FluentCRM – Email Marketing Automation
FluentCRM is a self-hosted WordPress plugin that turns your site into a full-fledged email marketing and CRM system — managing contacts, sending campaigns, automating behaviour-based journeys and owning your data, all without high SaaS costs.
“FluentCRM – Email Marketing Automation” is a powerful self-hosted email marketing and CRM plugin built specifically for WordPress sites. It enables you to manage leads, contacts, campaigns, and automated workflows entirely from your WordPress dashboard — without relying on an external SaaS platform. Because the plugin is self-hosted, all data stays in your environment, giving you full control of your contacts, lists, segments and automation rules.
Once installed, FluentCRM gives you a 360° contact overview of your audience: you can import contacts (via CSV or existing WordPress users), tag contacts, assign custom fields, monitor user behaviour (e.g., purchases, course progress, membership status) and segment accordingly. This built-in CRM capability allows you to view each contact’s profile, their interaction history, their membership or e-commerce status, and then act on that data for targeted communication.
For email marketing, the plugin supports unlimited campaigns (broadcasts), scheduling, automation sequences, and advanced segmentation. You can create one-off blasts to targeted segments, or design full automations triggered by user behaviour: e.g., when someone signs up for a form, completes a purchase, finishes a course module, or abandons a cart. The visual automation builder enables you to set triggers, add conditional logic, actions (such as send email, add tag, wait, goal/benchmark) and build user journeys that nurture leads, onboard customers, follow-up after purchase, and re-engage dormant users.
Integration is a major strength: FluentCRM works with dozens of WordPress plugins out of the box — e-commerce systems like WooCommerce, membership and LMS plugins such as LearnDash, LifterLMS, and more — so your site’s native data (purchases, membership levels, course progress, user registrations) can trigger automations and be used for segmentation. You’re not just operating in isolation of email lists, you’re leveraging your site ecosystem. And because the plugin is self-hosted, you avoid the “growth tax” (i.e., paying ever higher fees as contacts or sends increase) that many external email marketing platforms impose.
In setup and usability terms, FluentCRM is designed to be friendly: installation is straightforward via the WordPress repository, the initial setup wizard helps you configure basic settings, and from there you can access dashboards for contacts, campaigns, automations and reports. The system runs its UI in a single-page application style (via VueJS) to minimise performance impact in the WordPress admin. That means even though you’re managing large lists, the plugin itself doesn’t slow down your site significantly. The architecture uses custom database tables to isolate campaign data and avoid bloating your WordPress core tables.
Reporting and analytics are built in: you can see open rates, click rates, campaign revenue attribution, segment performance, automation funnel performance and detailed contact histories. After a campaign is sent, you can follow-up based on behaviour: contacts who opened vs didn’t open, clicked links vs didn’t, purchased vs didn’t — and route them into further automations or actions accordingly.
Pricing is simple and transparent: there’s a free version with core features (unlimited contacts and campaigns), making it a strong offering for small businesses or solo marketers. For advanced features — such as email sequences, A/B testing, advanced segment logic, full integration library — the Pro version comes at a yearly license for one site, 5-site and agency multi-site versions. Because you host the plugin yourself, you’re not charged per contact or per email send — you pay for the license, and scale is determined by your hosting capacity rather than software pricing. The vendor claims that many businesses are already paying multiples of what they’d pay for this plugin if using standard SaaS platforms, so FluentCRM is positioned as cost-effective.
From a marketer’s standpoint, the plugin covers the full funnel: lead capture -> list growth -> segmentation -> broadcast campaigns -> nurture sequences -> automation based on behaviour -> analysis & re-engagement. Because it lives within WordPress, you eliminate the friction of exporting/importing lists, syncing users between systems, or maintaining multiple platforms. Your WordPress database becomes your marketing intelligence hub. For affiliate marketers (as you are, Costas), this means streamlined automation of email campaigns, segmentation of cold vs warm leads, behavioural triggers (e.g., clicked affiliate link -> send sequence), and full control of data and branding.
In practice, for someone running email campaigns for a make-money-online (MMO) niche, you could capture leads via a form plugin, tag them as “cold lead”, send welcome sequence via FluentCRM, monitor link clicks, tag “interested” when they click, then trigger an automation that sends a case-study or affiliate offer at exactly the right time — all without leaving WordPress or relying on a third-party email platform. You maintain ownership of your list, customise segments, and scale without worrying about contact caps.
In summary, FluentCRM – Email Marketing Automation offers an ingenious combination of CRM plus email marketing plus behavioural automation — all self-hosted inside WordPress. It removes the recurring per-contact pricing model, gives you full data control, leverages your WordPress ecosystem, and gives you the tools for a professional email marketing setup: from list building to automation to segmentation to analysis. For marketers, agencies, membership sites, e-commerce stores, LMS site owners or anyone who already works heavily inside WordPress, it’s a compelling solution. The free version gives you a taste; the Pro version unlocks the automation power. If scalability, data ownership, cost-efficiency and integration with your WordPress ecosystem matter to you, FluentCRM delivers.
- Self-hosted solution gives full ownership of list and data.
- Deep WordPress & plugin ecosystem integrations (WooCommerce, LMS, etc.).
- Unlimited contacts/campaigns (no per-contact pricing).
- Powerful behavioural automation with triggers, actions, goals.
- Strong reporting and analytics inside WordPress.
- Cost-effective compared to many SaaS marketing platforms.
- Intuitive UI and built for WordPress users.
- Requires WordPress hosting (so you are responsible for deliverability setup).
- Steeper learning curve if you’re new to automation workflows.
- Free version lacks some advanced features (e.g., full automation sequences, A/B tests) until Pro.
- Doesn’t work off-WordPress (i.e., if you’re not running WP, you’ll need external system).
