How to Get Engaged Visitors to Take an Extra Step

As website owners our whole objective is to get visitors to engage with our websites. But one of the biggest engagements possible on our sites is almost always overlooked...

When a visitor leaves a comment on your website, they're raising their hand as an invested member of your audience. When you think about the effort involved in a leaving a comment, it's a little heartbreaking that all you can do with such an engaged visitor is send them a 'your comment is awaiting moderation' message.

So how do you zone in on those invested members of your audience, using their hand raise as a chance to move them along the path to a conversion?

With Thrive Comments Post-Comment Actions, you can completely customize what happens after a visitor leaves a comment, opening up a world of opportunities to take advantage of engaged visitors.

Below are just some suggestions of what you could do based on the goals of your site.

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To set up a simple coupon code, you just need to add a message and the code into the 'Custom Message' Post-Comment Action.

To further personalize your message, your can add the commenter's name to your message by using the {commenter_name} placeholder.

We've left it simple by using a single text based coupon code. If you want to protect your discount from abuse or reuse, you can set the code to one use per account, or use a coupon code generator. It depends on the cart system you're using. If the coupon code generator has an embed code, you can use it in the thank you message.

Blow your first time commenters away by redirecting them to a page filled with goodies. If your goal is to build a connection with your audience, you can just give out a bunch of free resources. If you're after email addresses, you can offer the goodies in exchange for their details.

Either way, this is a perfect opportunity to get your audience on board with your brand. Make sure to include a mini 'About Us' section, and any getting started content. 

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First you need to create you welcome page filled with valuable, fan building content. Once that's live, go back to Thrive Comments and set your Post-Comment Action to 'Redirect URL'.

Make sure your in the first time commenter actions.

From here, just paste the URL of your welcome page into the Redirect URL field.

Get invaluable audience insights and content ideas by asking engaged visitors more questions. Right after a visitor has left a comment is an ideal time to keep them talking. They're already in contribution mode.

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First, set up a new Google Form within your Google Drive (by clicking New then Google Form), and add the questions you want to include. Click on Send to get access to the Embed HTML for the form. with this code you can add a Google Form anywhere that allows HTML.

Adjust the width setting to 700px, and play with the height settings based on the length of your survey. We found 700px worked best for the survey above. These height and width settings tell Google Forms how big to make the survey.

Copy the final code and paste it into your Thrive Comments custom message window.

You'll notice we recommend this method only for repeat commenters. This is a great secondary goal for your comments, but it's worth taking advantage of one of the more active conversion focused methods for first time commenters. 

Pro Tip: To add all the responses to an easy to skim Google Spreadsheet, go into the responses tab when you're creating your Google Form. Click on the spreadsheet icon to name and save your responses spreadsheet. 

Gamification involves pulling elements of what makes computer games so addictive and adding them into non-gaming environments to encourage the same addictive involvement.

One element of gamification is unlocking achievements. That's why Thrive Comments has badges that are awarded to your commenters based on criteria that you set. You can award badges based on number of approved comments, approved replies, featured comments or upvotes received.

You can use the badges provided, or upload your own designs.

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The key to spurring engagement with this method is letting your commenters know there are achievements to be unlocked. And what better place to do this than in the post-comment thank you message.

It's important that you let your commenters know what they need to do to unlock the achievements (comment more, get more upvotes etc.). You're essentially letting them know how to play the game.

If you want to get really fancy you can show them what they'll get. If you're using custom badges, you can add them to your Thank You message using a little snippet of HTML.

First you'll need to go into your media library and get the URL of the badge you want to show. Then add the URL to this little line of code:

<img src="image URL" alt="image description">

The 'alt=' section is just alternative text in case the image doesn't load.

Fill in the green sections then paste the code where you want to image to show up in your thank you message. That's it.

Let's take raving-fan-generating machine Pat Flynn as an example. He's an expert at mixing personality into a brand, leading to an incredibly loyal fan base. Ask any one of his true fans and they'll be able to tell you that he's a huge Star Wars fan, and that his favorite movie is Back to the Future.

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Giphy is a GIF library, filled with ridiculous, creative, viral and hilarious moving images. They have a handy embed option, which means all you need to do is copy/paste a code and you can have the GIF on your website. 

Make sure you leave response OFF when using with Thrive Comments.

All you need to do search for a GIF, copy the embed code of the one you've chosen, and add that to the 'Custom Message' Post-Comment Action in Thrive Comments. You can add extra text if you like, or just leave it as a simple GIF.

Keep engaged visitors on your site reading more of your content, by showing them a list of other interesting articles right after they comment.

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This one's pretty simple. Select the 'Related Posts' Post-Comment Action, add a message if you want, and you're set!

If you're trying to build your audience on other networks, such as YouTube, you can give your channel a shout out in your post comment message. 

In an effort to make joining as easy as possible for your commenter, we'll show you how to create an auto subscribe button within your thank you message. All the commenter has to do is click and confirm their new subscription.

You can give joining prompts for other networks also, such as an Instagram account or Facebook group. 

We only recommend this for repeat commenters, since first time commenters should be prompted to join a channel you own instead, such as an email list. 

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To create an auto subscribe button for your YouTube channel, first go to your channel and copy your channel ID.

Copy the section of the URL between 'channel/' and '?view', so for example for Thrive Themes, it's the section in green: 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo5kj-2YFOG0BAjYLFVaoMA?view_as=subscriber

Once you've got your Channel ID, go to this Google Developers page and enter your Channel ID, set the layout to full and copy the code.

Add the code to the 'Custom Message' Post-Comment Action within Thrive Comments, along with a message asking them to subscribe.

