Long-time readers and subscribers here will know the love I have for email and commenting solution Postmatic.
From encouraging more thoughtful engagement around blog posts, to making subscribing to email updates frictionless, Postmatic has continued to impress me with each new update.
[Read more…] about Postmatic 2.0 Just Changed Blog Email Subscriptions and Comments Completely
Ask any blogger what their two main wishes are for their blogs, and eight times out of ten* you’ll probably get “more comments” and “more subscribers” as the answer.
*Note – eight times out of ten is not a scientific discovery, although it may be.
Especially for bloggers who thrive on engagement, more comments means more goals met. More comments also have a way of increasing subscribers, because if a reader leaves a comment, it means they’ve enjoyed the piece. If they’ve enjoyed the piece, it stands to reason that they’d want to subscribe to get more of the same content.
So, yeah: comments and subscribers.
The problem is, in recent years, many bloggers have complained (some rightly, some not so much) that blog comments have started to dwindle, as more readers took their discussions to other platforms, more often than not Facebook and Google+.
To counter that, third party comment plugins like Livefyre and Disqus offered workarounds – Livefyre’s SocialSync feature pulled in tweets and Facebook comments, while Disqus allowed you to tag Twitter users.
Then there was Comments Evolved, that allowed you to display comments from Livefyre, Disqus, Facebook, Google+, alongside your native WordPress comments. Unfortunately, while that plugin was useful, it stopped being supported.
However, much like many third party plugins (especially ones that have social network support built in), performance of a blog could be impacted, as Twitter and Facebook API calls slowed down response times.
Add to that the recent announcement by both Livefyre and Disqus that sponsored comments and ads would be appearing alongside “normal comments”, and the negativity these announcements received, the need for a solid native WordPress comment solution continued.
Until Postmatic came along, that is.
While many other plugins offer a “unique” spin on how they approach blog comments, Postmatic actually delivers on that promise.
Instead of having to comment via the web (although that’s still possible – more on that later), Postmatic allows you to get a new post by email, read it, and then comment on that post just by hitting reply to the email you’ve just read.
If you want to try it for yourself, simply leave a comment below this post and see what happens when other comments come in!
It’s so simple, you wonder why no-one has really thought of this sooner (there was a stripped down version of this for Disqus, but it was only for admins).
As well as being simple, it makes perfect sense.
Think about it – where do you spend most of your time during the day? A good bet would say email (perhaps second only to Clash of Clans) – so if you’re spending so much time in email, why wouldn’t you manage all your blog post interactions that way too?
In Postmatic?s own words,
We raise engagement by reaching your audience where they are – in their inbox. Except now with Postmatic, they can comment back and keep the conversation going just by hitting reply.
As a user of Postmatic since February this year, I can 100% agree that engagement levels have increased, as shown by the chart below.
As you can see, in the seven months prior to installing Postmatic, my comment count per month averaged 149 comments per month. In the seven months since implementing Postmatic, that jumps to 312.
That’s more than doubled my average comment count!
My posting schedule over these 14 months has remained pretty consistent (with the exception of one post per month more in May, June and July this year), as did my social shares – so how come Postmatic grew my comments and engagement when other plugins didn’t?
Simple – people felt comfortable commenting on my blog, because there were no extra hoops like social log ins, account creations, passwords, etc., to jump through.
Additionally, because Postmatic enables commenting by email, people could truly post a comment or reply whenever they wanted – at their desk, at the supermarket, at work, even while lazing at the beach having a cold drink (as I did, numerous times, over the summer).
However, as much as Postmatic raises engagement, there’s so much more to them than that.
Postmatic’s goal is simple – to reward bloggers for the love, sweat, time and money they put into their content.
To that end, they’ve created a four pronged approach so bloggers can focus on the specific area(s) they want to improve. While each area can work individually, it’s when you combine them that the magic truly happens.
It’s not just engagement that Postmatic grows. Pretty much every blogger also wants to grow their subscriber numbers, whether that’s via RSS subscribers or – more usually – email subscribers, and Postmatic delivers here too.
