In the autumn of last year a funny thing happened. Jeff Chandler, editor at WordPress Tavern, approached us to ask what we could do to fix their commenting woes. We weren't sure what to think, but the words heck yes definitely came to mind.
Category: Updates
Why users are afraid to subscribe to comments (and what we are doing about it)
Comments are the foundation of engagement on WordPress sites. They are a small but important piece of a larger story - one we are rewriting with Postmatic.
Postmatic 2 redefines WordPress comments and blog subscriptions
We launched Postmatic 1 year ago. It has proved that people still love email and that blog engagement is more important than ever. Since then we have since been listening, learning and refining. Most importantly we have been completely rethinking conversations in WordPress and honing our tools for publishers of all sizes.
Let’s look at the big features and ideas
Digests for frequent publishers
We’ve grown our content delivery service to be a perfect fit for publications that are publishing even dozens of times a day. Postmatic Digests lets you configure daily, weekly, or monthly automatic newsletters of new site content. Include featured images, top comments, widgets, and more. Offbeat Bride has been using digests for a few months now and had this to say:
I’d been using MailChimp for my RSS newsletter for years, and due to its design limitations with RSS content, it was starting to feel like a costly embarrassment. Right out of the box, Postmatic’s digests look clean and modern — I could never get my MailChimp RSS newsletters looking anything more than barely cobbled together.
Redefining comment notifications with Comment Intelligence
We began by asking the question should we really be sending all comments? The answer was an obvious no. So we had to decide what makes a good comment? If we could come up with a system for automatically identifying only the best comments in a conversation we could hold back anything that wasn’t adding value or moving the dialogue forward. So we did. And we call it Comment Intelligence. Say goodbye to nice post, dude.
Comment Intelligence is good for limiting email, but it can also help you bring the conversation above the fold for better engagement. Check it out over on Danny Brown.
Scaling email commenting to 1,000 comments per post
Postmatic will automatically throttle comment notifications depending on how active a post is. When appropriate, new comments are emailed immediately. Otherwise they are saved up for a daily recap. Now we’re a perfect fit even for active communities like Elegant Themes.
Smart templates which adapt to your theme
Wrap your posts, digests, or comments in a template that automatically adapts to match the colors and typography of your theme as well as the content within. Our digest templates even adjust their layout depending on number of posts and what sort of images are available. Have a look.
Send perfect post content… or something else entirely
Postmatic Precheck analyzes your post content before you hit publish. If there is any content which may not hold up well in email, we’ll let you know. You can then fine tune the emailed version before it gets mailed. Or, make the emailed version completely different than the web. It’s up to you. A handy addition for the page-builder lovers out there.
Integration with 500+ other apps
You can now send Postmatic subscribers to 500+ other applications and services. Things like MailChimp, Google Sheets, Infusionsoft, Salesforce and Drip.
Our Zapier integration uses Webhooks to send subscribe and unsubscribe notifications to the application of your choice.
Less email, more smarts
If there was one theme to define Postmatic 2 it would be less is more. Postmatic 1 proved two-way email was possible in WordPress. We have listened to every pain point, revised every feature, and rethought what it means to make conversations happen on your site. We hope you love Postmatic 2 as much as we do.
Sneak Peek at Postmatic 2: Digests
This will be the final post in the series previewing features and technologies coming in Postmatic 2.
The final big reveal is Postmatic Digests
Digests let you send a periodic summaries of all posts published during a set time period. An example would be a weekly digest of all your content.
It’s been done before, but never like this:
Email marketing solutions like MailChimp or AWeber have had digest functionality for a few years now. They work by scraping your RSS feed, parsing it, and spitting the results out in a relatively bland template. A friend and early beta tester of Postmatic 2 put it this way:
I’d been using Mailchimp for my RSS newsletter for years, and due to its design limitations with RSS content, it was starting to feel like a costly embarrassment. Right out of the box, Postmatic’s RSS digests look clean and modern — I could never get my MailChimp RSS newsletters looking anything more than barely cobbled together.
Ariel Meadow Stallings | Offbeat Empire
Postmatic has an advantage: we are native to WordPress. That means we have access to your full posts, images, author bio info, comments, and the general pulse of your community.
How it works
Setting it up
You start by giving your digest a name. That’s pretty simple. Just below the name box is a wysiwyg area which lets you enter any content you want.
