SendGrid WordPress Integration: Sending Emails Made Easy 101

Manisha Jena • Last Modified: December 29th, 2022

SendGrid WordPress Integration_FI

Email Marketing is a low-cost, targeted, and personalized Marketing Service that benefits every Business, large or small. Unlike other Channels, Emails facilitate faster Conversion Marketing by allowing Customers to move from seeing an offer to purchasing the item in as few as two clicks. 

Sending Marketing Emails using a Cloud-based SMTP Server like SendGrid is advantageous in various aspects. SendGrid Services save you costs by eliminating the costs of Staffing, Hardware, Software, Maintenance, Storage, and Ancillary Channels since it is hosted on the Cloud. With features such as Rapid Implementation and strong Email Analytics, SendGrid is a popular choice for many.

In this article, you will gain information about SendGrid WordPress Integration. You will also gain a holistic understanding of Instagram, WordPress, their key features, and the steps involved in setting up SendGrid WordPress Integration. Read along to find out in-depth information about SendGrid WordPress Integration.

Table of Contents

Introduction to SendGrid

Twilio SendGrid Logo: SendGrid WordPress Integration
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SendGrid is a Cloud-based Customer Communication Platform that makes Transactional and Marketing Emails for your Customers a priority. SendGrid maintains standards and deliverability as one of its unique selling features.

SendGrid was created to serve Developers and Marketers and to make it easy for Businesses to send Emails regardless of their environment. It allows you to send an email through Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) or Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), or you may even use one of the Company’s Official Client Libraries if you like. Your Business can set up and send its first email in a matter of minutes.

In addition to Transactional and Marketing Emails SendGrid also provides Autoresponder Services allowing your Business to send both Broadcast and Automated Emails. SendGrid is built for Time Savings, Scalability, and Delivery Expertise, which is why over 80,000 paying Customers trust SendGrid to send more than 90 Million Emails every month.

More than just an SMTP Server attached to a Marketing Platform, SendGrid offers an API that is meant to make sending Emails as simple as possible, and you can quickly connect it with your App (like Salesforce) using its Code Libraries. There are APIs for sending Emails, as well as an event API for automatically receiving Notifications and Statistics about your Emails. SendGrid also has a parse API for grabbing the contents of Replies and other Emails you receive and using them inside your App.

Key Features of SendGrid

Some of the key features of SendGrid are as follows:

1) Ease of Use

Setting up SendGrid is really simple, but it gets extremely quick if you’ve already worked with other Email Marketing Applications. After logging in, you’ll see a checklist for setting up your first Email and integrating it with other popular Applications.

The Main Dashboard displays all of the relevant data for your most recent Email Campaigns, including metrics such as Opens, Clicks, and Bounces. Although many additional functions are split up into multiple different menus, frequent use will make it easier to discover all the relevant features.

2) Email Deliverability

SendGrid ensures that Marketing Emails reach your Customers right into the Inbox folder and not the Spam folder. With SendGrid Analytics your Business can understand the various factors that might result in their Emails being sent to Spam. 

SendGrid can track parameters such as Bounce Rate, Spam Reports, IP Health, Number of People Unsubscribing, etc. upon which it can suggest changes to improve the Sender’s Reputation. It also has various functionalities that can implement Email Validations to filter out Misspelt, Inactive, Disposable, or Non-existent Email Addresses so that your Email Delivery Rates and actions on Emails improve further.

3) SendGrid Email Editor

SendGrid offers its own Email Editor, which allows Users to utilize Pre-built Email Templates or create new Templates from scratch, using drag and drop features or by coding the Email Template. 

SendGrid also allows Users to add Custom Tags to Emails, which can be used to include Custom fields. These Custom fields may be used to customize Emails based on the information Businesses know about the receivers.

SendGrid Email Editor: SendGrid WordPress Integration
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4) SendGrid Automation & Analytics

SendGrid comes with one Prebuilt Autoresponder but you can also create your own automated Email Series. You may use Triggers such as signing up for your Email Newsletter or making a Transaction, or you can construct Automations using a Contact List.

SendGrid Marketing Analytics lets users track

  • Opens
  • Clicks
  • Bounces
  • Spam Reports
  • Unsubscribes

for all the recent Marketing Campaigns. Not only this, but SendGrid also provides deep insights into Users’ Geographical Location, Device, and Email Providers.

SendGrid Automation and Analytics: SendGrid WordPress Integration
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Introduction to WordPress

SendGrid WordPress: WordPress Logo
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WordPress is currently one of the most widely used CMS in the market, with over 41% of the top 10 million websites leveraging it. WordPress has also found uses across other fields such as Pervasive Display Systems (PDS) (application domains such as healthcare, computing, etc). 

To start working on WordPress, you need to install it on a Web Server, where a computer runs the software package WordPress.org to serve as a Network Host or as a part of a hosting service like WordPress.com. You can use a local computer for learning purposes and single-user testing.

WordPress ensures more human-readable permalinks by directing all requests for non-static URIs to a single PHP file. This file can parse the URI and identify the target page.