While there are a bunch of plugins like Optin Monster and Bloom that can help grow your email subscribers already, Postmatic offers a free alternative called, simply enough, Postmatic Optins.
While not as feature-intense as similar plugins, Postmatic Optins offers four flavours of optin forms: Popup over the page, Slider, Top Bar, and After Content.
Between them, these four options cover the most popular optin forms for email lists (with the exception of Exit Intent, which is scheduled for a future update).
As you can see, they don’t look too shabby either.
Each optin has five basic colour options, to help blend into your theme design better (you can also edit them via CSS). Additionally, the copy is fully customizable and supports HTML, so you can create very customized forms specific to your email list goals.
Not only that, but for the pop up and slider optins, you can choose when these display – after a set amount of time, after the reader scrolls to the end of a post, or after they leave a comment.
While there are only four optins at the moment, they more than cover the needs for the majority of bloggers looking to grow email subscription numbers.
In addition to the Optins, Postmatic also has a pretty cool Import and Invite set-up. The import option allows you to import subscribers from MailChimp, Mailpoet, Jetpack, and Subscribe to Comments Reloaded.
With the invite option, you can invite past commenters, commenters who are subscribed to replies but not posts, email lists and more (Postmatic do a great job of ensuring bloggers don’t abuse this option with clear wording around best practices).
Not only does Postmatic help you grow your subscribers, it also delivers your posts directly to them.
Much like Feedblitz, Feedburner, and Mailpoet’s email delivery service, Postmatic sends out each new post by email to your subscribers. The free version of Postmatic sends the post via the mail service of your web host, while Postmatic Premium uses Mandrill and/or Mailgun, depending on network traffic.
While the free version of Postmatic is more than adequate for email delivery of your posts, it’s when you make the jump to premium that the service really shines.
As well as guaranteeing delivery of your email, the extra features and options available to premium users makes the current $9 per month per site a steal.
However, in addition to the features above, and the comparisons in the image above, the key difference between the free and premium version of Postmatic is how the posts are delivered.
If you’re used to receiving posts from Jetpack or Subscribe2, you’ll know the basic look and feel of these emails. Nothing particularly wrong with them – just that they lack the bells and whistles of other email services (branding, images, etc). This is the same for the free version of Postmatic.
Postmatic Premium, on the other hand, converts your post, with all its formatting, to email-compatible HTML and wraps it in the customized template you’ve created with your own images and widget areas.
The result is a beautiful, uncluttered, content-focused email template ? with the added bonus that your subscribers can leave a comment (and reply to future ones) all from the comfort of that very same email!
As I mentioned earlier in the post, one of Postmatic’s main goals is to grow the engagement around a blog post. As highlighted by the chart showing my own blog’s engagement growth, this is a goal Postmatic are more than delivering on.
Other bloggers that have switched to Postmatic have also shared how it’s helped their own blogs when it comes to comments and engagement.
However, the mindset to comment via email can still be a big one to overcome – after all, we’ve commented via the web for so long, it’s become the only way we know.
While Postmatic quickly becomes second nature once you’ve actually used it, the team behind the plugin also recognize that some commenters will still prefer web commenting, which is why they’ve released Epoch.
Pronounced “epic”, Epoch can best be described as a comment plugin that offers the best features of Disqus – real-time commenting, Ajax loading – while solving some major long-time complaints about native WordPress comments, like page cache support and CDN support, all while remaining SEO-friendly.
Because of the light design of the plugin, it doesn’t eat up resources the same way a Disqus would. Nor should you have any loading issues when trying to post a comment – anyone whose ever seen the little spinning circle of Disqus loading doom will appreciate Epoch’s approach here, especially on mobile.
Since Epoch supports Ajax commenting, every comment left on a post via the web will appear immediately, with no reloading of the page. You can see Epoch in action on this blog – just leave a comment if you’re reading this on the web.
While Epoch is a standalone plugin and can be used on any self-hosted WordPress blog, combining it with Postmatic sees some pretty cool stuff happening.
