How do you communicate product updates to your users?
For those of you with an existing userbase, how do you communicate product updates to your users? How often do you do this? What tools do you use?
We are doing several things when it comes to new features announcements: 1) Newsletter (mailchimp) Newsletter with latest improvements, once a month (open rate of 5-6%)
2) In-app - everytime there is an opportunity - mostly bigger/noticable updates) a) Using our own product (Inline Manual) where within a widget we show latest release notes, always available b) through in-app announcement, sometime interactive walkthrough, to show them step by step what is new and how to use it
3) Community (discourse) - everytime there is something new, but even small updates we can post to community and keep it more granular We have a community for our customers where we announce those features in advance, where further discussion can happen or clarifications
Generally pretty badly but I am working to fix that.
Currently, I use my blog and makerlog. I just do summaries of the things I've been working on and link back. On the blog, I tend to be a bit more forward-looking than reviewing what I did because I have my log here. But I'm working to improve that.
Going to start building out a monthly newsletter for my users, that works as a digest of activity on the app. It's also an email marketing tool so I should be doing that at the very least to try and showcase the app.
The monthly digest will contain info from the changelog. What features have been released, etc. Maybe I'll create a summary of the updates from the latest release.
I like how @kilian does the changelog on Polypane - https://polypane.app/docs/changelog/ so I'll likely follow a similar model for that.
I do it in three ways:
- I blog about major releases.
- I sends a new version newsletter and social media update for major releases or noteworthy minor releases.
- I keep a changelog at https://polypane.app/docs/changelog/ and those release notes are also shown in-app after an update.
Everything is handwritten, the changelog lives on GitHub so I can send it everywhere (which for now is the site and the app)
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