Make your Comments more Personal

02. Jun 2007 | 15 Comments

Email One of the things I look at quite often is the Comment/Post ratio in the Wordpress Login. Quite often people will leave comments & perhaps never come back to the blog again, which is a bit of a concern. It’s almost like sending traffic to a landing page & not capturing any information.

I found an awesome Wordpress plugin after leaving a comment at Community Spark which allows you to send a customised email message to all new commenters on your blog. Immediately my eyes lit up as I thought aboutthe possibilities.

This allows you to do a number of things which ultimately make the experience for new users to your blog very very welcoming & personal.

It also has a large number of practical applications that allow you to convert visitors to feed subscribers or paying customers:

Greet them with a personal message & thank them for posting on your blog
Point them in the Direction of your RSS Feed
Recommend your favourite products & services
Ask them to sign up to your real mailing list
Direct them to some of your best post

The plugin is called Comment Relish & can be used on ANY type of blog to make money.

Lets look at a random real life example:

Say you run a web hosting blog like the guys over at the Hostican Blog. They could for example include a special discount offer to sign up to Hostican whenever someone comments on the blog. Or include something like “The top ten reasons you should switch to Hostican.” This could be said for any webhost or blog that has a product or service. Imagine physically sending a sales letter to everyone that comments on your blog. This could double your sales.

You could also sell advertising space in the email at a monthly rate.

The possibilities are endless as to how you use it (i’m sure some of you will come up with ingenious ideas), just remember that you’ve now added another potential source of revenue to your arsenal.

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15 Comments on "Make your Comments more Personal"

Robert 02. Jun 2007, 9:50 pm

Did you try it? How are you going to put those links in the email as the plugin doesn’t support HTML tags. So it’s nearly useless IMHO.

daminc 02. Jun 2007, 11:00 pm

err. that’s nice of course..
But where’s the link to that wonderful plugin??

Ryan 02. Jun 2007, 11:57 pm

This sounds like a great plugin. I look forward to seeing the email I get from you and trying it out for myself (if the links appear, that is).

Keep up the good work.

SEO Expert Blog 03. Jun 2007, 5:49 am

People who leave comments may also be very annoyed because they already receive enough mail spam.

SEO Expert Blog 03. Jun 2007, 6:29 am

People can even be more annoyed when they receive the same mail twice and unsubscribe from your feed as a result. At least that’s what I have done. AdiÃ³s

Stuart 03. Jun 2007, 6:37 pm

You shouldn’t get the email twice, the plugin will only send the email to people who haven’t commented before.

daminc, the link is in the post, click on Comment Relish

Jon Waraas 04. Jun 2007, 9:19 am

Jane May has that plugin. I was looking around for it when I got the email from her blog. Thanks for posting it, I added it to my blog

Brendan 04. Jun 2007, 4:31 pm

I tested it out, it sent NINE copies of the email to the gmail account I used for the fake comment. After that the site was unresponsive, so I deleted the plugin off the server.

Julian Paling 05. Jun 2007, 7:44 pm

I agree with “seo expert blog” when he says “People who leave comments may also be very annoyed because they already receive enough mail spam.”

From my point of view i’m leaving a comment no asking to be sent a promotional email.

Sorry but i dont like the idea of it.

Julian.

T&T 06. Jun 2007, 10:35 am

Great Plug in, im using it now! Thanks!

Ash Haque 17. Jun 2007, 8:13 pm

Let’s see how it works

Andrew Tingle 21. Jul 2007, 1:10 am

I can see why people see this as appealing but I have to agree with the above posters in saying that this will, in my opinion, drive people away from sites that use it.

First impressions count – and if this includes getting what is, in essence, an unsolicited email then I suspect many (if not most) readers will take a very dim view.

When I initially saw this I thought it could be useful for many of the reasons you state – but that’s from my perspective as a site owner and from the angle of what it can do for me. Whether such an angle is in the interests of readers is quite another matter, however.

Blogging Experiment 10. Aug 2007, 11:28 pm

It’s a fantastic plugin but a few people (myself included) have run into problems with it crashing our sites or creating a big load for the server to handle. There’s a new “optimized” version that works great for me put out by I think it’s patchlog.com. If anyone has any trouble with the original, you might want to give that version a try.

NaijaEcash 26. Mar 2008, 2:50 am

I actually was searching for this plug-in because I thought it was a nice one to add to my new blog. However, after reading the diferent views aired above, I have decided against it. Readers are easily offended, and often times, they won’t even tell what your offense was. They just go away never to return. I don’t want to do that when I am yet crying for readers.

This is the beauty of blogging. You have an idea that you think is absolutely wonderful, and readers start putting down their own views from other perspectives, before you know it, you have to change your stance, not because you are chicken hearted, because you love your readers.

Thanks for posting about this, it has done me a lot of good. Cheers.