On Monday, April 22nd, we will deprecate our weekly community digest emails. This decision is based on weeks of thinking and months of collecting data. This means that weekly community digest and email notifications about new admin posts will no longer be delivered via email to your end-users. Admins can still deliver push notifications about new posts and use our ”Email Broadcast” feature to have more impactful and controlled communication on the cadence they like.
As you all know, removing functions is always way harder than adding new functions, as it requires you to explain to users two things:
- Why the hell did you remove it?
- Why the hell did you build it in the first place?
Let me answer both of these questions.
As you know, Uscreen is actively building the community part of our platform. Last year, we added a new community digest feature that summarizes all admin posts weekly and sends them to end-users.
Most of our communities at the time published one to two admin-generated posts per week, and one way to re-engage the audience with those publications was to send them a weekly digest and see how it affected the DAU metrics.
- Initially, it looked like a big success, but as time passed and communities grew, the number of posts admins generated also grew. This fact drastically dropped the email quality, where end-users will end up with almost an endless scroll, as some admins can create 20-30 posts per week.
- Side learnings: we discovered that it’s much easier to re-engage end-users with installed apps via push notifications, and this activity has a much higher chance of success. Emails produced less impact.
- Our creators have different audiences, so unification is not working well. For some, getting an email on the weekend is excellent; for others, it’s best to receive an email during weekdays. This lack of control may not only provide a smaller engagement but in some cases, it may harm user engagement
- Creators need to be in control! We’ve found that creators have more control over engaging their audience and promoting their community using our “Email broadcast” feature rather than sending random posts. Maybe in the future, we can revisit automation to provide a semi-automatic way of doing with suggestions based on each membership’s historical engagement data.
- These emails can increase churn for specific types of memberships. You might say that this means that the audience wasn’t ready to buy or not sticky with the content — maybe, but I believe that it should not be the reason to proactively lose revenue — business is not a charity.
These points above explain why we decided to move ahead and remove this feature. As always, we are open to your feedback, and you can submit your suggestions via the Admin area interface or contact us directly via email.