Set "Max Characters" in Emails to Encourage User Login (to view full message)

Support
1

A similar inquiry was posted by @Phuong_SuSu over here.

When a user is mentioned in a forum post or a PM/DM, other digest, or summary email, from what I can tell, the user receives the entire message and has no reason to log in to the site.

This is not ideal for us.

Our goal for these transactional emails is to serve as a tool to pull users back into the platform where they can not only get the message that was meant for them, but also be enticed to stick around and engage with other great content.

This is exactly what Facebook, Linkedin, and other social platforms do with their transactional emails… they “tease” that there’s a special something waiting for the user, if they click the button and jump back into their account, on the respective platform.

As a side-note, another reason this is important to us is for sponsorship and partner agreements. The more page-views we are getting, and the longer our users spend time on our site, the more validating data we have to help us secure more sponsorship and partner deals.

Is there a way to indicate in the email templates that we only want to display a certain number of characters within each of these transactional emails that go out?

%{message}

%{context}

I noticed these variables in the email templates.

Is there a way to tweak them and/or other variables to allow only 160 characters, or something similar?

Jeff mentioned something that may relate, in this thread:

Or perhaps there’s another kind of workaround?

2 Likes
2

Just to add one more use case…

Our coaches use DM’s as a means of starting and tracking a training log for their students. These coaches want the students to come to the forums for a few reasons:

  1. To access their “Progress Plans”
  2. To connect with other community members.
  3. To find value in the forums through answers to questions. To feel supported.
  4. To become familiar with the platform so students can appreciate the value of having a centralized location to learn and grow as a player. This will be one of the factors that leads students towards joining the private member groups that the coaches offer as an added monthly cost.

Users are getting all coach communication from our Discourse forums, directly in the email, and I’ve been receiving feedback that the user’s aren’t logging in to access the info b/c they get everything they wanted (the full training report) right in their inbox. This weakens the value proposition of the coaches. And this also defeats the whole purpose of moving this content to a DM in the forums, and outside of scattered email threads.

1 Like
3

Sure I support this as on optional setting, we already have secure mode where nothing leaks out via email, so this should be possible too.

4 Likes