#digest email

[bestwayadvertisement]

Quora Digest is a great way to stay informed and learn new things. In this infographic, you will get to know how Quora digest email is beneficial. 

[knowtify-blog]

Interview with Matt Goldman - founder of Hookfeed.com

Matt Goldman has pretty much been building web businesses since he was able to tap a keyboard. Most recently he launched his own product development company, SmallHQ, focused on developing simple, yet powerful tools for entrepreneurs and small businesses. He has built Minimanalytics.com, Hookfeed.com and has created one of the most popular podcasts for startups - the Rocketship Podcast - in his "spare time" :)

We love all of Matt's work, but we especially love his focus on simplicity...as well as his appreciation for the digest email. We recently talked to Matt about Hookfeed and his use of the digest email. 

MATT: I started a company called Small HQ with my girlfriend, Joelle, in early-2013 after leaving the web agency where we worked together previously. We spent several months working on our first product, Minimalytics, which would send you a daily email with analytics from various services pulled together into one simple report. All the while, we were also working on HookFeed, a news stream of events from various web services. At some point along the way, we shifted focus to HookFeed and began iterating through multiple vastly different versions, ending up where we are today.

KNOWTIFY: Give us a quick pitch for Hookfeed.

MATT: Today, HookFeed is a great tool for SaaS/E-Commerce Customer Management. Our goal is to bring together big-picture metrics, with customer-level insights, to help you run your business. Most analytics apps focus on data abstracted from your customer base which has limited use. 

Stripe is great at the basics of collecting credit card charges, issuing refunds, and managing the logic behind recurring subscriptions. But that’s just scratching the surface of what it takes to run your SaaS. Every customer has a history with your product, and we strive to reveal that history, and make you more awesome at running your business.

KNOWTIFY: From where did the inspiration for Hookfeed come?

MATT: We were using Stripe in Minimalytics and other previous products, and would continually build in (crappy) functionality to do some of what HookFeed does today. It just made sense to break that out into its own product :-) However, I don’t think I realized this until I’d built the same functionality multiple times, and then needed to make an update inside of each app due to an API change.

KNOWTIFY: I know that Hookfeed has evolved a lot since it’s first iteration. I’m interested in understanding the things that drove that evolution. How did you decide how you were going to build out the vision for the app and the specific feature set? Customer feedback, analytics, competition, etc?

MATT: Little of what we’ve done so far has been based on customer feedback, analytics, or competition. In fact, whenever we follow any of those feedback mechanisms, we go astray. Today, we use HookFeed literally every day and couldn’t run our business without it. What works best for us is looking at how we use our product, and what would make it work better for us. That is the best driver of our roadmap. Customer feedback is incredibly valuable/supportive, but in our case (and likely your case) it can’t be relied on to set product direction. Especially when your product is solving a problem in a different way - customers tend to try it expecting different functionality and then they give feedback based on the category they’re trying to fit your product into. This can be very detrimental as it pushes you towards an existing  product category and discourages innovation. It’s up to you to ensure that you’re actually innovating in the right direction.

KNOWTIFY: In many ways, Hookfeed is all about giving SaaS applications a window into the financial impact of retaining their customers (and in the case of expiring credit cards, giving them very actionable data). So...can you tell us some of the ways you are keeping your users engaged with the service?

MATT: We encourage our customers to invite their teammates and ideally subscribe different teammates to receive different alerts. For example, Stacy in Accounting may need to know when charges are refunded, but Bill in Growth doesn’t. We offer several alerts which you can’t currently receive from Stripe which help you run your business on a daily basis. When you need more information on a customer (when their charge fails, subscription renews, downgrades occur, etc), you can quickly dig into our web interface to find the info you need, and act on it.

KNOWTIFY: One of the things we love about Hookfeed is your smart use of emails - particularly your daily digest emails. How important are those emails for keeping your users engaged?

MATT: They are critical to the product. We’re always working on finding ways to increase engagement with the insights we present to our customers, about their customers. Digests allow us to keep you in the loop, without requiring that HookFeed be open in your browser all day long.

A constant challenge is determining which information to include in daily digest emails since many companies use Stripe (a flexible payments API) in very different ways. For example, not all companies have recurring revenue.

KNOWTIFY: What are your future plans for Hookfeed? Where would you like to see it go?

MATT: We will continue making HookFeed the absolute best tool to manage your business and customers. We can’t share much more than that, but if you follow us on Twitter here, we’ll keep you in the loop :-) https://twitter.com/HookFeed

[knowtify-blog]

The MuckRack Daily - Interview with Greg Galant

One of my favorite daily digests for the past 3-4 years has been the MuckRack Daily. As a fun, elegant summary of the days important news stories - from the perspective of the world's top journalists - the MuckRack Daily has become a staple of (not just) my mornings. 

