Does 'reply via email' increase engagement?

community
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Continuing the discussion from Setup incoming emails :e-mail::

Has anyone measured the effect of the “reply via email” feature on user engagement, when it is enabled in a previously web-only community?

On the one hand, it can be expected to increase – since “reply via email” offers another, often easier means to contribute to a discussion. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be totally surprised if there was a negative effect, too – because of fewer visits to the site and, consequently, fewer opportunities to discover other interesting topics to contribute to.

So, I’m interested if anyone has been through enabling the “reply via email” on a previously web-only forum, and what were the results. Thank you.

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@iva I’m interested in this also. I’ve migrated a community that did not have this feature, and I’m afraid it’s provided more confusion than benefit.

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Personally we wouldn’t have selected discourse without this feature. My field sales teams used to be on a Google group, we split that group into multiple sub-categories owned by the product manager for that feature. Allowing them to answer via email was the norm, it reduces friction considerably and also serves as a reminder to check in on the community.

However, I haven’t published addresses to start conversations via email except on the internal side. I still want our end users coming to the community to start a question, that way the search and suggested titles can help solve the issue.

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That is very odd, because being able to reply via email opens up many worlds of new communication possibilities on so many devices. It’s essential.

Perhaps if you could elaborate on the specifics of your community audience and give some examples of why they find it “confusing”?

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Have you (or others reading this) found that reply by email increases engagement?

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It could be a bad ideea if you run ads and earn money from your forum, coz with every reply/post from email you lose a user visitor on your website. You won’t be able to display ads trough the email reply.

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I would say the vast majority of my engagement is via email, probably north of 75%.

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The answer to that question is fairly simple. The audience leans heavily to the >65 crowd and has been using a legacy forum that had only one bell and one whistle - few options and few benefits. It was the devil they knew.

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There is no reason you have to turn it on. If they like the web interface it’s easy enough to do it that way. For my guys they are all security sales engineers, email isn’t a technical hurdle and mailing list mode allows them to quickly jump in and answer questions.

Every community I’m on is a bit different. In your case you might want to do a write up and explain email is an optional way to participate and let people who want opt in.

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I’ve disabled reply by email all year, and I’m not sure about enabling it. As a feature it certainly attracted me to the platform, and I expect it would increase engagement. However, because we use outlook, and the formatting of outlook is terrible at best, I’m thinking about keeping it disabled – as badly formatted topics can put people off, not just from reading, but even from writinng.

Secondly, I find it better that users come into Discourse, and actually spend their time here. Another part of this is that the culture and mentality of what people will contribute is different in Discourse compared to email – email can be anything to anyone, Discourse is our communal platform specifically for Problem Focussed Discussion.

I’m curious if anyone has any new thoughts on this?

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We have about 12% of posts made by email and there are many users who would not participate at all if it were not for the ability to use email. Having the option is good in my opinion.

Can you show an example screenshot of how Outlook displays a post?

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Personally, I find reply via email most useful when I am very crunched for time, but a critical individual post appears that needs a relatively quick answer from me. It’s faster to fire off an immediate email reply to the email notification than it is to click or tap and load up the browser and the full site.

The one-off nature of the message (versus having a bunch of topics I need to reply to in a group, where it would make more sense to load the entire site and compose several replies in a row), and the “I’m in a remote place with limited access”, are both essential ingredients.

In summary I’d say not very often, but when you need it, you really need it. It’s in the nice to have category for most people.

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(The weekly email summaries are vastly more important for general engagement. Discourse automatically emails a “greatest hits” of what’s going on in the community and invites people to become intrigued, click through and visit to get a fuller sense of what’s happening. These go out when you haven’t been on a site for 7 full days, and they only happen for 26 weeks in a row before concluding the user probably isn’t coming back, especially if they haven’t been seen on the site a single time in six whole months…)

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