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Engagement Emails and Management
Engagement Emails and Management

How to use notifications and emails to improve engagement on your Stack Overflow Enterprise site.

Joel Bradley avatar
Written by Joel Bradley
Updated over 3 months ago

Tags | Emails | Engagement |

Applies to: Enterprise

ADMIN PRIVILEGES REQUIRED

This documentation is for Stack Overflow Enterprise. Free, Basic, and Business users can access their documentation here. Find your plan.


Overview

Email notifications play a crucial role in keeping users engaged and informed on Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise (SOE). Users can receive a variety of notifications to help them stay up-to-date with activities and discussions, including:

  • For You notifications

  • Weekly digests

  • Weekly dashboard report

  • Email notifications on posts

  • Research opportunities

For You notifications

For You notification emails mirror the alerts found on a user's For You page on SOE. Personalized For You notifications give users a convenient, all-in-one place to respond to questions, comments on articles, share their knowledge as a subject matter expert, discover new knowledge, and more.

Clicking on a For You notifications email link takes a user to their For You page, where they can see:

  • Feedback on articles they wrote

  • Activity on tags where they are a subject matter expert

  • User group notifications

  • New answers to a question they wrote

  • New questions they may be able to answer

  • New bounties

  • Their questions with no answers

  • Their questions with no accepted answer

  • Direct notifications

  • Edits to their posts

  • Content Health review actions

Users can control the frequency of their For You notification emails by clicking their avatar (profile picture), then Settings, then Edit email settings. The "For You Inbox" section allows them to select an email frequency of Off, Immediate, 3 hrs, Daily, or Weekly for the main site and each Private Team they're a part of (if enabled).

Content Health notifications in For You

The For You inbox feed includes Content Health notifications. Users with access to the Content Health review queue can filter for Content Health notifications on the For You page to see any posts identified as needing review. SOE will generate a follow-up notification email if no user takes review action on the post within 90 days.

Weekly email digests

SOE sends email digests (also called "community digests") to all users on the main site every week. If your site uses Private Teams, those users will also receive a separate Private Teams digest. Digests include top new questions of the week, highlighted questions needing answers, and a section that asks users to accept answers to their own questions.

Additionally, users can personalize their email digests to spotlight tags they're watching. The top activity related to tags they're watching will appear in their email. Their email digests will filter out activity related to tags they're ignoring.

Active weekly email digests

SOE considers sites and Private Teams "active" if there's been any activity on a question (answer, comment, upvote, etc.) in the past seven days.

Email digests for active sites or Private Teams include:

  1. Activity Metrics Highlights the number of new questions asked, new answers provided, and new tags added in the past seven days.

  2. A list of questions, including:

    • Top answered questions A list of the top two questions with answers, sorted by votes.

    • Top unanswered questions A list of the top three questions without answers, sorted by votes.

      If a user has tag personalization enabled, SOE will filter the Top Answered and Top Unanswered questions based on tags they watch.

  3. Top contributors A list of the top four users by reputation earned in the past month.

  4. Call to action Highlights the number of unanswered questions that the user may be able to answer.

If your site has Communities enabled, the digest will also highlight new Communities created in the past month and largest Communities (by member count). A section on Connectivity shows how your users are answering questions across departments and/or job titles. Communities and Connectivity are available on the main site only (not Private Teams).

Managing weekly email digests

Administrators can control the following main site digest settings from the Admin settings page in the "Email and notifications" section:

  • Turn email digests on or off globally. Digests are on by default. Users can disable email digests in their personal settings.

  • Include a section that lists the user's questions that have an answer but no accepted answer. This section is off by default. If enabled, this section can have a negative performance impact on your site (especially with larger communities).

  • Allow users to personalize their weekly digest based on their watched and ignored tags. This feature is on by default (for the main site only). Users can disable this in their personal settings.

To change email digest settings for Private Teams, see the Email settings for Private Teams section below.

Email notifications on posts

In addition to the activity digests, SOE will send users two email notifications from the main site or Private Teams (if enabled). These emails are in addition to on-site alerts that users receive when there is activity around their question(s).

  • New Answers Emails a question’s author when their question gets a new answer.

  • Accepted Answers Emails an answer’s author when a question author accepts their answer.

As with the weekly digests, administrators can manage email notifications from the Admin settings page in the "Email and notifications" section. From there, administrators can turn both emails on or off for the main site.

To change email notifications settings for Private Teams, see the Email settings for Private Teams section below.

Email settings for Private Teams

As with the main site, administrators can control email digest and notifications settings for Private Teams (if enabled). Unlike the main site, however, changing these Private Team settings requires accessing specific site settings as follows.

