About a week or two ago, I left a comment on someone’s blog and almost immediately, I received a “welcome to the blog and thank you for commenting” e-mail from him. It looked like he personally crafted it just for me and it made me feel appreciated.
On occasion, I’ve been known to personally write to some of my commenters, but it seemed like a stretch to write to every single one. Luckily he revealed how he did it (and I didn’t even need to ask).
Matt Keegan has been using a plugin called Comment Relish* which will send the first time commenters on your blog an e-mail.
The plugin is highly customizable; a number of tags available to personalize the e-mail further. And after pondering it a bit, I’m starting to believe simple is better when it comes to these e-mails.
- This is a judgment call, but omit the author’s name to maintain the “personal touch”. Sometimes commenters use an alias in the name field and their name is actually buried somewhere in the comment itself. Responding using the alias can kill the illusion that it was a personally crafted e-mail.
- Invite your commenter back to your blog. This is a great opportunity to solicit feedback from your readers and invite them to participate further on your blog. Make sure to include your blog’s full URL in the message.
- Suggest subscription options. It may be pushing it, but if you do it with a little finesse, you could gain additional subscribers to your blog by suggesting the feed link or newsletter option to your commenter.
- Use a real contact e-mail. You’re opening the doors to communication when you allow your commenters to respond to you. You never know who you’ll meet, which friends you’ll make, and what you may learn that could improve your blog in the long run.
Download it, play with it, and start telling your commenters how you feel about them.
* Be forewarned, there is a risqué advertisement for t-shirts on the website. While the ad is work safe, you may end up doing a double-take. 
Thanks for the mention, Teli. Yes, the ad in question certainly made me wonder what the plug-in author was up to, but I had learned that Comment Relish was being used by other bloggers, so I wasn’t worried about a problem with it.
# June 26th, 2007
Thank you, Matt, for sharing your little secret with us.
Hopefully I didn’t imply that the plugin was questionable with my disclaimer; it certainly isn’t what I meant. I’ve updated it, so I hope that others know the ad on the website may cause a double-take and not the plugin.
~ Teli
# June 26th, 2007
I installed this plugin about a week ago when I heard about it from John Chow’s blog and it is really a great way to further connect with readers.
# June 26th, 2007
Thanks for this great tip, Teli. I’ve just added the plugin to my must-install list.
# June 26th, 2007
Awesome!! What a great plugin.
# June 27th, 2007
Not sure I would like receiving an email like that. I don’t like leaving my email in the first place, so someone actually using it to send me emails makes it even worse.
# June 27th, 2007
Hi Uno,
Out of curiosity, why?
One of the the purposes for providing an e-mail when you comment on a blog is networking and building a relationship with the blogger.
As I mentioned in the article, I occasionally e-mail my commenters personally, especially if they ask a question. You wouldn’t like personal contact of that nature? (Just trying to get a feel for what you’re saying.)
The plugin doesn’t actually add you to a mailing list or anything of that nature. Just offers a friendly welcome and thank you for commenting on the blog. Plus, it’s only a one-time deal.
~ Teli
# June 27th, 2007
I don’t mind a personal email at all, but this plugin does *not* send a personal email. I think (hope) I have enough of a 6th sense to recognize a carefully crafted one email suits all type of reply, and I’d feel fooled if I ever got one.
Especially since it’s a one-off. It means that there is no connection at all with the author of the blog, and on top of that, he/she installed a bot to try and trick you into thinking there is.
Seriously, I’d rather not receive a reply, than a faked personal one. If you want to send an automated reply, make sure it looks like one.
Just my 2 cents of course
P.S. your challenge question robot doesn’t think “Yes I’m human!” is the correct answer
# June 28th, 2007
Ah, thanks so much for weighing in Els. It’s really good to have another perspective on this because I, admittedly, have been quite myopic about it.
But, my question now becomes, what about those authors (*cough* me) who can’t possibly respond to every commenter personally as hard as she may try, but still wants her commenters to know that she appreciates them and wants them to contact her if they need to or come by again and continue to participate?
I guess it boils down to how genuine the blog author is, no? I’d personally get upset if it was just a canned “thanks for stopping by, please come back” e-mail from a noreply adress and no more. But, as witnessed by Matt’s response to me, if the author took a little extra time to make it more personal, it seems like a nice touch.
