Retaining blog readers with email: Subscribe2 and Subscribe-to-comments
If you do stuff with WordPress, then there are two plug-ins you should definitely include in your toolkit: Subscribe2 and Subscribe-to-comments. The bottom line is: despite the advantages, few people use RSS, and few people remember to revisit your site to monitor comment threads and new postings. Email is still king.
Subscribe2 is a pretty fully-featured email subscription tool. You drop a special comment into a post or paste the subscription form into a template and voila: your readers can sign up to receive notifications by email whenever you post something new.
Subscribe-to-comments (confusingly similarly-named) does a different job: it adds a checkbox to your comments form for commenters to receive an email notification when a new comment is added to the thread. Keeping track of the conversation in a comment thread is a bit hit-and-miss: with this plug-in, it’s easier for your readers to monitor and rejoin the thread if they want to.
