If your WordPress site is a membership one, or an online store one, this means that WordPress will have to send multiple transactional emails to your users (confirmation emails, login details emails, password reset emails, etc.).
However, these emails often tend to get lost in the spam folders of the recipients. You can eliminate this outcome, with the use of a SMTP WordPress plugin.
A SMTP plugin represents a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which is a protocol used for sending and receiving emails. In order to be able to use the plugin and avoid the situation described above, you can use a third-party SMTP server, which usually is represented by an autoresponder service, dedicated to sending emails.
In this tutorial, I will use the “Post SMTP mailer/email log” plugin and connect it to the SendGrid server.
Note: Please keep in mind that “Post SMTP mailer/email log” is just an example, and you can use multiple plugins for the same purpose. Similarly, SendGrid is one of the autoresponder services that you can use.
The steps presented below are just a demonstration of a way in which you can make sure that the automatic emails sent to the users will not end up in spam folders.
Install a SMTP plugin
To begin with, you will need to install the SMTP plugin of choice. As mentioned above, in this example, I will use the “Post SMTP Mailer/Email Log“ plugin, but feel free to use another one, if you wish.
You can find a list with all of the plugins and mailing services (Mandrill, SendGrid, etc. ) that are compatible with “Post SMTP Mailer/Email Log”, here.
To install this plugin, in your WordPress admin dashboard, hover over “Plugins”, in the left sidebar. This will open a small dropdown with some options. Click on “Add New”:
On the page that opens, go to the search bar and start typing the name of the plugin:
Then, look for the card with the plugin details, and click on “Install Now”:
Once the installation is complete, activate the plugin:
After this, you’re all set and you can move on to the next steps.
Connect the mailing service to your Thrive Dashboard via an API connection
What comes next, is to connect the mailing service of your choice, to your Thrive Dashboard, with the help of an API key.
In this article, I will be using SendGrid as an example. Post SMTP also works with Mandrill and Mailgun. However, if you’re getting started, we recommend SendGrid since they have a generous free tier.
You can find a step-by-step description of how to set up and use the API connection with SendGrid here.
Once you create a successful API connection, you will have to configure the SMTP plugin settings and add the SendGrid hosting server there. Here is how to do that:
Insert the SendGrid server hostname
Moving forward, from the WordPress admin dashboard, click on the “Post SMTP” section of the left sidebar:
Then, you will be able to go through a setup wizard, in order to configure the necessary setup. For that, click on “Start the Wizard”:
Feel free to go through all of the steps. Set up the sender details, and when you get to the third step, which is the “Outgoing Mail Server Hostname” step, enter the SendGrid server host: smtp.sendgrid.net
You can also check out their article, as well, if you need more information about integrating an SMTP plugin with SendGrid.
Then, continue with the wizard. In the “Connectivity Test” step, you can choose any of the SendGrid sockets:
What will differ here, is the way you authenticate in the next step. You can either do that using your SendGrid account credentials (username and password), or using an API key.
If you choose one of the first two sockets from the image above, you will be asked for the username and password, and if you use the “SendGrid API” socket, you will be asked for the API key. Choose the variant that you prefer, and move on to the “Authentication” step:
As you can see, I’ve chosen to prove the identity with the SendGrid account username and password, but, if you choose the “SendGrid API” socket, this is what you will see, instead of the account credentials:
Naturally, enter the SendGrid API key in this field. The way to generate an API key is also described in the article mentioned above.
Continue with the wizard, and, when you’re done, click on “Finish”:
Desired Outcome
The setup is complete. Now, whenever someone will receive a transactional email, the sender will not be “WordPress”, but it will be the administrator of your site. This way, you will not have to worry about the users not receiving their mails, or losing them in the spam folders.
Here is an example of how the email would look like after someone makes a purchase on your site if you do not use a SMTP plugin along with a mailing service:
This is very likely to go straight to spam. However, if you follow all the steps from this article, this is how the email will look like:
This will be sent from a secure source, thus it will go to the users’ inbox, and the risk of them losing important information will be minimum.
I hope this article was useful for you. If you need more information about Thrive Themes and its numerous features and products, please take a look at our knowledge base.
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