No matter if you’re commenting on the web, or from your email, every comment is updated in real-time. So, a web user could be leaving a comment, and a new one from an email subscriber could appear on the post – all without disrupting the web commenter.
Oh, and remember the Postmatic Optin option of the Slider or Popup only appearing after a comment has been left? If the blogger has Epoch activated, it will fill out the name and email part of the form, and the reader only has to click the subscribe button – how’s that for frictionless subscriber growth?
Epoch has three style settings when it comes to the look and feel of the comments on your site.
To help you choose which one is best for you, the plugin’s settings asks how much you’d like Epoch to take over that look and feel – “Completely”, “Use my typography and colours”, and “Minimally”.
My own preference is for using my own typography, as per the image above, but I also use the Completely option on other sites, and it’s an excellent alternative for anyone that prefers the Disqus approach to styling.
Epoch recently came out of beta, but already it’s shaping up to be an excellent commenting option, and one that promises to make blog comments more fun and less complicated again – which is no bad thing at all.
The last part of Postmatic’s four tiered approach to helping bloggers meet their goals is the question of value.
When you think of the word value, and its use around a blog, what do you think of?
All of these, and more, are actually the definition of value when it comes to a blog. Think about it – you read/subscribe to a blog because of the value in the content, and the expertise that blogger brings.
You’re also happy to support that blogger through affiliate links, because of the value the blogger brings in recommending only products that would be valuable to you.
As a blogger, you might feel that the readership and engaged community you have built trust with is an ideal one to help you become a trusted partner for brands looking to do right by their customers.
All of these goals can be met by Postmatic.
These are just some of the ways value can be built via Postmatic.
Additionally, they recently announced the support for Skimlinks in Postmatic emails.
Skimlinks is a pretty slick way of working with affiliate links.
Skimlinks work from within Postmatic emails so tracking affiliate sales happens both on the web and in the inbox.
Now when you send an email out, the Skimlinks aren’t just restricted to your website. Couple this with some other vendors Postmatic are hoping to announce soon, and you should be starting to see why Postmatic is a developer to sit up and take notice of.
Uh, why have you read this far is you’re not interested?? 😉
Seriously, though, I can’t recommend Postmatic enough. I’ve tried pretty much every comment system around – Livefyre, Disqus, wpDiscuz, G+, Jetpack, Echo, IntenseDebate, etc., and Postmatic beats them all hands down (especially now they have Epoch).
Their Optins make it easy to grow subscribers, without the extra cost of other, more popular plugins.
Their support is second-to-none (seriously), and their willingness to listen to their users (and the readers of their users), to add new features and support for other plugins, is something all WordPress developers should take notes from.
Are they perfect? Not quite (but they’re close).
Postmatic keeps the features focused and the experience tight, with a major focus on getting people talking about your content, which means they don’t charge hundreds of dollars for the service like others do.
While the free version is fine, ask yourself this – if you could meet your goals as a blogger when it comes to subscribers, comments, brand partnerships, affiliate sales, membership site opportunities and more, would you be willing to spend just $9 per month for that?
I know I would. And did. And I haven’t looked back since.
A version of this post originally appeared on WPKUBE.
Regular readers and subscribers to this blog will know of the praise I’ve been putting the way of email commenting solution Postmatic in recent months.
Not only does the solution work seamlessly, it does exactly what it says on the tin – encourage blog commenting, comment interaction, and increased engagement. And it does it all in a snazzy email template that looks great on both desktop and mobile.
So enamoured have I been with the difference Postmatic has made not just to this blog, but to my overall blogging enjoyment too, I’ve decided to make the full switch over to a Postmatic-powered blog (at least as far as email and commenting is concerned).
Given I currently run a weekly newsletter with MailPoet, this is going to mean some changes. Here’s what they are, and what they mean for you.
If you’re an active subscriber to my weekly newsletter, you don’t need to do anything – you’ve already been moved over. However, this is only if you’re an active subscriber – so, you opened or clicked one of my newsletter emails.
