The discussion revolves around best practices for email subject templates in Discourse. robmc is concerned that the default template subject lines may be too formulaic and ignore-worthy. He wonders if personalizing the subject lines could increase engagement.
maiki argues that the subject line alone is not enough to prompt a reply, and that the body of the message is more important. However, robmc clarifies that he is referring to the default template subject lines used for all Discourse emails, which include elements like email prefix and category.
HAWK suggests removing square brackets and capitalization to make the subject lines look more personal. codinghorror shares an example of a successful email campaign that used hand-edited, personalized subject lines.
robmc shares an image of his inbox, showing the repetitive nature of the default subject lines. codinghorror suggests shortening the email site title to make it less repetitive. However, robmc notes that this may not be practical due to brand guidelines.
debryc is experimenting with moving the prefix to the end of the subject line, and sebastianh asks for an update on the results. The discussion highlights the challenges of balancing personalization with brand consistency in email subject templates.
Does anyone have any thoughts on best practice for the templates used on emails from the site?
By default the email subjects have a fairly standard look & feel, e.g.
[%{email_prefix}] [PM] %{topic_title}
I’m finding that we are not getting many replies to welcome PMs and there is a chance that the formulaic nature of the subject line, at least for PMs is making them be missed, ignored or treated as spam.
While a standard template makes writing email filing rules easier, it also makes the notification more likely to be ignored, and so I wondered how to personalise this and bring it to life, so that I’m not annoying members, but making sure I catch their attention.
Do you have any thoughts? Have you changed the default setting for these email notification templates?
Is it better to leave it in to be ‘honest’ it is just a notification and not an actual personal email from the relevant member?
We can’t assess your question without seeing the body of the message. The subject on its own won’t cause a person to reply, so it should be treated all together.
Also, why would a person reply? Do you ask questions, with question marks? If they don’t have a reason to reply, they won’t.
Thanks, but I think we are talking about different things
By default, ALL Discourse emails follow a template subject line which is:
PM subject line [%{email_prefix}] [PM] %{topic_title}
Notification subject line [%{email_prefix}] [%{category}] %{topic_title}
The Digest subject line [%{email_prefix}] Summary
In other words, if you do not customise your subject lines, ALL notifications from the community start to look very similar.
I am wondering if anyone has made any significant changes to these template subject lines (including removing the email_prefix and the [square bracket dividers]) or whether we think that keeping these are good practice in order to inform our members?
Hey Robert,
Interesting question. I haven’t customised the template for any of my Discourse communities but I’ve spent time researching email subjects for mail drops from Mailchimp etc.
The ones that I find do the best aren’t capitalised (so they don’t look like titles). Ideally they’d be personalised but that’s not feasible in this case so I’d say that you’re likely on the right track with at least removing the square brackets. You probably need to be careful though because if someone writes a PM with a spammy looking title (“help me please”) then that might affect both delivery and open rates.
That said, people are going to get used to recognising these at a glance regardless of what they look like so I’m not sure you’ll have a huge impact on your numbers.
It’s probably a case of testing a few options out.
The only ones that I’ve seen work – by that I mean bulk emails that caught my eye consistently – are from demand progress, and they hand-edit each email blast title to make it look like it came from a person. Very labor intensive.
Thanks all - I turned on ‘watching’ for most of my categories initially, so my inbox is busier than most, but the results look like this. The individual’s name still does appear in the From box, so that is great, but by defaulting to the name of the site, there is a mix of category, sub-category and PM there, and you can see that it gets rather repetitive (sorry, names meant to be ‘private’)
Ah, nice idea but practicality has to contend with brand guidelines and the acceptability of acronyms (no shortening is allowed!)
I’m thinking of re-branding (potentially) to create a shorter name, but in any case it gets repetitive if you use it for everything, but removing it completely means you end up with emails not obviously linked to the community - either not encouraging repeat visits, or being accused of being misleading
