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You might be unaware of this, but notification emails are actually quite a powerful tool in order to stimulate your users to become (even more) active on the community.

In this topic you will find out how to improve the content of your notification emails in a way that they will have a maximum impact on your users. Of course you might have more/different ideas than the once presented here. If you think they might be of value to others, please feel free to share it with us in the comments!

In case you are changing your notification emails for the first time, here a guide to help you on the way.

And if you a wondering which notification mails are being sent, check this topic.

This guide includes all the different variables which you can use in a notification mail.

 

 

Tone of voice in your notifications

The default text of the notification emails is rather formal. Let's fix that first, because you want your users to have fun on the community, right? Of course you will have to comply with the policy of your company. Nevertheless, try to think about which words would make you feel happy, and copy that!

In my opinion, the team of the mint mobile community has done everything right. Many kudos, I really like the way they communicate with users:

When someone is being mentioned, the user will receive this:
 

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Even the "reset password" email has a fun line added:

 

 

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You can see that adding an informal, funny line can create a much more personal touch. Users will remember this and hopefully they will feel more welcome and invited to become active themselves.

How to improve the notification emails in the community

If you do not know how to improve these emails in the control environment, then I can recommend to visit this topic! There we explain everything you need to know.

Improving specific notification emails

The list below will cover all the relevant notification emails which are being send from your community.

Password reset / Activate account

Note: In case you are using an SSO login, these emails will not be used.

For these emails, there is not much to do. I would simply recommend to keep the tone friendly and inviting. For the "activate account" email you might want to add an explanation of what will happen once you activate your account.

Account activated

The activation email is a key moment in the journey of your users. They clearly want to participate, but they are still at the very beginning. This is where a good notification email can really make a difference:

  • Give your users a warm welcome by chosing an informal tone of voice
  • Advertise the benefits of engaging in your community (e.g. "learn more about your product")
  • Link to the "how-to"-section of your community (don't have one yet? Check here!)
  • Provide links to different categories, maybe even directly to the "create a topic"-page (Were you not able to find your question? Ask it here!)
  • Some communities even have a dedicated topic (example from ID mobile), of course that could be a nice addition to your notification as well!

New reply / topic has been marked as answered

These notifications inform the user about a new activity on the community. Make sure that you include additional information about how a user can stop notifications from being send. This can be done in several ways, the text below actually includes all of them:

 

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  1. Remove from favorites (Link: https://community.insided.com/favorite/overview)
  2. Ignore the email
  3. Adjust the notification preferences (Link: https://community.insided.com/settings/general)

Alternatively, you could also link to a topic on your community which explains how to turn off notifications. This is also covered in our topic about the "how-to" section.

New topic

This email will only be sent when a user has subscribed to a subforum. As the subscription to a subforum can only be disabled in this subforum, this means that you cannot use the same disclaimer text as in the notifications for e.g. new replies.

I would include a simple text which says that you have to turn off the notifications in the specific subforum. Again, you could also create a how-to topic for this, and include the link in the mail.

Well, that's it. 🙂 Do you happen to have questions, or do you know other tricks around email notifications which have not been covered here, then please let us know in the comments.

Cheers,

Julian

 

Hi! What are the recommended image sizes if we want to incorporate images in the notification e-mails?
Hi!





There is no real answer to this, at this depends on how you style your email. :)





If it helps, we use an image size of 600x66 pixels in our notification mails.





However the actual size how it will be displayed is defined by the email notification itself: These emails usually use a responsive design, which will automatically resize the email and the used image e.g. for mobile devices.





My colleagues have shared this link with me, maybe it can also help you to find out more about the code you could use: Link





Of course, should you have issues in creating or optimizing your template, I will be happy to help you.
Thanks, @Julian 🙌

Hello : )

  1. Where could I find a full list of things you can call from the database? Example as seen above {author}.
  2. Also a list of function you can use in messages please. Example: Google

Many thanks in advance!

Hi @Verdi,

good questions! You can find the list of variables here, I will also add it to the opening post:

For your second question: Our notification emails work with HTML, meaning you can use all HTML commands. There are a ton of options to choose from and the internet is full of guides and editors that can help you to build your ideal notification template. Of course, if you have specific questions or challenges, feel free to start a topic.

Hi! Is it possible to disable the functionality where ignoring an email notification about a new reply in a thread will prevent any future notifications about activity on that thread? In other words, can I configure a setting so that a user will always be notified about a new activity on a thread even if they miss one reply within it? (I would still want options 1 and 3 to work for disabling these notifications.)

Hey @mbuuck1 - I’m afraid that changing how those notifications work for a user isn’t possible.  It’s not a common request, as it could result in a flood of email notifications whenever there’s a very active topic.  I’d be curious to know what your use case is.  Is it for an employee or for one of your community members?  Depending on what you’re looking achieve there might be a workaround - for example, if you’re thinking of an employee, a common integration with our platform is to pull community topics or replies into a Slack channel using Zapier.

Hi @Kenneth R, thanks for the insight. I figured that wouldn’t be a common request, and agree that it’s likely not something we want to do. 🙂 The use case is that we’re running smaller beta testing groups for our products and are using private community groups as the centralized communication method. The expectation for participation in these groups is a very high level of involvement and conversation, in which case more of these notifications might be legitimately helpful instead of spammy. Ultimately, just wanting to know if that is even a lever we could possibly pull! 

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