Growth/Personalized first day/Engagement emails/cs

Tato stránka popisuje práci týmu Growth na projektu "aktivizačních emailů", což je podprojekt iniciativy "Personalizovaný první den". Tato stránka obsahuje nejdůležitější informace a rozhodnutí. Postupné informace budeme vkládat na stránku s novinkami týmu Growth, nejdůležitější či detailní informace budou vloženy sem.

Víme, že před zasíláním emailů nováčkům musíme posoudit mnoho věcí, zejména soukromí a bezpečnost. Náš tým spolupracuje s právními a bezpečnostními týmy nadace Wikimedie Foundation, aby se ujistil, že data budou zpracovávána vhodným způsobem. Také chceme vyzvat členy komunity, aby s námi sdíleli myšlenky, které nám pomohou vytvořit tento projekt přijatelným pro wikimediány. Chceme implementovat užitečné a nápomocné části emailů, avšak ne ty neužitečné a invazivní.

'''Ačkoliv jsme původně plánovali odeslat první e-maily koncem března 2019, tým Growth se rozhodl tento projekt pro nejbližší měsíce odložit a zaměřit své síly jinam. Myslíme si, že naše pozornost by měla být směřována na dva hlavní projekty: panel Potřebuji pomoc a Domovská stránka nováčků. Tým momentálně práci na e-mailech přerušil a může ji v budoucnu opět obnovit.'''

Současný stav

 * 2018-12-16: komunitní diskuse o nápadech, jak personalizovat první den nováčka
 * 2019-01-16: tým se rozhodl věnovat se "aktivizačním e-mailům" a "nástěnce nováčka".
 * 2019-03-15: tým se rozhodl snížit prioritu tohoto projektu ve prospěch projektů nástěnky nováčka a panelu Potřebuji pomoc.
 * Další: zvážit obnovu projektu v průběhu roku 2019 nebo 2020.

Shrnutí
Z výzkumu víme, že nováčci na Wikipedii přicházejí s konkrétními cíli, kterých se snaží dosáhnout. Pokud se jim to nepodaří, často odcházejí a již se nevrací. V uvítacím dotazníku jsme se zeptali nováčků na jejich cíle, abychom jim mohli nabídnout pomoc, kterou k jejich dosažení potřebují. E-maily jsou jednou z cest, jak toho můžeme dosáhnout.

Chceme:


 * Rozesílat e-maily, které si nováčci budou chtít otevřít, přečíst a reagovat na ně.
 * Umístit do e-mailů tlačítka, která uživatele povzbudí k učinění dalšího kroku (výzva k akci), tak aby je lidi vnímali jako užitečná.
 * Propojit obsah v e-mailech s obsahem na Wikipedii prostřednictvím nástěnky nováčků.
 * Zvýšit počet nováčků, kteří u Wikipedie zůstanou

Nechceme:


 * Rozesílat příliš mnoho e-mailů.
 * Vytvořit překážku v naučení se, jak komunikovat přímo na wiki.
 * Personalizovat e-maily natolik, že by byly invazivní.
 * Demotivovat nováčky tím, že jim řekneme, že jejich dopad byl nízký.
 * Navádět nováčky na matoucí "přistávací plochu" na Wikipedii.
 * Překážet ostatním projektům týmu Growth či jiných týmů.

Doručování e-mailů: abychom mohli tyto e-maily uživatelům zasílat, musí mít ověřenou e-mailovou adresu a s odesíláním e-mailů souhlasit. Kromě přidání možnosti souhlasu s odesíláním e-mailů uvažujeme nad cestami, jak usnadnit ověření e-mailové adresy. Ačkoliv nechceme tlačit uživatele, aby e-mailovou adresu uvedli, vidíme mnoho příležitostí, jak zdůraznit benefity uvedení e-mailové adresy a jak vyjasnit způsob, jak ji ověřit.

Why this idea is prioritized
Once a newcomer leaves the wiki after their first day — whether they do or do not accomplish their goals — it is likely that they are never encouraged to contribute again. This is because all existing communication channels are on wiki, even though the newcomer is no longer on the wiki. We can use email as a proactive communication vector to reconnect with new users off-wiki to help them to make their first edits or to continue making edits.


 * Community members were positive in their feedback on the idea.
 * Reach users no longer on wiki: emails enable communication with users who may likely no longer be active on wiki (and would therefore not see activity on Talk pages and Notifications).
 * Communicate with new users unfamiliar with Talk pages: automated communications exist in the wikis in the form of bots that post on new user talk pages.  While in some cases, those postings generate emails, email is not being fully utilized to get the attention of newcomers, who are usually not accustomed to how Talk pages work. Wikipedians who have experience mentoring newcomers have had success using email to communicate, since it is a medium they understand.
 * Email campaigns are a proven means of engaging users of software: email is used by virtually all other community contribution platforms (e.g. TripAdvisor, Google Maps/Locals, Wikia) to engage users.
 * Newcomers care about impact: many interviews with Wikipedians have surfaced that new editors first become enthusiastic about Wikipedia when they realize that others are reading their contributions.  Email can be a way to make users aware of their impact. There have been example of success in showing Impact data in other Wiki projects such as the Outreach dashboard (see comment here).

