Collecting emails from users is one of the old and popular ways to start building a strong user base around your website. There are multiple ways you can collect emails like subscription form, contact form, newsletter, etc. however, there is one other method available for you which is adding subscription option to your comment submission form. In this article, we will explain how to add comment subscription to WordPress site.
Why You Should Use Comment Subscription?
Comment subscription is a powerful option unlike other subscription methods.
- Generally, users subscribing to comment feed leave very useful question or hint that can be useful for other readers.
- They will get a notification whenever you or some other users respond to that article.
- Large possibilities are there the subscribed users will get back to your site thus increasing the traffic.
- You can also get a potential long term customers starting from comment subscription.
At any case this is good option to try like push notifications and category based subscription widget on the sidebar using custom setup.
How to Add Comment Subscription in WordPress?
The style of your comment form depends on the theme you use. Generally, you should see a comment forum something like below with the options to leave name, email, website URL, message box and a submit button.
Once you decided to add subscription to your comment forum, login to your admin panel. Navigate to “Plugins > Add New” and search for “comment subscribe”.
Click on the “Install Now” button against “Subscribe To Comments Reloaded” plugin and then activate it.
Subscribe To Comments Reloaded Plugin
This plugin offers easy way to add subscription to comment form with the following options:
- Manage subscriptions from admin panel
- Double opt-in with email verification
- Customize email and notification messages
- One click unsubscribe to opt-out
- Disable subscriptions for specific posts
Default Behavior of the Plugin
After activating the plugin, your comment form will have an option to subscribe like below.
When submitting a comment, user can select the checkbox “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail…..”.
Email Subscription with Double Opt-in
Sometimes, user may be interested in reading the latest comments in an article without actually commenting on your site. In this case, instead of subscribing when submitting a comment, users can simply click on the “You can also subscribe without commenting” link. The plugin will show an email subscription box like below.
Users can provide their emails and subscribe to the article’s comment feed without commenting on the article. After submitting the email, the plugin will send a confirmation link to the entered email address. User needs to click on the link and confirm the subscription before getting notifications of the comments.
After verifying the email address, user can get notifications whenever someone leaves a comment on that article. At any point, user can unsubscribe by clicking on the link from the notification email.
Customizing Plugin Settings
After activating, the plugin will work with the default settings to add subscription link and allow users to use email subscription with double opt-in. However, you can go to “StCR > Options” menu and customize the options. There are numerous options with the help button.
You can go through and enable only the needed options. Here are some of the important options available on this section:
- Enable subscription only for blog posts
- Manage admin notifications
- Completely disable or uninstall the plugin
- Add challenge question or reCAPTCHA box
Other Settings
The plugin also offers numerous other settings under different tabs:
- Manage subscriptions – check all your subscribers, activate, delete or manually add users.
- Comment Form – manage the messages shown in the comment form, during pending subscription and manage subscription link. You can also enable the subscription checkbox by default and offer users to subscribe only to replies or for all comments.
- Management Page – the plugin will generate a virtual page to show the opt-in and other messages. You can customize the messages shown under this section or create a real page and show messages on that page.
- Notifications – setup sender email and message notifications content under this section.
- Support – you can report any bugs using the GitHub links available under this section. Remember, this is a completely free plugin and hence you can get support only from WordPress support forum. You can get some help for each option by clicking on the question mark icon showing against it.
Privacy and Security
Remember, many countries require you to get user consent before collecting their emails. By default, WordPress allows you to show the comment consent checkbox to set comment’s author cookie on the browser. This will help the browser to remember the details of the person who is commenting on your site. You can enable this under “Settings > Discussion” section by enabling “Show comments cookies opt-in checkbox, allowing comment author cookies to be set” option.
With this your comment should look something like below:
However, this is not sufficient and you have to describe the data collection and usage procedures in your privacy policy section.
Final Words
As you can see, it will only take few minutes to enable comment subscription on WordPress site using “Subscribe to Comments Reloaded” plugin. Users can also easily subscribe to any particular article’s comment feed with or without commenting. You as an administrator can customize the setup and manage the subscriptions right from the admin panel.
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