If you didn’t do any of that, an email invite went out yesterday to advise of the change, and how to subscribe to the new format.
* Note – due to a glitch between MailPoet and Postmatic, several of you may have received multiple invites. My sincere apologies, and the Postmatic team is looking into what happened.
If you wish to continue receiving my posts, but now as soon as they’re published as opposed to a weekly digest, you’ll just need to reply with “agree” in your email and Postmatic will do the rest. If you don’t wish to change over, simply ignore the email and job done, subscription over. 🙂
The last newsletter will go out this coming Sunday, June 21, with an update on the new set-up.
Lucky you – you don’t have to do squat! 😉
Because Postmatic is an email-based delivery and commenting solution, my move won’t affect your RSS subscription. You can continue to get the posts you like via your chosen feed reader, or Feedly, since these are handled by my RSS provider, Feedio.
Of course, if you did want to get email delivery instead of RSS curation, then the next section is for you.
Because I’m moving from MailPoet to Postmatic, this means my email list details need to change. So, from this post on, anyone that uses the email subscription box at the end of each post will be added to my Postmatic email service.
This means any new posts I publish will be emailed straight to your Inbox, and then that’s when the fun really begins.
Because Postmatic not only delivers my posts to you by email, but also allows commenting by email, you never need to leave your Inbox again (at least for this blog).
Here’s what’ll happen:
The real beauty of Postmatic is that you, the reader/subscriber/commenter, are fully in control of what comes into your Inbox.
Don’t worry, Postmatic reiterates these points with an introduction email when you sign up to my blog via email.?It’s a very elegant way of ensuring your Inbox doesn’t get clogged with multiple emails from the same blog post.
So there you have it. As of this post, all future posts will be delivered by Postmatic. There are also some cool features coming down the line to make your experience an even better one, so stay tuned.
Thank you for being with me this far, and I look forward to seeing you in the comments in posts to come!
It takes a lot for me to be completely won over by a new product out of the gate, never mind make me a staunch supporter of it from that very same gate.
Usually, I’ll find a bunch of things I don’t like, and use that as an excuse to look for another solution, or one that does the stuff the one I’m looking at doesn’t.
Now and again, though, the actions of the developers or creators of a product make you forget what’s missing, and instead make you focus on the very cool stuff that’s included in the current version.
That’s exactly what happened with the Postmatic WordPress plugin that enables blog comments by email. And now, I really can’t see myself using any other option.
When Jason Lemieux, the co-founder of Postmatic, first reached out to me about his product (I think it was on Twitter), I’ll be honest, I didn’t really have the time or inclination to check out another plug-in.
For one, I was tired of content and commenting. Not so much content and commenting itself, but the myriad of commenting systems I’d already tried out and had left for various reasons.
Livefyre, Disqus, Inline Comments, Google+ Comments. All with their strengths, all with various reasons to go with one over the other, and all with the same problem – they don’t play well with each other when it comes to leaving a comment.
You want to leave a Livefyre comment, you need to create a Livefyre account or sign-in with social log-ins (unless the blogger allows guest commenting). Same with Disqus.
You want to leave an Inline Comment, the reader needs to be aware Inline Comments are actually available. Since comment bubbles only appear after a comment is left (unless you want intrusive comment boxes after every single sentence), Inline Comments are invariably missed by readers.
You want to leave a Google+ comment, you need a Google+ account. Not only that, but the notification system is poor, since you don’t know people have commented on your content unless you’re tagged in that comment. You can imagine some of the stuff that could appear on your blog with that in mind.
So, four comment systems, four reasons to sigh. So, yeah, when Jason reached out, I initially wasn’t interested.
But, fair play to him, he didn’t give up, and reached back out at a time when I was ready to look at commenting options again, especially given how I want to turn this blog into a very personal destination, where conversations are the driver of the content as much as being the other way round.
And I’m glad he did, because Postmatic has made commenting fun again, and reminded me of what it used to be like when blogs were the hub of conversation, versus the multiple social channels that blogs fight for attention with.
