For every website, irrespective of the industry, a blog is a powerful magnet that attracts both visitors and search engines. In order to keep your website fresh, you need to regularly treat your audience to new and tasty content.
Among the ways to increase blog engagement is to notify users about new posts. Let’s see how to set up content email notifications on a Drupal website.
Of course, you can always rely on our Drupal development team for setting up notifications on your website according to your requirements at very affordable prices.
A few tips about how to engage readers on a blog
So you have a blog that helps you bring your message across to your prospective customers. How can you increase content engagement? How do you connect with readers better? The tips include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Regularly share your blog on social media and add sharing buttons for your readers to do the same.
- Make sure your website has a comment section so your readers can share their thoughts or ask questions (and get your answers!)
- Insert encouraging questions into your blog content that directly ask your readers’ opinion.
- Never underestimate the power of interesting video content.
- Share your blog on forums, communities, and specialized platforms in various engaging formats like polls, podcasts, contests, slideshows, and so on.
- Don’t forget to increase your website loading speed so your users don’t lose patience while waiting to read your content.
- Be sure to improve your website’s mobile UX so it’s easy and enjoyable to read your blog from any device.
- Email users when a new post is published, or an old one is updated or commented on. This is the subject of the rest of this post.
The role of email notifications in your user engagement
Let’s see more details about the benefits of notifying users about new posts on a website. This increases the chance that they:
- come and read your content
- share it on social media
- register on your website
- subscribe to your newsletter
- become loyal readers
- get involved in a discussion in the comments
- or, most desirably, click your important CTA button
That’s why email notifications, as an important engagement technique, are beneficial for your blog views, popularity, SEO, and conversions. Considering the high open rates of emails, the impact can be very significant.
Opportunities to notify users about new posts on a Drupal website
If your website is built with Drupal, your options for email notifications are very extensive:
- Recipients. You can send new post notifications to subscribers, users, authors, admins, etc. These can be users of specific roles, users from a specific list, or users who have performed specific actions (e.g. commented on a blog post).
- Events. Notify users when content is created, updated, someone posted a comment or replied to it, there are new posts to moderate, etc.
- Form. Send notification messages, full content items, content teasers, full comment threads or just personal replies.
- Time. Send your emails immediately, schedule them to be sent in the future, or unquee them to be processed by Drupal Cron (time-based task scheduler).
- Amount. Notify users about every single event or collect the events into regular newsletters.
Drupal modules for email notifications
Let’s now see how to notify users about a new Drupal blog and other events described above. As usual with Drupal, this can be implemented through a wide array of contributed Drupal modules.
Which is the best Drupal module to send new post notifications to subscribers? Each of them is great in its own way and performs particular functions. Of course, anything that is not covered by them can be added as custom functionality by Drupal development experts.
Comment Notify
Comment Notify is a lightweight module that notifies users by email about replies to their comments and other comment-related events. It is available both in Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. The module has been freshly updated.
One of its important features is the ability to send emails both to authenticated and anonymous users. Anonymous users are a very promising audience in building a blog community. Other features of the module include the option for users to unsubscribe, notifications for admins that they need to moderate a comment, emails for authors about new comments to their blog posts, and much more.
Admin Content Notification
The Admin Content Notification module allows you to notify users by email when new content has been created or updated. It is also available in Drupal 7 and 8.
You can notify website administrators or users of any other roles, as well as users of a specific list. It’s possible to select specific content types, events (whether the content is created or updated), send content nodes via tokens, and much more.
Workbench Email
The Workbench Email module enables you to send email notifications based on content status changes. You can send emails from the admin dashboard about the transitions of content from state to state, for example, when the content moves from “draft” to “needs review.” Its work is based on configurable email templates. The module supports tokens and allows you to select users and content types.
Message Stack
The Message Stack is a complex but very powerful and flexible module that consists of the Message, Message Notify, Message Subscribe, Message Digest, and Message UI submodules. The package has capabilities that will impress any developer because it can do literally anything if used properly. For example:
- defining message types and generating messages
- export of message types
- subscription to events related to content
- plugins for email and SMS notifications
- multilingual support
- Token support
- Rules support
- example modules included
Let us help you notify your users about new posts on your site!
If you are still asking yourself “How can I increase my blog traffic?” try these effective email notification techniques and boost user engagement with the help of our Drupal development company.
We understand the situation is difficult today for many businesses. So we have adopted a cost-effective development approach and now do the work twice as fast. A wealth of contributed modules in Drupal, for email notifications and other purposes, allows us to use minimum customization where it is possible in order to meet the customer requirements. Give it a try!
Contact us to discuss how we can use our development expertise to help your website and business.