Community Email Digests on Trending Topics?

[jonchen]

Hello Everyone,

I am managing a Community that moved from Jive-X earlier this year. While on Jive-X I was able to send weekly emails to all members as a type of Community Newsletter. This would consist of the most popular items discussed that week, including threads that the particular member participated in or created. 

Now that we are on Khoros, I am unable to find a feature that fully replicates this capability. I am aware of the "Email Notifications" settings in the "Notification Defaults" section of the admin console. However, as far as I'm aware, this only sends thread activity that a user is subscribed to.

Is there a workaround to this newsletter that would allow me to send weekly digests like it did in Jive-X, where the focus is on trending topics (i.e. most liked or most replies)? This was a very valuable feature to us as it was a primary access point for many of our users to visit Community in the first place. 

Thanks in advance! 

[JasonHill · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately not @jonchen.

This is something we got tired of waiting for and have tackled in a couple of different ways.

One is to create our own newsletter as a template in an marketing marketing automation platform. When we want to send a newsletter out (currently monthly) we export our current member list out, then send to that list. The newsletter obviously needs to be curated manually. So it's a lot of work, but I think important for both dragging lapsed users back to the site, highlighting the most popular content of the month, and rewarding and recognising our top members.

Second is to customise the notification emails so they have a section which features content from the community. My goal here is to add more value to the notification emails by highlighting to members recent popular content. Again, we had to build this ourselves as the current templates don't allow for dynamic content. 

Please add your vote to the following enhancement requests:

https://community.khoros.com/t5/Khoros-Community-Ideas/Automatic-emails-or-PMs-following-registratio...

https://community.khoros.com/t5/Khoros-Community-Ideas/Build-a-Message-Manager/idi-p/186374

https://community.khoros.com/t5/Khoros-Community-Ideas/Email-Digest/idi-p/213435

Hope that helps.

Jason

[jonchen]

Hey @JasonHill , thanks so much for the response! Unfortunate to hear that there's no OOB solution for this, but love to see that you're working around it. I went ahead and voted for those three ideas you listed. 

I like your solution of exporting all users into a monthly curated email send. I'll explore this feasibility of this using our marketing automation platform.

Regarding your second point - could you please clarify how you customize the notification emails that go out to the Community? Thanks again! 

[JasonHill]

Let me tag @cblown for you as his team built the solution for us. 

Jason

[cblown · Accepted solution]

Thanks @JasonHill 

@JonL We've done this a few different ways, however the key to making somewhat dynamic notifications emails in Khoros, is by putting html content into a custom text string and then including the custom string in your email templates.

So the basic idea is:

1. Create an endpoint which generates the "dynamic" EDM ready html content you wish to add to your Khoros email(s).

2. Then manually copy and paste the output source code into your custom text string (in Studio).

3. Include the text string into your email templates and test them out in Studio.

4. When you're happy do a production push to sync the new content into prod. 

Now when an email is fired off by Khoros that content is included in the email. It's not perfect but it is a way to get "recent content" into standard Khoros emails. 

[caseygum]

@JasonHill  - What are your default notification settings set to in Admin > Users > Notification Defaults in order to approximate the behavior in Jive in terms of just sending out the email at all.

[JasonHill]

Which email are you referring to @caseygum?

If you are asking about a newsletter, then as per my original reply this functionality is not available in the Khoros community platform at present. 

Jason

[caseygum]

Sorry - I guess my question was kind of ambiguous.  I'm wondering which Lithium email templates you are adding custom content to and what your default settings are for user notifications in Admin > Users > Notification Defaults.  Specifically, the first three values...

Thanks!