Key Features of WordPress

Some of the key features of WordPress are as follows:

1) Ease of Publishing

WordPress became popular because of how easy it was to publish any form of content to the Internet with it. You can pen down pages and posts, plug in different types of media, and format them seamlessly in a matter of a few clicks. Once you have ironed out the details, you can get your content on the web with just a click with WordPress.

2) Publishing Tools

You can manage your content seamlessly with WordPress. You can glance through post revisions, create drafts, and even schedule publications. You can decide if you wish to make your content private or public. If you wish to make some content private, you can secure it with a password in a hassle-free fashion.

3) Simplicity

The WordPress interface allows you to get publishing very quickly, with a simplistic UI to supplement your user experience.

4) User Management

You can decide the different levels of access for your website. Every website has several people associated with it. An Editor works on content, the Administrator manages the site, Contributors and Authors write the content, and subscribers have a profile to manage. 

5) Flexibility

WordPress allows you to develop almost every type of website imaginable, ranging from a personal blog to an eCommerce website. You can improve your website with custom themes built for specific use cases and supplement it with various plugins to work on a better user interface for your users. WordPress also grants you the freedom to build a website from scratch and build it to completion in no time flat.

6) Optimized for SEO

WordPress has been optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) right out of the gate. To achieve a more fine-grained SEO control, you can utilize various SEO plugins offered by WordPress.

7) Media Management

The ability to add media seamlessly is imperative for a CMS. With WordPress in place, you can simply drag-and-drop media to the uploader to add it to your website. Apart from the ability to add captions and alt text, WordPress houses a few image editing tools that you can play around with.

8) Easy Installation and Upgrades

WordPress is very easy to install and upgrade. Numerous web hosts offer One-Click WP Installers. If you prefer an FTP program, you can start with creating a database, uploading WordPress with FTP, and then running the installer.

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Understanding SendGrid WordPress Integration

SendGrid’s WordPress plugin replaces WordPress’s default wp_mail() function by sending outgoing emails from your WordPress installation via SMTP or API integration with SendGrid. It also enables you to add contacts straight to your SendGrid Marketing Campaigns account through a subscription widget.

You can boost user engagement on your WordPress installation by utilizing the SendGrid plugin, which provides greater deliverability and an extended feature set, including tracking and analytics. If you have any issues, SendGrid will help offer world-class customer service.

Setting Up SendGrid WordPress Integration

The steps for setting up SendGrid WordPress Integration are as follows:

A)) Installing SendGrid’s WordPress Plugin

You can send emails through SMTP as well as API Integration. In this article, the SMTP approach has been taken into consideration.

The steps followed for installing SendGrid’s WordPress Plugin are:

  • Step 1: First, install the Swift Mailer plugin. You can follow the Official Documentation for installing the plugin.
  • Step 2: After activating Swift Mailer plugin, navigate to “Settings”. Enter your SendGrid credentials.
  • Step 3: Now, select the way you want your email to be delivered:
    • Via SMTP
    • Via API
  • Step 4: You can also set default values for the “Name,” “Sending Address,” and the “Reply Address” headers. By doing this, it won’t be necessary for you to define these headers every time while sending a mail.
  • Step 5: You can also set the template ID for the template you want to use in all of your emails or individual emails as well.

By setting the x-smtpapi-to header, you may have an individual email sent to each recipient. For example:

x-smtpapi-to: example@example.com, example2@example.com

When using the SMTP method, the “To” address must also be specified by you. It makes no difference what address you enter in the “To” field because it will be overwritten by x-smtpapi-to.

2) Configuring SendGrid’s WordPress Plugin

While you may simply install and configure the SendGrid WordPress plugin as mentioned above to start sending emails through SendGrid right away, you can also take steps to further customize the SendGrid WordPress plugin in order to better set up the SendGrid WordPress Integration.

The SendGrid plugin modifies and makes changes to the wp_mail() function to ensure that all emails sent by WordPress are delivered by SendGrid.

Emails can be sent using the following function:

wp_mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers ="", $attachments = array())
VariableDescription
$toAn array, or comma-separated list (CSV), of email addresses to send messages.
$subjectThe subject of your email.
$messageThe contents of your email.
$headersAn optional array or SendGridEmail() object.
$attachmentsAn optional array, a comma-separated list (“, “), or a new line separated list (“n”) of files to attach.

If you wish to send an email containing HTML content, change the content type to ‘text/html‘ by running the following function before calling wp_mail():

add_filter('wp_mail_content_type', 'set_html_content_type');

To restore to your initial settings after running wp_mail(), remove the ‘text/html‘ filter.

remove_filter('wp_mail_content_type', 'set_html_content_type');

For further information on SendGrid WordPress Integration, you can visit here.

Conclusion

In this article, you have learned about SendGrid WordPress Integration. This article also provided information on SendGrid, WordPress, their key features, and the steps required in setting up SendGrid WordPress Integration.

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