Email notification features we want from Online Community vendors in 2015

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Many online community developers are starting to lock in their 2015 roadmaps this time of year. We’ve seen a lot of cool new features in community platforms crop up in 2014, from making the community platform 100% responsive for mobile devices, to enhanced reply-by-email functionality, to development of community automation tools.

In this series of posts, we’re revealing the top features we’re looking for from online community vendors in 2015. Today, we’re focusing on email notifications.

We know that the number one way that members interact with online communities is by way of email notifications. In fact, I’d argue that email notifications are the single most important feature of any online community. And yet, they tend to be an afterthought for both vendors and buyers of online community software.

Any incremental improvements that community vendors can make to their email notifications should produce a corresponding increase in engagement. To this end, we’re looking for vendors to offer or enhance the following features in 2015:

• Reply-by-email: Users should be able to reply to discussions, comment on content, and otherwise interact with community content by replying to email notifications. When notifications come in digests, this becomes really challenging for community vendors, as it’s difficult to tell what specific piece of content in a digest is being replied to. However, some vendors have figured out clever ways to do it. With many association members accustomed to listservs, reply-by-email will continue to be an important community feature for years to come.
• Auto-login: Some platforms offer the ability to bypass login when a link in an email notification is clicked. This functionality overcomes the number one barrier to engagement: logging in. Some developers have ruled out implementing auto-login technology on the grounds that it’s a security risk if the user forwards the email notification. You’ll get no argument from me on that. But our point of view is that we’re talking about an online community here, not a bank account. The risk is really, really low. In fact, we’ve never — ever — heard of someone maliciously impersonating another person by way of an auto-login email notification.
• Styling: Many platforms allow for at least some degree of styling, such as adding a masthead and advertising to the email notifications. Others allow you to configure the text color, link colors, footer text, etc. We’d like to see some additional functionality like adding or suppressing certain actions in the notifications (such as “reply to sender”), the ability to override the nomenclature in notifications (such as changing the word “discussion” to “thread”), and the ability to add or remove certain content types in the digests (e.g. suppress blog posts but include resource uploads).
• Algorithmically-curated summary digests: What if a community platform could dynamically curate weekly or monthly best-of summaries of community content that’s relevant to you? One prominent social platform that does this really well is Quora, which algorithmically curates best-of digests based on implicit data, sending you updates about new answers to questions that are similar to questions you’ve already viewed. This could be as simple as a monthly or weekly digest that shows users the most-downloaded file, most-replied-to thread, and most up-voted response.
• Unified digests: Some platforms send digests for each and every group the member belongs to. Others wrap up all of your groups’ content into a single unified digest. Given the ever-increasing email deluge that we’re all subject to, we prefer platforms that can summarize all community activity into a unified digest, even if it means truncating the content to keep the unified digest to a reasonable length. Allowing the community manager to set a default, while letting the user choose a unified digest or separate digests for each group would be ideal.
• Tracking opens & clicks: Even managers in mature communities still need to justify community ROI based on consumption — rather than creation — of community content. I recently heard about an association whose board was questioning the value of its online community, which has been up and running for five years! Those who defended the community ROI said, “I may not reply, but I do read.” Wouldn’t it be great to put numbers behind this line of reasoning? We work with some community vendors who can compute open rates, and others who can get click-through data. Imagine being able to show the powers-that-be that XX% of daily digests are opened or YY% of notifications are clicked! It’s difficult to measure lurker behavior, but easier when you can access open and click-through rates on email notifications.

What new email features would you like to see from your community vendor? Leave a comment and let us know!