Comparative review
To learn how best to design engagement emails, our team's designer reviewed the way that other platforms (e.g. TripAdvisor, Wikia, Google) send emails to newcomers. While the experience we want to give newcomers is definitely different than other platforms (we want to give newcomers an optional, lightweight, non-invasive experience), we also recognize that there are best practices we can learn from other software. The comparisons are recorded in detail on this Phabricator task.


 * Takeaways from looking at emails
 * Show impact via celebration of milestones/achievements of a recipient’s contribution statistics or social impact (x people read your review) to motivate continued/re-engagement
 * Appeal to prosocial behavior (your contribution helps others)
 * Appeal to social proof encourages emulation (testimonials or examples of others participating)
 * Provide personalized recommendations that target specific interests of individuals reduces effort for someone to find out how to participate according to their interests
 * Personalized messaging in general is important (e.g., subject lines, copy, when the email is sent)
 * Provide onboarding help anticipates issues faced by newer recipients on how to get started, as well as remind them of the value of the sender’s product/service
 * Time messages to a relevant or meaningful event or timeframe (for example, an ‘impact’ email for the year sent at the end of the year)
 * Subject lines are direct, succinctly encapsulating the email’s intended purpose/message
 * Short, text-lean messages
 * Personalized, informal language is generally used
 * Usually contain a single, main call to action that is specific and prominent
 * Requests for specific follow up and feedback are sometimes shown towards end of messages
 * Optimize for mobile - commonly by using simple, single column layouts with centered text
 * Branding is prominent shown at the top of the email
 * Scorecards and ranking illustrations (leaderboards, badges, etc) are often used in impact emails
 * Minimal use of graphics, predominantly visual clean messages on white
 * Use of photography depicting people used in appeals to social proof and prosocial behavior
 * Takeaways from looking at industry metrics and benchmarks
 * Welcome emails are generally the best performing in terms of being the most opened (82.57%) and clicked (22.76%) type of email type.
 * Triggered emails such as an email when a user expresses interest in being contacted for mentorship perform second-best to Welcome emails, and have a much lower unsubscribe rate.
 * Autoresponder emails like a weekly or monthly “Impact” email have lower open and click rates, but also have a much lower unsubscribe rate.

Design
In order for emails to help users accomplish their goals, they need to be tailored to the things that we know about them from the welcome survey and from their editing history. Preliminary designs have been made for six email campaigns, but we will start with three, which are in bold:


 * Welcome: a generic orientation email that links to their newcomer homepage.
 * Impact: tell newcomers how many pageviews the pages they've edited have had.
 * Mentorship: send newcomers an automated message from a mentor they can contact for help.
 * Task recommendations: send newcomers a set of tasks related to their topics of interest or past edits.
 * Neighborhood activity: send newcomers a list of editing activity that has happened on articles related to their topics of interest or past edits.
 * New article: send newcomers who said they intend to create a new article a couple of pointers and link to tutorial.
 * Quiz: send newcomers a quiz with a series of questions to determine "what kind of editor are you?" Here is an example from Codeacademy.

General requirements

 * Should be possible to include rich content.
 * Be sent based on rules that incorporate welcome survey responses, edit history, and time.
 * Allow people to unsubscribe.
 * Allow us to know how often the emails are replied to.
 * Have a noreply@ from address or allow users to reply somewhere that their message will be seen.

Emailability
In order to send engagement emails to newcomers, they need to have verified email addresses associated with their accounts and they need to opt-in to receiving this content. The analysis our team did in this Phabricator task shows that a remarkably low number of users end up with verified email addresses. See the table below. Only 25% of Czech and 14% of Korean newcomers have verified emails. When we wondered why these numbers are so low, we realized that there are many moments during account creation where we could increase a user's understanding of what's going on, making it more likely they'll add an email if they want to. Here are some ideas we're working on:


 * Adding language to Special:CreateAccount that explains that email addresses are required for account recovery. T216087.
 * Adding a notification to Special:CreateAccount letting people know to look for a verification email. T216087.
 * Re-designing the verification email itself so that it is clearer what to do with it, and is less confusing. T215665.
 * When users try to create their account without an email, ask if they are sure. T215633.

Measurement
As with everything the Growth team does, it is important for us to be able to measure how users do and do not engage with the feature -- that's the only way to stick to strategies that are working and abandon the ones that aren't. We want to be able to measure how often users open and click on the emails we send them, but we know that instrumenting emails is new territory. We'll need to careful to safeguard privacy and security, and we will work with other Foundation teams to do so. We may need to come up with detailed solutions to learn what we need to learn without recording too much data, like the approach our team took with the "Understanding first day" project in which we obfuscated the names of articles viewed by newcomers.