The MuckRack Daily is produced by the editors at MuckRack - an essential SaaS service for anyone in PR. MuckRack's product is the easiest way to track & build out relationships with journalists on (and off) social media. If you're in PR, you probably already know about it. If you are, and don't, check it out - you'll thank me :) 

MuckRack was started by one of my favorite entrepreneurs - Greg Galant (who is also the founder of the Shorty Awards). And while I could  spend time outlining all the good things about the MuckRack Daily (as well as MuckRack's other digest email - their MuckRack alerts)...I figured it'd be much more interesting to hear from the chief MuckRaker himself.

So I talked to Greg. And here's what he had to say:

GREG: Muck Rack let you effectively pitch story ideas to the right journalists to get press, monitor what's being said about your company, receive alerts when there are new PR opportunities and track how successful your PR efforts have been.

Muck Rack also allows journalists to get verified in our authoritative directory, build a beautiful portfolio and track the impact of their work.

KNOWTIFY: You actually have two great daily digest initiatives - the Muck Rack Daily and what you call Alerts from your main product. What is the difference between the two?

GREG: The Muck Rack Daily (http://muckrack.com/daily/email) is a free email written by our writers that summarizes what journalists are saying about the news in general and the media industry. It’s won critical acclaim from both the journalism and PR words by offering an inside look at how the news it made. It also has news about journalists changing jobs, job posting and highlights great work journalists are doing.

Muck Rack Alerts (http://muckrack.com/alerts/), on the other hand, sends you an email (either as-it-happens or in daily digest form) when a journalist tweets, links to or writes about your company, competitors or any other keyword. Our customers tell us it’s more useful than Google Alerts because it comes faster and includes what journalists say on Twitter. Thanks to an early warning from a Muck Rack Alert, MasterCard was able to correct a mistake in an article shortly after it was published.

KNOWTIFY: Tell us about the origin of the Muck Rack Daily. Where did it come from? What was the original idea?

GREG: When we started Muck Rack in 2009 there were only a couple hundred journalists on Twitter, so it was easy to keep up with what they were saying. Just a year later thousands of journalists had signed up for Muck Rack, and it was impossible to keep track of all of them. So the basic idea for the Muck Rack Daily was to have one email that summarizes everything journalists were tweeting to save our readers time. As Peter Kafka put it in AllThingsD when we launched, “Straightforward stuff, but it’s something that isn’t being done yet.”

It’s evolved to have more of an attitude than when we started and offer more of an inside look into how journalists operate and how the news is made.

KNOWTIFY: What has the Muck Rack Daily meant to your business?

GREG: The Muck Rack Daily is a cornerstone of our business. It’s given our brand a lot of credibility with both journalists and PR pros, which has made it easier for us to get meetings with potential customers and even drive conversions to our pro product. It also creates a strong incentive for journalists to join Muck Rack, since being quoted in the Daily will increase their visibility with their peers.

The Daily also has had a lot of second order benefits: We’ve been able to put on a series of events hosted by news outlets including the Wall Street Journal, AP, LA Times, FT and NBC News that we’ve filled up with our audience from the Daily. We’ve also been able to do media partnerships with other events (where we promote them in the Daily in exchange for access to and exposure at the event), whereas otherwise we’d have had to do a paid sponsorship.

KNOWTIFY: For Muck Rack, how important are these daily touch points with your users?

GREG: What websites do you visit every day? If you can answer more than three then you’re in the minority. Being able to connect with your users every day is very powerful, but it’s very hard to do that on the web and it’s increasingly hard to do it through social media. Having an open-worthy email is one of the only ways to connect with users on a daily basis. But remember, the content has to be awesome because the “mark as spam” button is only one click away.

----------

Thanks to Greg for taking the time to talk to us this week. We are big fans of the MuckRack digest strategy and look forward to it continuing to evolve. If you have any questions for Greg, he is available on Twitter at all hours of the day and night :) Cheers!

[knowtify-blog]

Why we love Todoist, and how they can make their email digests better

Keeping a team focused and organized is difficult. There's an abundance of productivity apps in the market. How do you know which one is right for you?

Here at Knowtify, we needed help staying organized with a few specific projects. And we tried many solutions, but for one reason for another, they didn't fit our workflow - I felt like I was doing more work to try to get work done. No good. 

Enter Todoist

We heard good things about Todoist and decide to give it a shot. It's been a few weeks... and we're still using it! The ability to quickly create, assign, and complete tasks is amazing. Visually, the interface is simple and well organized. And we can start discussions about tasks in real-time - it fits great into our workflow! We love their delightful finishing touches too - for instance, when all tasks are completed, you see a different message based on the time:

Their daily digest email

The completed tasks and productivity chart is great for keeping me engaged and motivated! The Karma chart underneath is a bit confusing, because as a new user I'm not sure it means. But I think they're definitely on the right track here with these data-viz charts. 

