HubPages smart email notifications

Over the past year, engineer Ari Lamstein has worked on developing a more intelligent way to communicate to you via email about new activity on HubPages that might spark your interest. The goal is to let you know about new Hubs, new Questions and Answers, and new Forum threads, that might truly be interesting to you, as often as you like. You might call our ideal the “Goldilocks approach”: not too much, not too little, but just right.

Part of the change Ari has worked on has involved monitoring what you actually do click on and read. If you do end up clicking on a link to a certain Hubber’s new Hubs in an email often, we’ll be sure to notify you more often about their new Hubs. If you don’t click or read as much of a particular Hubber you’re following, we’ll notify you less often. The goal is to make sure notification emails are as useful to you as possible. Note: this discussion is for those Hubbers who have selected auto as their notification frequency; naturally, those choosing always will get all emails, while those choosing never will get none.

One measure of how useful these emails are to you, collectively, is the open rate of your emails. If you find notification emails more useful, it stands to reason you’re more likely to open and read them. Data from the past 9 weeks, displayed in the chart below, shows that open rates are generally climbing, hopefully correlating with the growing perception of these notifications’ utility to Hubbers receiving them:

Specifically, this chart records how many recipients opened up “instant email” (i.e. not including the daily digest) emails within 1 day of receiving them.

This innovation isn’t limited, though, to those who have selected auto for “instant email” only; it’s also been extended to those selecting auto for digests, too. The number of listings we include in your digest email responds to how often you click on the links, too. You’ll see, for example, the number of new Hubs published by Hubbers you follow wax or wane, depending on how often you click on those links. Note that this works on a per-Hubber basis: if you click on more of Hubber A’s new Hub links, but fewer of Hubber B’s, then we’ll include more links to Hubber A’s new Hubs than to Hubber B’s.

The newest addition to the smart email notifications that Ari has rolled out concerns topics you are following. The logic works the same: click on more links, and we’ll send you more links;  click less, and we’ll send you fewer. The difference is that it now extends to your favorite topics. We’ll let you know when new Hubs, Questions, Answers, and Comments are published on Chicago, for example, or classic cars. Within a week or so of “training,” or observing your response to the notification emails, we’ll adjust the frequency with which we email you about activity in these topics.

If you want to change how and what we notify you about, please visit your email settings page.