Now I wonder if others feel that way, too. Thanks for getting this ball rolling, Els. Definitely a good conversation piece.
Oh, and sorry about the challenge question ROFL. Maybe I need to limit the input field to only three characters.
~ Teli
# June 28th, 2007
“…but still wants her commenters to know that she appreciates them and wants them to contact her if they need to or come by again and continue to participate?”
What’s simpler than saying that on the “thank you for your comment” page that comes up after pressing the submit button on the comment form?
Just now I received your automated reply in my inbox, saying my comment really brightened up your day. It reads as if my comment was more appreciated than other comments (which of course is possible
), but knowing that everybody receives the same reply, undermines that sentiment directly.
Perhaps I’m seeing it more as a challenge; when I comment on blogs that have 50 or more comments, and the blog author happens to reply to mine in the comment section, I know I won something - I triggered the attention of the author, made a connection.
I prefer to comment on many blogs and have only one real reply from an author (like I got now on this blog
), than having each blog author send me an appreciation reply which appears personal, but really isn’t.
“I’d personally get upset if it was just a canned “thanks for stopping by, please come back” e-mail from a noreply adress and no more.”
Oh, definitely. I agree that any reply, automated or not, should have a real reply-to address. And it can be a bit more verbose too - by all means mention how much you appreciate comments on your blog - but don’t overdo it, don’t try to make it look like it was a personal message.
A truly personal reply brightens my day - an automated one is okay, but an automated pretend personal one just doesn’t do it for me
# June 28th, 2007
WordPress does not have a “thank you for your comment page” by default. Instead, the commenter is brought back to their comment on the single entry page with a little note about moderation if the comment is in moderation.
I’m sure that one could be finagled, but to me, sending the commenter to an intermittent thank you page interrupts the cycle and conversation. Every time they submit a comment or a reply to a comment, they’d be taken to the same thank you page. That could get annoying after a while.
Now, my next question follows.
How would you know, if I hadn’t mentioned in this post, that it was an automated reply? And just so you know, I love receiving comments and they do brighten up my day, so the response sent to you was definitely accurate. (I was careful not to fib when writing it.)
I’ve set up the plugin on another one of my blogs (which receives a number of comments) and I’ve not yet had a single complaint — just because I haven’t received any doesn’t mean there aren’t any LOL.
However, a few people have responded to my “generated, but well thought out” e-mails letting me know that they’d like to keep in touch with me. A couple even asked me questions and mentioned that they probably wouldn’t have, except the e-mail response made me available to them.
Some people would just assume the blogger’s too busy to deal with their questions on an individual level. Those are the people I want to say “hey, get in touch with me” to because they are the people who help my blog. Make sense?
For those blogs, I’ll keep it activated, however, if it causes too many problems on this one (due to my transparency LOL), I’ll happily deactivate it — no big.
~ Teli
# June 28th, 2007
Easy
Besides the fact that you’re not addressing me personally, and that the content beyond the second paragraph is just too canned to be handwritten, the most important tell-tale sign is that it isn’t a reply to my comment. If someone replies to me personally, I expect them at least to have read what I wrote, otherwise, why make the effort to send a reply?
But isn’t that just true? It’s the reason you’re sending an automated reply instead of a personal one
Yes, that’s the good part of sending a reply. But if you state up front in the email that although it is automated, it’s also really meant so they can contact you personally, and that you would actually like them to, I think you win twice. They are invited to participate, and they can trust you won’t send fake personal replies
And, the stronger the invitation, the more likely they’ll respond.
I don’t think it will cause any problem at all actually
).
Personally I think it’s better to be honest about the fact that it’s automated, but it’s not like a message like it is now would stop me from replying on the blog (as proven!
An afterthought: I think it can be a good thing to use the plugin, but with a different kind of reply. Something that *is* personal, but personal from you, not personal in reply to the commenter. That’s a bit cryptic perhaps, let me illustrate with an example:
“Hi there, thanks for your comment on my blog!
Although this reply is slightly automated (I did write it in person, but my bot sends it out to new commenters all by herself), I would like to let you know that comments on my blog brighten my day.