Private Teams email digest site settings

  • Newsletters.Enabled Send email digests for Private Teams. This feature is on by default for the main site and Private Teams. Go to https://[your_site]/c/[team_name]/developer/site-settings/edit?name=Newsletters.Enabled

  • Newsletters.NewslettersWithQuestionsToAcceptEnabled Include a section in the digest with questions that have an answer but no accepted answer. This feature is off by default for the main site and Private Teams. Go to https://[your_site]/c/[team_name]/developer/site-settings/edit?name=Newsletters.NewslettersWithQuestionsToAcceptEnabled

  • Newsletters.PersonalizedNewslettersEnabled Personalize the digest with the user's watched and ignored tags. Go to https://[your_site]/c/[team_name]/developer/site-settings/edit?name=PersonalizedNewslettersEnabled

Private Teams email notifications site settings

  • Email.EnableYourQuestionHasBeenAnswered Enable/disable new answers email notifications for question authors when a first answer is received. Go to https://[your_site]/c/[team_name]/developer/site-settings/edit?name=Email.EnableYourQuestionHasBeenAnswered

  • Email.EnableYourAnswerWasAccepted Enable/disable accepted answers email notifications for answer authors when their answer is accepted. Go to https://[your_site]/c/[team_name]/developer/site-settings/edit?name=Email.EnableYourAnswerWasAccepted

NOTE: The easiest way to change site settings for teams is to click into the team from the left-hand menu. Then, modify the URL by replacing "/questions" with "/developer/site-settings/edit?name=[Site.Setting]".

Private Teams default site settings

To change the default setting for all Private Teams, modify the site setting URL by adding &siteId=10000 to the end (or change the existing siteId value to 10000). Press ENTER. The notice "Channels only" will appear. Edit and save the setting.

When you change default site settings with &siteId=10000 appended to the URL, the new value will apply to all Private Teams that don't already have a custom value for that setting. New teams will also inherit this default value.

Other email notifications

Tag Watching

The Tag Watching feature allows users to receive email notifications for new activity on a specific tag or set of tags. Each tag has its own email setting, so users can adjust the frequency based on tag activity. Tag Watching monitors both the main site and each Private Team the user is a part of. Read more about Tag Watching.

Notifying

Connecting questions with people who can answer them becomes more difficult as a site's user base grows. To address this, SOE's Notify feature allows users to notify colleagues about questions they think they may be able to answer. SOE notifies a user by email when someone clicks Add people under a question and enters their name. The Notify feature works for both the main site and Private Teams.

Research

If we host your SOE site (your site is not on-premises), your users can opt in to research emails sent to help us refine and improve Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise. These research opportunities include surveys, user interviews, usability tests, focus groups, and more. To opt in, users can click on their avatar (profile picture), then Settings, then Edit email settings. They can then toggle Enable research invitations on under the "Research" heading.

To opt out of Stack Overflow research emails site-wide, reach out to our support team. If you opt out site-wide, users will no longer see the Enable research invitations toggle on their Edit email settings page.

Weekly dashboard report

Administrators can receive a weekly email containing activity statistics for the "General area," which is similar to the information available on the Activity Dashboard. This report helps administrators monitor their users' engagement and activity.

This weekly dashboard report is enabled by default for administrators. Admins can disable the weekly email by going to Admin settings in the left-hand menu, then Email and notifications.

You can also have your site email the enhanced Weekly Dashboard Report to additional recipients in your organization—they don't even have to be Stack Overflow for Teams users.

To add additional recipients of the Weekly Dashboard Report, click External subscribers to expand the external subscribers box. Enter a valid email address into the text box, and click Add. You can add up to five additional recipients. To delete an existing recipient, click its X button.

Connectivity

For SOE sites with Connectivity enabled and configured, the weekly dashboard report email can include a section that mirrors the Connectivity information at https://[your_site] /metrics-dashboard/connectivity. This section of the dashboard email includes the following metrics:

  • Connections across departments/job titles The total number of answers submitted by users with a department or job title that differs from that of the question.

  • Department/Job title connection rate The percentage of questions that were answered by users with a different department or job title.

NOTE: The Connectivity section of the weekly dashboard report email only applies to the main site. It doesn't include activity in Private Teams.

Sample emails

Below are some examples of the emails that SOE sends to users.


"Your Question Has Been Answered" Sample Email

Subject Line: Your question was answered!

Preview: Take a look at the answer to see if you have an accepted solution

Hi {First Name},

Your question has been answered!

{Question Title}

{Preview of the answer}

If the answer is what you were looking for, reward your teammate by accepting it.

Want to return the favor? Here are some questions that need answers - answering is a great way to help your team and earn some reputation points in the process:

{Question}

{Question}

Not the expert on a particular question? Mention others who may be able to help in the comments.

Best,

Stack Overflow


"Your Answer Was Accepted" Sample Email

Subject Line: Your answer was accepted!

Preview: {Asker's Name} thought your answer was the best one.

Hi {First Name},

Congratulations - {Asker's Name} thought your answer was the best one and accepted it!

Since you are on a roll, here are a few other questions that need answers:

{Question}

{Question}

Not the expert on a particular question? Mention others who may be able to help in the comments.

Best,

Stack Overflow

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