So, you should be getting the gist that I’m a fan of Postmatic, even in its early form (the product is just coming out of beta). Given that there are alternatives to the commenting solutions mentioned earlier, why the big love for Postmatic in particular?
Simple – it’s made by WordPress lovers for WordPress lovers. Specifically, WordPress blog comment lovers (although it does a good job with email delivery too).
Because my whole mantra with this blog has always been about the conversation, and for everyone to have the same voice when it comes to commenting and sharing ideas, Postmatic’s main goal strikes a chord with me.
Engaging in meaningful, timely conversation online is out of reach for too many people, especially in the blogosphere. We have created blogs for so many organizations that publish thought-provoking and essential content, but it often goes overlooked and under-discussed. Last spring we started thinking about how to change that. And so it is that we made Postmatic.
Jason Lemieux
Based on what I’ve seen on my own blog since initially installing Postmatic, and from comments of others I’ve recommended Postmatic to, the team behind the plug-in are well on their way to meeting that goal, and more.
As I mentioned in my initial post back in February, it takes a little getting used to, to not only reply to a blog post by email, but to leave a comment, and continue leaving comments, by email too.
Ever since blog commenting became more open source, we’ve needed to jump back to a post to leave a comment, and then sign up for notifications if we wanted to know if anyone replied to us. That kind of behaviour is ingrained in us.
So, flipping the mindset to commenting via email takes a little leap of faith – but the benefit to us, as bloggers and commenters, is worth it.
Especially with the new features from the recently public version.
While Postmatic’s methodology is sending a blog post out by email, then inviting people to leave a comment by simply hitting “Reply” to that email, it feels like it’s more than that simple premise.
Probably because it is more than that, intentionally or otherwise. When chatting with Jason about some ideas regarding future additions to the plug-in, I mentioned that I see Postmatic more as an engagement optimizer than a simple comment plug-in.
Because that’s exactly what Postmatic does – it not only encourages more comments and engagement by removing the technology barrier to leaving comments, it optimizes how that looks and feels for both commenter and blogger.
Since my initial look at Postmatic in February, the team behind it have added a whole slew of features to ensure a seamless and, more importantly, user-friendly experience for reader and blogger alike.
As long as you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, and you use native comments (or even wpDisquz, which supports Postmatic integration), you can get Postmatic set up in minutes.
Because Postmatic uses email to reply to, and receive, new comments, your existing native WordPress comment styling isn’t touched. All that changes is you have a little box below the comments to sign up for Postmatic comment replies, and you’re good to go.
If you currently use another solution (like Livefyre, or Disqus), and you decide to switch back to that from Postmatic, your comments are there ready to import back into that platform. Try that the other way round, without getting some weird leftover Livefyre or Disqus styling in return.
Run any blog with comments activated, and you’re going to come up against comment spam. It’s the bane of every comment system, even with the various filtering, moderation and blocking features around to combat it.
Postmatic makes it really easy to moderate via email, even when on the go. As a moderator, you can use “Approve”, “Trash” or “Spam” as a reply to a comment notification and Postmatic takes care of the rest.
Again, a bonus if you don’t have time to jump into your WordPress dashboard (or third party comment system admin area) to quickly moderate spammy or abusive comments.
While the free version of Postmatic offers a perfectly functional email notification system, it’s when you jump up to the premium version that the design really kicks up a notch.
Using the Postmatic Premium template, you can add your own header, end of email widgets (for promotional banners, email sign-up, or anything else you’d normally put in a WordPress widget), and footer template.
This lets you have a branded email and comment reply notification that is immediately recognizable as yours – and it’s all responsive, so will look good on any display.
When I wrote about Postmatic in February, the post ended up getting over 200 comments. 100 of these came within the first couple of hours of the post going live.
Now, while this is great for engagement, you can imagine what that must look like for someone’s Inbox, especially if you leave the conversation for the day, then come back to your email in the morning only to see your email clogged with comment notifications.
Enter Postmatic’s notification throttling, one of the new features that a lot of early users of Postmatic – probably commenters more than bloggers – have been asking for, and a great addition to make the user experience even more enjoyable.