Please feel free to participate in the comments section on the blog, as well as to send me any notes or questions personally. The reply-to address on this email is really my email address, and I promise to read each and every email that comes in personally, that’s me, not my bot.
Thanks again for your comment, I appreciate it
”
Personal touch, automated, no pretending… perfect?
# June 28th, 2007
Oh, forgot to say: I agree about the extra click that’s needed with a separate thank you page. Some blogs have the thank you message on the same page (through AJAX? no idea), but often enough it’s not really noticeable, and the effect would be lost altogether.
# June 28th, 2007
Okay, I’ll give you the second paragraph, but sometimes I don’t address my commenters personally unless I’m relatively sure they used their real name or an actual nickname.
I don’t feel comfortable addressing anyone by “obviously cool screenname or keyword” on any level, so I tend to leave it out (the same is even true when responding to my comments). That may make some people think it wasn’t personally written, but that’s just how I am.
I also deliberately left out the comment information (which, with this plugin, you can include). I went back and forth with it, but it just seemed like overkill and I usually trim my e-mail responses anyway.
(Are you seeing a pattern here? When I crafted the e-mail, I took a lot of my own habits into consideration.)
Regarding the blogger being too busy for personal attention and your question of whether it’s true or not. Yes and no.
Yes, I am busy. But, no I’m not too busy to get to know my readers. It takes a great deal of time in and of itself to open, address, and respond to the e-mail (even using a canned response) while managing who has already received a personal reply and who hasn’t. Automating the process makes sense.
I like your example. It truly made me smile, however, it isn’t perfect.
I have received responses similar to that and in no case did they make me feel closer to the company or person sending it. In fact, it had the opposite effect. (This is only personal experience, but where there is one….)
In certain situations, I believe it would be a great response, but it may alienate some readers in the same way that receiving a automated response disguised as a personal one would.
For the most part, it needs to be played by ear depending on the audience of the blog in question. Like I said, on one blog it’s working like a charm, so in that case, I’ll leave well enough alone.
The only way to see how it will play out on this one is to watch it over time and as this post drops off the front page. LOL
By the way, those intermittent thank you pages are noticeable. I comment on a number of TypePad and MT blogs which have this “feature” enabled and every time I need to get back to the post and conversation or the blog itself, I need to click the link. This has impeded my commenting on those blogs because I didn’t want to go through the hassle any more after about two responses. But, I guess it’s just a personal thing.
~ Teli
# June 29th, 2007
My 0.02euros go to Els. It may be a cultural thing, but my gut feeling is that I’d prefer the email to be up front that it is auto-generated. Faking it is a turn-off. Some - maybe even the majority - may be fooled, but those who are not can be turned off.
Nothing wrong with saying that you set up the bot because you do want to correspond with people, if they take the time to comment on your blog, and also want to correspond.
Then it’s a perfectly understandable auto-generated invitation to get personal.
# July 3rd, 2007
Teli,
I think this plugin is great to start further conversation with the people who are most likely to return.
Keeping the email short is the key and then one thing I’ve found effective is to ask them to hit “reply” and let you know what else they would like to see you write about.
It’s a fabulous way to pull your readers in for more interaction and thanks to this plugin, you’re able to do that automatically with your most interested readers.
Thanks for sharing this!
Take care.
Stu
# July 15th, 2007
If anyone still thinnks about using this plugin you should get the optimized version I created, especially if you have blogs with a large number of comments…that’s if you don’t want your server to crawl
# July 18th, 2007
This looks like a fantastic plugin … I’ll install this next week and see how it works.
Thanks for the post, Teli!
- Dave
# July 20th, 2007
I personally love the comment relish plugin. I love to show my readers that any voice that they have, counts.
# January 20th, 2008
I Googled “Comment Relish” and I found that this plugin may cause problems with some hosting companies. Some people say that this plugin causes an error in emails because the plugin is not coded well enough for heavily populated shared hosting to be able to cope with.
Just something you might want to keep in mind if your site is hosted on a server with multiple sites.
# February 23rd, 2008
I think this is a great plugin. I just installed it on my new blog, and have been using it on the other blogs I run.
# March 4th, 2008