provider if you are not sure about this. If you are not happy with their quality and delivery rates you can use affordable services like Amazon SES, smtp.com, SendGrid etc. Heck, you can even use Gmail as free SMTP service.

Here’s a great guide on setting up Amazon SES. You may skip the VPS part because you likely already have a hosting. We can also provide paid help if required.

Here is how to find SMTP details in Cpanel which is the most popular hosting control panel:

Arigato customers and everyone who sends from WordPress can install some of the free plugins like Post SMTP, WP Mail SMTP, Easy WP SMTP. etc. Arigato will automatically send emails through them.

Please do use SMTP, it greatly improves delivery.

Use a sender address from your domain name. For example if I send you newsletter from this site, it will be sent from someone@calendarscripts.info. If I use domain name different than calendarscripts.info this will reduce my success a lot. Many email servers will block the incoming email due to domain mismatch. In many other cases the email will end up in the spam box.

If you are using SMTP account from other domain (like Amazon SES, or Gmail) your sender’s address must be the same as the SMTP account. So if you are sending from SMTP someone@gmail.com, use the same as sender address.

Don’t look like a spammer. This is subjective but nowadays spam filters are rather intelligent. An email full of typos or grammatical errors will quickly be labeled as a spam. Same goes about and email message containing too much exclamation signs, SCREAMING, and so on. How much is too much? You never know for sure so bend on the safer side and tone down your messages.

Too many links inside the message will also mark it as spam.

Here is a good place to check the spam score of your emails.

Send a responsive email

If you are just using a regular WP editor to create your email contents, it will most likely be responsive. If you are using more advanced design you must make sure your emails are responsive (Note that all email presents provided by Arigato PRO and the Gozaimasu module are fully responsive by default and you don’t need to do anything about that)

Regarding Arigato PRO

Have in mind that Arigato PRO is an email marketing software, not an email sender software. It handles the logic of sending the desired emails at the desired time, managing mailing lists, etc. The technical sending of emails is handled in this order:

• Arigato sends the email to your WordPress installation by calling the wp_mail command. This is the last time we have control over the emails.
• Your WordPress installation instructs your mailing server to send the email. This process may be affected by SMTP plugin if you have installed such (recommended).
• Your mailing server handles the actual sending of the email. If the email is not sent, this is the place where the problem occurs.

So if emails are not sent and Arigato says they are sent, this means you should contact your hosting support or your SMTP provider (when you use external SMTP).

This free bridge is for customers who manage their mailing lists and newsletters with Campaign Monitor. Similarly to our MailChimp bridge, this plugin will let you automatically subscribe users who take quizzes to your mailing lists in Campaign Monitor.

Download version 0.6 (~300 KB)

The bridge will respect Campaign Monitor’s double opt-in settings for the given mailing list. There is no way to overwrite this.

To use the bridge you’ll need your Campaign Monitor API keys and the IDs of the mailing lists you want to use. Please don’t ask us why finding out the ID is so complicated 🙂 Campaign Monitor does not allow a method to select all lists so you have to use the ID instead of seleting the list from a drop-down:

If you’d rather not pay monthly fees and leave your mailing list data in someone else’s hand, we recommend you our premium WordPress Autoresponder / Drip marketing suite. It comes with one-time fee and optional yearly upgrade fees, and there is also free bridge for connecting WatuPRO.

From version 2.7.4 Arigato PRO supports shortcodes that will display information from selected subscriber’s profile on a page on your site.
The most common scenario to use this is to create a dynamic thank-you page which is prepopulated with subscriber’s data and shown to them right after subscribing or after email confirmation. In order to make this work we have also added an option to automatically prepend user ID when doing redirects. Read on to learn how to use all this:

Using The Shortcodes

Use the shortcode in the following format:

[bftpro-user-field field="field_name" default="Default value"]

This format expects that user ID will be sent in the URL as argument called “arigatopro_id“. This can happen automatically after registration as explained in the second part of this article. If you are using some other configuration you may need to take care for prepending the user ID yourself. An alternative to this is to add the shortcode parameter “user_id” in the shortcode like this: Default value

Where does the field name come from? There are four fields presented in every mailing list: name, email, ip, date. Use the names exactly as shown here. You can also include custom fields the same way – just pass the field name (not label) to the “field” parameter.

Here is the how the thank you page that you get after signing up for our demo list is done:

Using default values is recommended because someone could be visiting your page without the proper URL parameter.

Prepend Subscriber ID On Redirect

To make using the above shortcodes simple we have added a new option on the Add / Edit Mailing List page next to both redirects:

This way you can be sure the ID is passed and can make a page like the one from the example in the previous section yourself.

Prepend Subscriber ID in Trackable Links (Intelligence Module)

From version 1.1.6 the trackable links in the Intelligence module support the same feature. You can have subscriber ID added to the end of the URL. This is most useful if your target URL is a page with shortcodes like the above example but you can also use it to redirect to a page with custom shortcodes. The attribute name that holds the subscriber ID is called “arigatopro_id”.

Important!

This is not meant to be extremely secure. Although from version 3.0.8.5 of Arigato PRO we have added a hash parameter in the URL making it impossible to guess someone else’s combination, browsers may keep these URLs in history. Don’t expose sensitive personal data via these shortcodes. The purpose of this is simply to greet the user in more personalized manner. If you need to use user profiles you’d better use the feature “When user subscribes to this mailing lists, register them as subscriber for my site too” so users get real accounts with passwords.