What I'd also love to see is a snapshot of yesterday's activity, speaking of which....

By default, I'd receive a notification about every action taken, which in theory is good for staying in the loop, but in reality you get something like this:

Yup, that's a lot of emails. I started ignoring them after a while.

Sure, I could go into settings and manually change my notifications, but the power of defaults are strong. Although I haven't seen the numbers, I imagine many users going through the same experience will stick with it.

Jakob Nielsen writes,

"Users rely on defaults in many other areas of user interface design. For example, they rarely utilize fancy customization features, making it important to optimize the default user experience..."

Having smarter defaults and bundling related actions into fewer emails would definitely help. 

I would also offload some of this into their daily digest. 

Their daily digest could look like this:

Seeing a summarized recap of yesterdays activity is a great way to stay motivated without being overwhelmed by a sudden barrage of emails, and knowing what tasks are due today keeps me focused. This is more concrete and actionable in comparison to their existing digest.

Actually, they could have 2 digests.

Two different digests

While the new daily digests will cover the nitty-gritty and help me plan my day, the weekly digests (their existing emails) are great for higher level overviews of my productivity. These digests provide complementary information and I see it working great in tandem. 

If users find daily recaps and actionable tasks as useful as I think they will, their productivity should shoot straight up, which will then be reflected on the awesome charts in their weekly emails - this is an awesome way to keep users engaged in a positive feedback loop! 

Anyway, we love Todoist and will continue to use it for future projects. A more actionable daily digest would totally help us, and we think it'd help other users too. We'd love to see it happen!

[knowtify-blog]

Quora Digest email

One of the best digest emails in the universe - certainly a Knowtify Hall-of-Famer - is the Quora digest email. This email makes the Hall-of-Fame, not only for its value from a user-perspective (I love it), but for it's power to drive engagement. 

We recently surveyed Quora users about their engagement with Quora. 58% of all the respondents indicated that the Quora digest email was the main reason they visited the Quora app. But even more interesting, 83% of those who said that they visited Quora once per week or more (their most engaged users) claimed the digest email as the main reason they visited Quora. 

Talk about a digest that drives value - not just for users, but also for Quora shareholders. Quora was recently valued at $900mm - and I would contend that much of this value can be attributed to this digest email.

THE QUORA DIGEST

If you're a Quora user (meaning you have an account with Quora), you will be well aware of these digests. They started out as a weekly email, but have moved to daily and recently I have even noticed them coming more than once per day.

The Quora digest summarizes interesting/popular questions that have either been posted, or answered, or voted on by people within your network. They also look for questions that would be interesting to you based on some sophisticated analysis of what you tend to like. 

What to like about the Quora Digest

First of all, we love the Quora digest for existing. There is so much great content on Quora, but without this digest email, much of it would go unnoticed.

We also love how the digest presents a mix of content from the users direct network along with seemingly random (but popular content). This gives this digest both a sense of personalization and relevance while not ignoring the beautiful serendipity that makes Quora special. I generally find myself engaging with the most relevant content first and then exploring any interesting posts later on in the email. 

Also, as a practitioner in the digest email space, I also have to appreciate their smart use of dynamic subject lines for their digests. These digests always use the most relevant question from the digest as the subject line for the digest. 

This makes each email feel fresh and drives great open rates and engagement. It's a smart practice that other digest creators should take note.

How to sign-up for the Quora digest

If you'd like to sign-up for the Quora digest, you will need to create and account - which you can do here.

[givegab]

Introducing the Weekly Digest Email for Volunteers!

We realize that in the past, you may have received a few more emails from GiveGab than you might have liked (or, let's face it, a LOT more). That's why we're excited to launch Weekly Digest Emails for Volunteers! 

Starting Wednesday, March 12th, volunteers using GiveGab will begin receiving a Digest email every week.  This email includes 4 important sections: 

Posts to Your Wall: This includes the last 3 comments made to your wall within the last 7 days.  It will not include Reflections or Logging Hours posts, and we only display activity that wasn't your own (because you know what you did).  :)

Posts to your Organizations' Walls:  Similar to the above, each organization that you belong to will have a section which shows the last 3 comments made to their wall. 

Events: This section will show recently added Events, Programs and Jobs by your organizations.  And if any of your friends are volunteering there, you'll see that information too!

Connections: Friend requests and recently added friends will appear here.

If there's no new activity in any of these sections, then it won't appear in your Digest email.  If there was no new activity at all that week, you won't receive an email (we've learned our lesson about too many emails!).

Here's a sneak peek at the new Digest email, let us know if you have any questions or feedback at [email protected].