You can even use it to make your digest be quite a bit like a newsletter. If you have your digest scheduled for Sunday night, log in on Saturday to write a quick recap of the week. It supports shortcodes and widgets as well. Add a video, and RSS feed, or anything you want.
Choose from 5 amazing layouts
We are very proud to say that our automated digests are hands-down the best looking solution available to publishers. We build templates which are responsive not only when viewed on a variety of devices, but which also automatically adapt to your weekly content. No featured image on a post? No problem. Only two posts this week? We’ve got it covered.
The templates also of course adopt typography and colors from your active theme. Add in widgets in both the header and footer, and the sky’s the limit.
It’s the little details
Each template pulls in different kinds of information from your WordPress database. Some are more suited for news sites which may have a variety of authors and heavily use categories. Others are geared toward chatty communities. One feature they all share which we are particularly proud of is the comment context feature:
For each post which has comments we display not just the number of comments, but also highlight important community members involved in the conversation. This does a lot for getting more people engaged in the comments.
Add to my inbox. Awesome.
This is a special feature for those of us who live in our inbox. If enabled, each post within a digest will have a special little link that says Add to my inbox. Clicking that will package up the entire post along with all comments and mail them to the subscriber instantly. They can then read through the whole post and reply to each comment they’d like to. It’s a great way to read through a digest, pick the stories you like, and have them all queued up for reading later. During our beta tests I’ve quite fallen in love with it.
Choose a subject line. Keep it simple. Or make it smart.
Next you choose a subject line. There are two options:
- Name and date (Acme Daily Digest | May 11, 2016)
- Smart subjects based on post activity (How to Catch a Roadrunner + 3 more posts from Acme Daily Digest)
The smart subjects are particularly cool. They are automatically generated based on which post from the digest period has seen the most traction and popularity.
Set a schedule and off you go
Finally, you choose a schedule. First you decide how many days should go by between digests being mailed out. A daily digest would be 1. A weekly digest would be 7.
When the digest is mailed Postmatic will grab all of the posts that have happened in the last X days and package them up for mailing.
The last step is to choose when to start sending your first digest. There is a nifty calendar picker. Set it and you’re done.
A video
I put together a video demonstration a few weeks back for a beta tester. It’s not production quality but still worth sharing. Have a look if you want to see how things actually work. You can see the video here.
A pile of gratitude
I’ll say it again. I love the team here at Postmatic. So many thanks to both Ankur and Dylan for making this happen. Digests was the #1 feature request for Postmatic 2. They both worked tirelessly to make it happen. It was a huge amount of work but very much worth it. We hope you love it.
Sneak Peek at Postmatic 2: Comment Intelligence
A few months back I got three comment notification emails on a post I had subscribed to. The first was a :) . The second a :P . The third was a ;) . That is three different emails. Each showing just an emoji. Argh.
I felt horrible. And annoyed. Horrible because our software had just sent about 30 emails (if you count the other subscribers) with nothing in them but smiley faces. Annoyed because opening and trashing those emails was a waste of my time.
Postmatic 2 has a huge focus on reducing the amount of email sent to your subscribers. We aim to create a system in which a ton of information is being exchanged. But only the important bits get delivered, and only to the right people.
Sneak Peek at Postmatic 2: Improving Email Content
Sending posts by email is tricky. When you compose and publish a post Postmatic does a ton of work behind the scenes to convert the markup and assets (images, embeds, shortcodes) into an email-friendly format.
What constitutes a post is getting blurrier as WordPress evolves. Page builders have become more prevalent and the number of plugins that affect post markup is on the rise. We see more and more posts coming through our system which are full of the familiar this content is not compatible with your email client message.
We have a plan to fix that in two different ways.
Sneak Peek at Postmatic 2: Flood Control 2 for less email
There have been two primary complaints from the email haters since Postmatic 1 was launched.
The first is that high frequency publishers don't want to send posts multiple times a day. We'll get to that one soon. You're going to love it.
The second is that comment notifications can get overwhelming on active posts. Every time someone adds a new post an email is sent to any subscribers. We addressed this early on with the introduction of Flood Control in Postmatic 1. What it did was simple and effective enough. If there were more than 6 comments in an hour we would pause notifications and shoot everyone an email telling them as much.
The problem of course was that in hour one there could be 5 comments, and another 4 in hour two, and 5 again in hour three. That's 12 emails waiting for you in the morning. We're fixing that in the upcoming Postmatic 2.