I used to advocate sending notification to users to increase website engagement. Similar to Facebook, send an email to a user to tell her who commented on her post and who updated the status, and expect the user to click on the email and engage on the website. I think this is a genius idea, every UGC website should do that. However, when I think more, it is not worth of doing if most of the website content are not submitted by the users and the amount of subscribers are not significant, because the actions on non user submitted content won’t trigger any emails. And if not enough subscribers or activities on the website, the triggered emails will be very limited. Even though some users would click back to the website, but the engagement is not going to move the needle. The whole service is wasted.

When we think about using email to increase traffic, we have to check the percentage of activities from subscribers over the amount of website content first. For example, you have 1000 articles on the website, but only have 1000 subscribers, daily activities from subscribers are not much. Instead of thinking to use email marketing, it might be better spend the time on SEO, social exposure, and website feature enhancement, etc. Email marketing requires huge amount of resource, from research, design, test, deliver, analyze to improve, then run through the whole cycle again. Plus you have to pay for the email service!

So the idea, sending notifications to users is genius, when you have the substantial amount of subscribers and relatively high engagement on the site.