If a post gets more than six comments in an hour, Postmatic will pause notifications and instead send out an email that advises the post discussion is taking off. The post commenter/subscriber then gets an option to leave it on pause and resubscribe to the conversation at a later time, or rejoin there and then.
It’s a slick implementation that puts full control into the commenter’s hands – if you rejoin, you know what you might be getting yourself into. If you no longer want notifications, you won’t get them.
I mentioned earlier that I see Postmatic as more of an engagement optimizer than a commenting solution, and their “past commenter invitation” option is part of that.
When you switch Postmatic on, you have the option of sending an email out to people who have commented on your blog before, but may have dropped off the radar.
You can send a personalized invite out to those folks, advising of your switch to Postmatic and inviting them back to the conversation, with the promise of never contacting them again if they don’t reply (click to expand).
It’s a great way to reach out to members of your community that may have slipped out of sight. This also lends itself to migrating your existing email list subscribers, if you also want to use Postmatic to deliver your content.
Instead of sending a blast email out to everyone, Postmatic determines those that have taken an active action in a certain timescale on your existing list – click, open, forward, etc, – and only sends an invite out to those people.
It’s another way of showing respect to subscribers, and keeping spam out of the inboxes of email users.
These are just some of the new features that Postmatic is offering, now they’ve moved out of beta. There’s also:
I’ve also been fortunate to have a look at what Jason and the team have coming down the line in the next few weeks and months when it comes to even deeper integration between comments, blogger and readers, and they’re pretty damn exciting.
With all that being said, Postmatic isn’t perfect – yet. Some of the core things I’d really like to see are:
In the grand scheme of things – with perhaps the exception of the analytics – these are minor quibbles in what is otherwise an awesome plug-in and experience.
And, to be fair, Postmatic isn’t positioning itself as a replacement for the Mailchimps and the Awebers of the world – yet. Instead, they want to make the process of blog post to email to reader to comment-by-email to ongoing engagement as smooth as possible.
In that regard, they’ve succeeded in spades.
While Postmatic doesn’t offer analytics for comments, etc., at the moment, there are other options out there that you can install, if you want to track the change pre-Postmatic and post-implementation.
One of these is Graphical Admin Report, that shows you behind the scenes statistics about growth of your blog, including comments. Using this, I ran a comparison of my own blog’s comment count for the six months between November 1 last year, and April 28.
The first three months – November, December and January – are all pre-Postmatic. The last three months – February, March and April – cover the period since I switched Postmatic on.
Despite the plug-in doing a weird right-to-left comparison, you can see for yourself how effective Postmatic has been at increasing comments and, by association, engagement on my blog.
Even the lowest of the comment count for Postmatic (for this month) is still more than the highest comment month in the previous quarter (November).
This rise in engagement seems to be happening elsewhere, too, once Postmatic is installed. A couple of bloggers I introduced to Postmatic, Jens-Petter Berget and The Jack B, have seen an increase in comment numbers since installing, and are good examples of the way Postmatic can increase engagement when introduced properly.
Because it is a mindset change, as well as a change in behaviour, and as humans we’re often not good at that – a good introduction by the blogger helps ease readers into the change.
Wrap your head around it though, and email commenting makes so much sense.
We already do it, anyway – if we use Livefyre, Disqus, Jetpack or native comments, we get an email notification telling us of a new comment or reply. And we still have to jump through another hoop to comment. Postmatic removes that hoop and leaves you to spend that time more effectively.
As the title of my post says, when it comes to WordPress blog comments, it’s the only solution I’ll use on my blog moving forward.
For a blogger that cares about engagement and true interaction with his readers, that’s the highest possible endorsement I can give.
You can check out Postmatic, and get a free two week trial of the Premium option, here.
So a year or so ago – January 11, to be precise – I published a piece on this blog about some of the changes that I was going to be making.
I’d been experimenting with podcasting for a few months leading up to the post, and had really enjoyed the experience.
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