Auto-subscribe community members to categories/product updates

Thanks for sharing this idea @kaponte - always good to have an idea documented so other customers can add their 2 cents!:)

I’ve edited the title of this idea from “How do you drive and measure repeat visitors?” to “Auto-subscribe community members to categories/product updates” in order to clarify the idea for other members when it appears in search/the recently active stream.

If you’re a single product company, subscribing users to product updates automatically seems like a no brainer → for categories it’s less clear: what would you expect in this case? Do you have examples of categories you’d like to auto-subscribe any registered user to, or would you expect some logic (based on user attribute X, subscribe to category Y)?

I’m also linking a related idea to what you mentioned re: more transparency for total numbers of category subscribers: 

Hello, @daniel.boon . Nice to hear from you.

For auto subscriptions ideally we would see something like

if {some user attribute} then {auto subscribe to categories x,y,z at frequency of weekly digest}

In our particular case, 

if {new registrant} then {auto subscribe to Q&A Category && Product Updates at a frequency of weekly digest}

But eventually it may also be,

if {new registrant && user_industry=real_estate} then {auto subscribe to Q&A Category && Product Updates && Real Estate Forum at a frequency of weekly digest}

In the US at least we can still do this and then force people to opt out of communication. Not sure about the EU. Part of the registration flow will usually say, “by registering you are agreeing to receiving notification from the community. You may opt out of communications at at time by going to...”

​​Hi ​@daniel.boon, is there any update on the status of this idea? 

We’re currently looking at our Product Updates subscribers and, at present, we have only approx. 7% of total members subscribed which isn’t great. 

Whilst we’re looking at ways of increasing this number, the question was asked on whether we’re able to auto-subscribe members to Product Updates. 

We are also very interested in this functionality. We are looking to use the forum for product alert notifications both internally and externally. In order to ensure our users are receiving the message, we’d like to auto subscribe specific roles for certain forums. 

Would like to know if there are any updates/has this option been prioritized on the roadmap at all? @daniel.boon 

While auto-subscriptions (or default opt-ins) can be a bit tricky from our perspective, this seems like it might be a solution for a product update delivery system we’re looking to implement.

Our use case:

We have product teams that currently share updates via mail merges or CSV distro lists. These updates are for a specific product with a wide range of sub-products. There are different types of updates sent out (monthly, ad-hoc), which would require numerous emails each month.

It would be far easier if customers were able to be subscribed in a group for that product, based on which sub-product(s) they owned and which updates they would want to receive.

Hey,

Has anyone found a workaround for this?

This would be a great help for our community site, too. We understand the considerate goal of not opting users in to anything they might not want, but we are finding that our new community members (1) don’t understand the value of subscribing until they’ve missed crucial content and (2) reinforced education for “this is how you subscribe...” is insufficient when our user base is already busy. Being able to auto-subscribe new community members to a news/announcements forum or something similar would help our community members get quicker wins by actually receiving updates. It would also save our community team time spent on educating users on how to subscribe.