If you haven’t already settled on WordPress, I’d highly recommend Ghost, it’s a great platform and brings a lot of the complexity of WordPress out. It doesn’t need any plugins (meaning you don’t have to worry about outdated plugins getting you hacked) and has allows you to use simple toggle switches to configure mail tracking.
The one thing with Ghost is that you’re currently locked to Mailgun for newsletters. However, the Mailgun free plan[1] offers a generous 1k emails a month. Even if you aren’t going to use Ghost, I still recommend Mailgun because of the free plan.[2]
Technically, the plan requires a credit card to be added to the account. ↩︎
They recently removed the option to select the plan, so you have to get a plan, get charged for that month ($35 USD for smallest plan), than downgrade to the plan. If you’re interested in the process, let me know, I’ll send some instructions. ↩︎