If the goal of your site is to make money through affiliate links, why not put these links in front of your most engaged visitors? You can link to a single tool, or redirect them to an entire page full of affiliate back resources. 

While you can use a 'Redirect URL' or 'Opt-In Form' Post-Comment Action for this, we recommend adding a simple link in a 'Custom Message' Action. This is to avoid annoying your commenters each time they leave a comment.

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*Update: You no longer have to use code to add a link to your thank you message. Just click the link icon on the bottom right of the thank you message window to insert a link into your text.

Here's the message we used, feel free to copy / paste:

"Thanks for your comment! I’ll be shooting you a reply very soon. Hey, while I’ve got you here, have you seen my tool list yet? It’s a list of everything I built this very site with, complete with tutorials on how you can use the tools for your own site. Check it out: *add link to your tool list here"

Time to get into the game changers!

If you have Thrive Leads, you can open a ThriveBox lightbox after a commenter submits a comment. The cool thing about this is the commenters name and email are pre-filled from their comment details. All they have to do to subscribe is hit the button.

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First head to Thrive Leads and create a new ThriveBox. In the ThriveBox, offer something special to your first time commenters such as a free PDF guide.

Once your ThriveBox is all set up head back to Thrive Comments and select the 'Opt-In Form' Post-Comment Action.

Select the ThriveBox you just created from the drop down. And done!

Another great use of the ThriveBox option is to get more attendees to your webinars. A live webinar will allow you to build your list and gently present offers to an engaged part of your audience, all while providing value. 

If you don't know how too set up a live webinar, take a look at this Thrive University course.

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Create a new ThriveBox in Thrive Leads and set up you webinar invite ThriveBox. Make sure to include a countdown timer element to increase scarcity. Connect the lead generation element to your webinar software, and to your email service provider (or just your email service provider if you're using the free method above).

Once your webinar invite ThriveBox is complete, go to Thrive Comments, select the 'Opt-In Form' Post-Comment Action and choose the webinar invite ThriveBox from the drop down.

A quick, fun and easy way to get some valuable audience insights is to ask your commenters to take a quick quiz.

If you're wondering how this is different to the Google Forms survey method above:

• A Google Form survey is more suitable for open ended questions with a mix of text and multiple choice answers. The information takes longer to interpret because you end up with a spreadsheet full of raw responses.
• A Thrive Quiz Builder quiz is a quicker, more user friendly way of asking questions because it only involves multiple choice answers and has a more pleasant flow. The responses can be easily interpreted with percentages, and represented visually with graphs (as you'll see below).

Reporting inside Thrive Quiz Builder.

We've got this as a first time commenter method because you don't want to be pestering repeat commenters with a lightbox for a quiz they've already taken.

But again, audience insights isn't the most important goal of most websites, so for this method I'd recommend using it for repeat commenters temporarily instead. Run the quiz for a week or two, until you have enough responses, then go back to your usual Post-Comment Action.

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First you'll need to create a new quiz within Thrive Quiz Builder. Add any questions you want, and leave the results page simple with a generic 'Thank's for taking the quiz' message. The end results aren't really important with this kind of quiz, you're just after the individual question responses.

Once your quiz is built, head to Thrive Leads and create a new ThriveBox.

Make sure to set the width of the ThriveBox to 900px rather than the default 650px. This allows the quiz element to take up it's normal width.

To change the width of a ThriveBox, select the 'Thrive Leads Element' in the breadcrumbs then change the max width in the Layout & Position drop down.

From here you just need to drag a Thrive Quiz Builder element into the ThriveBox and select the quiz you created earlier.

The final step is to go to Thrive Comments and select 'Opt-In Form' as your Post-Comment Action, then choose the ThriveBox you just created.

If you're in an industry where the value of each new warm lead is very high, such as real estate, it's worth getting engaged visitors on the phone ASAP.

Since leaving a comment on your site is pretty much as engaged as a visitor can be, it's the perfect time to ask them to take this step.

In this method, we're using Thrive Ovation to capture and keep up with new lead details, but you can also use your own CRM system (provided they offer embed HTML contact forms) or even Google Forms.

The benefit of using Thrive Ovation is you can use the back-end to keep up with the state of new leads.

The back-end of Thrive Ovation, using tags to keep up with lead status.

If you're a Thrive Themes Member, we've got a whole course on how you can use Thrive Ovation as a CRM system.

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Create a new ThriveBox within Thrive Leads. Add the details about your call offer, then drag in a Thrive Ovation 'Capture Testimonial' Element.

Click on the 'Form Settings' button to add your questions and choose what information you want to collect. Change the Title field text to 'Phone Number' so that your new lead's phone number will be displayed as the title within Thrive Ovation.

Create a tag for new leads. You can name the tag what ever you like, as long as you know it means a new contact form has been submitted. 

Save the ThriveBox, select 'Opt-In Form' as the Post-Comment Action and choose the ThriveBox you just created from the drop down.

Just like with the Thrive Leads Lead Generation element, the commenter's name and email will be automatically filled out from their comment details. All they need to do is add the extra information requested.

If you want to be notified as soon as a new contact form is filled out, you can set up email notifications that will send you all the details of the new lead.

I am! And we're still just scratching the surface of everything you can do with Thrive Comments Post-Comment Actions. You really are only limited by your own creativity.

Speaking of which, do you have any other ideas of how you could use Post-Comment Actions to take advantage of engaged visitors? I'd love to hear your suggestions in the comments below.

While impressive, Post-Comment Actions is just one of the things Thrive Comments can do. Check out the full suite of features here, and start maximizing your WordPress comments today.