AUTOMATIC: Inviting every new SaaS signup into the Discourse Forum

Community
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Not sure whether I put the topic title clearly but let me explain. Looking for some ideas.

Traditional Signup
In most SaaS solution, we have this auth system where people can self signup.

  • This signup users may or may not visit the forum.
  • They will receive newsletters if we sent them via marketing channel
  • they may have questions related to the product, currently they may find via google search or help desk
  • They will not be involved in community forum

What we want is every traditional signup receive an automated invite or automated registration in the community forum. So they will receive all the community topics and get engaged into community.

Community topics would be mostly non-sales things, so this topics can create a long term trust and brand remembrance as well.

There are some ideas I thought like

  • MANUAL: Once in a day or week, export users from SaaS signup > Upload them in community Invite (We tried it but the conversion rate is 6% in 100Batch)
  • Exposure: Adding the community link in menu, footer, pricing page, and also answering the chats question into community and then provide the link in chat. So pulling the users in

However the community members is still not picking up. But what would be intriguing is

  • Automatically add the SaaS signup into the community forum as a member
  • OR automatically do a trigger INVITE USER on discourse from SaaS Signup.

Happy to test any ideas and share for others as well.

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We tried automating it initially, but without results. Probably the “what’s in it for me” was missing. Also, Discourse was not really easy to set up for on-boarding as part of another on-boarding master process for the user’s perspective.

Instead, we switched at some time to making the forum for product-related questions the first stop with no exceptions. That dramatically increased traffic and - more important - also increased customer retention since they started finding answers themselves without additional costs. Some users have been repelled by the new approach, that is a downside that you need to account for. In our case typically some users with a less investigative mindset are leaving since they can not call anymore for every question, but that is not considered a problem for reasons:

  1. it is in the individual relationship less nice, but the global world is socially helped by sharing knowledge.
  2. the net margin of users leaving was typically negative: they consumed more resources than their financial and intellectual contribution accounted for.
  3. the remaining users better fit the ideal user profile targeted for.

Hope it helps.

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This.

See Sync DiscourseConnect user data with the sync_sso route which does exactly what you need.

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switched at some time to making the forum for product-related questions the first stop with no exceptions

Exactly. We are pushing this method as a well from pricing perspective as well. So we are telling to customers/potential, if you are looking for 1:1 support then go for higher priced plan.

What you have done is something we are looking to do as well, 100%.

Any example how you did? For example, did you remove some sort of support form and replaced with forum link? Anything you did inside the product apart from the forum in navigation?

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