Strategies for increasing category subscriptions

For newer communities, Id recommend putting all discussions into a centralized place separated by tags/labels. If there are 5 products, theyd have to sub to all 5 spots. This might be a harder ask for some members. 
Giving users less places to go can help to prevent confusion as you look to make the transition.

I am also interested in this topic!

Things we’re doing to promote category subscription (I am not saying it is a successful recipe):

• Call to action to subscribe in our monthly newsletters
• Explain the importance of subscribing to categories in the notification a new member receives when their account is created
• Created an article about subscription that is featured on our homepage
• Created a custom page that lists all available categories and subscription button for each, this page is linked in the new member email notification as one of the first steps to take

I would still love to be able to have the following:

https://communities.gainsight.com/ideas/follow%2Da%2Dtag%2D27900

Out community has been live for 6 monthy and we did not create endless categories like ​@mitchell.gordon  mentioned just because otherwise it would have been too much. We migrated from Whatsapp (I know really bad for B2B ;) ) and there the owner did create chats per product/module and even more… but that also meant that we had chats with NO engagement at all and that is something we did not want in our new community. 

So we only have Q&A, Best Practices, Automations (as that it something a lot of our customer talk about) and integrations. And we use tags to specify what it's about. This works really well for now.. I do miss having the option to subscribe to tags but I know that idea has been posted already and I voted :P

In order to promote to subscribe… I focused first on the one where I wanted to get the most subscriptions which is our product updates. And in our Monthly webinar update I always mention this like ‘they want to know when something has been released, please subscribe here (refer to the page) etc….’ 
And it does give me new subscribers on a monthly basis. 

I’ll echo what others have said above: we just hammer it as often as we can! On events, in newsletters, in occasional Community “tip” posts, etc. We’ve also made sure the Subscribe buttons are as visible as possible, by using the most noticeable color in our brand palette. 

We are also looking at programs or initiatives that have engagement thresholds for participation, and that therefore require subscribing in certain places. We’re hoping a knock-on benefit of that is to improve subscription awareness and usage elsewhere.

This is the reason when we are promoting our monthly community webcasts, in our Events & Meetups forum category, we also do email campaigns. As much as we have tried to push subscribing it just doesn’t have the traction we need. Promoting a webinar from a forum category will net us maybe 50 registrants. Promoting via an email campaign gets us closer to 1000. Email campaigns have saved us here.

What a great question. And what great ideas in this thread!!

We have about 15 different products represented in our community, so we're trying to solve a similar challenge. One thing I've wondered about is whether there could be a way to automatically subscribe members to the channels most relevant to them, while still giving them full control to update those subscriptions whenever they want.

Part of the challenge is that self-subscribing is often an extra step that new members may not realize they need to take, even when it's highlighted through CTAs and onboarding messages. If relevant subscriptions could be set up automatically from the start, members would be more likely to see content that's valuable to them right away.

It would also be great if members could choose how often they receive notifications. For example, some people may want an alert for every new post, while others might prefer a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly digest. Giving users the flexibility to decide what content they see and how often they hear from the community could make the experience feel much more personalized and manageable.

I guess this might be something to take to the ideas channel...