Community Management

Grow Your Community with Email Marketing

Email is a great method for driving users to your community. There are different methods you — continue reading
Posted by Taco Potze
October 10, 2017

Email is a great method for driving users to your community. There are different methods you can use to achieve this. No matter which method you choose, it’s important that you keep your main strategic goal in mind.

Email Marketing and Open Social

Open Social comes with an export feature that allows you to export user data from the platform and organize the data according to specific parameters (in Excel or Google Sheets, for example). The export can provide insights into:

  • How often a user logged in.
  • The last time a user logged in.
  • How much original content a user posted.
  • How many comments a user posted.
  • And more…

You can use all of this information to target different emails to different users based on different activity levels. Import your various target groups into an email marketing program like MailChimp and start emailing to increase traffic and engagement!

Depending on each target group, you can send weekly, bi-weekly or monthly email updates. Consider the following options:

  • Send reactivation emails to inactive users, MailChimp has great tips for reactivation campaigns.
  • Send a weekly email with a summary of active topics to get more users to join the discussion.
  • Filter users based on interest and inform them about new content that matches their interests.
  • Organize an event and invite users (you can even make this area specific).
  • Combine all of the above and create perfectly targeted mailings for users based on activity, interests, and location.

You will probably find that as your community matures, you will be able to identify more and more target groups for your email marketing activities. Generally speaking, two or three different target groups (new users, active users, inactive users, for example) will do.

Notifications

You can also use the Open Social notifications system to reach specific users. If you want to keep specific users active and engaged you can use the @-mention function on the platform. Whether in a topic, post, event or comment, users that are mentioned will receive both a notification on the platform as well as a notification that they have been mentioned via email.

Notifications in Open Social

 

One way to utilize this feature is to welcome each new users on the platform with a welcome message on their personal page. The easiest way to do this is by creating a template with the most crucial information and then personalize it by adjusting the name and use the @-mention feature to tag the user when you post the welcome message.

Learn about more features and extensions by booking a live demo with us! Click on the below image to request a demo:

Live demo - Open Social

Do you have an email marketing strategy for your online community? Do you have any tips for our users? Or questions on how to improve your current strategy? Let us know in the comments!

 

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