The missing link for retention: Automating "We Miss You" emails
I'm working on my community using your stack, and I am really enjoying how FluentCommunity and FluentCRM talk to each other. However, I am hitting a wall with retention automations and was hoping you could help fix them.
Right now, I can see a member's "When we last seen" date sitting right there on their profile in FluentCommunity, so I know the data exists in the system. The struggle is that I cannot actually use that data point to fire off an automation in FluentCRM without manual intervention.
To spot members who are drifting away because they haven't logged in for a month or more, I am currently stuck doing it manually. I have to export user lists to spreadsheets every month to track engagement and find the inactive ones, which is a headache and does not scale well. The only other option is buying third-party tools just to tag users based on their last login, or trying to build complex SQL queries with external tools just to read that field.
It would be a game-changer if you could add a native User Inactivity trigger to the FluentCRM integration. I would love to be able to set a logic that says if a user hasn't visited FluentCommunity in a specified number of days, the system should apply a specific tag or something to trigger a re-engagement email sequence to help reconnect with them.
Retention is everything for us community builders. Usually, once someone cancels, it is too late to win them back. I need to reach out automatically with a personal message when they start engaging less, well before they churn. Adding this feature would make the Fluent stack a complete retention machine and save us from having to patch it together with other plugins.
Thanks for listening and for building great tools.
UPDATE:
You know, I want to make an additional suggestion based on a comment below. The idea is to look at Activity, and a Login is only a part of Activity. I'd like to amend the request to consider New Posts and Replies to help show engagement.
My guess is that a Cron job could run once a day to update the activity. Perhaps we need more than one trigger - for logins and for discussion activity.
No idea how this works in code, but I'm just an idea man. Let's hope the wonderful team of Dewvelopers can implement it.
Great idea
+1
Amazing feature request. Thanks
Great suggestion! Just wanted to add that the same inactivity detection logic could also be useful for list cleaning — automatically identifying and cleaning out contacts who have had zero activity for a certain period. Two use cases, same underlying concept.
Thanks for bringing this up 👍
Ramsis Kasis Your comment just inspired me to update the initial post to look at more than logins for activity.
+1
I use an automation, from fluent crm. When a user joins a space it waits for 20 days, checks the activity and send an email if he does not log in. Then I make a loop for 20 more days. I also have a dynamic segment to send emails every month.
Ioannis Glossopoulos That works for a specific wait period, but it's not quite what I'm after. I'm looking for a daily counter. One of the other things I want to do is automate badges for activity, sort of like Reddit does. If someone replies or posts every day in a row, grant a badge when they hit a number, like 10 or 20. Grant a badge after they login daily for 100 days, etc.
I think I need to buld this in n8n.
William Beem Yeah your thoughts are sweet! That would be an awesome automation. For the budges I do it manually for now
William Beem I'm a little out of the loop rn over at fluentcommunityaddons.com but I believe this functionality is a part of Ross FCA 's dev plan.
Charlotte D I didn't see it, but that's OK. I'm not really liking the pricing options I see there for other things. I have enough subscription plans already.
Charlotte D The essence of what's described is definitely in my plans, to the point it would be simple to pull it together to achieve the results asked for. I'm already tracking users activity/engagement via Advanced Analytics, and Members could definitely use that data to automate we miss you emails or other ways to try and reengage the user.
I have an "engagement score" currently that is based on posts (2 points) and comments (1 point). This could be configurable to include logins, login streaks, reactions to other posts etc. That engagement score could be trackable so maybe you could see a really active user start to tail off way before the stop logging in.
William Beem appreciate your honesty on pricing, and I try not to be in anyway "salesy" on here - but the lifetime deal I currently have is one off and provides access not just to existing and future add-ons, but to a vibrant and growing community of Fcom users who are contributing and influencing the development. The monthly subscription I think is really fair value, especially considering the majority of my members are owners of premium subscription communities, so they understand that particular model very well. My "customers" are actually "members". So if you think of it is a $19 per month premium community subscription that comes with a ton of free software that enhances your business and that you get to influence - you may then see and appreciate the value and worth 😊. There's certainly many many community owners here who charge a premium membership larger than $19 just for the privilege of a private discussion space with like-minded people, and maybe a resident expert in their field. I'm pretty sure that's what Skool, Circle etc are built on, and what FluentCommunity is all about.
Ross FCA Hi, Ross. No hard feelings. I appreciate the work you've put into enhancements for FluentCommunity.
When I looked at the products for your Premium plan, the majority were not things I need. That's either because I have a product that suits the role - such as Kanban or KB - or I didn't need them. That's $468 annually, so the value proposition isn't there for me.
If we look at some of the items I may need that could possibly be in your min plan for $19/month, it's limited to a couple of sites.
I create a number of test sites to show clients what they can do with FluentCommunity, FluentCart, etc. I have enough licenses to do that. It's the 3rd party licenses that start to eat into my budget when I try to match them with my FluentXYZ licenses for what is essentially a test or demo.
You're right that it could make sense for a profitable business venture. Tests and demos aren't profitable, but rather marketing efforts that have to incur some expenses. They don't always pay off, so I limit what I use on those sites.
For my own community site, I still need to build up a bit more. That is something I expected to kick off by now, but some client work is taking up a fair amount of time.
It's not that your offer is bad. It just isn't right for me. Monthly recurring revenue is wonderful. Monthly recurring payments are not. I'd rather buy the piece that I need than have the premium pack.
William Beem None taken! Genuinely, I aim to be as transparent with everything as possible. You could tell me what I'm doing is hot garbage and I'd hear you out and not take offence. I don't take financial contributions for granted, don't feel entitled to members, and don't expect my offer to be appealing or suitable to everyone. I tried to cover what I'm saying here in the launch offer page - again, not trying to sell anything to you or anyone in this particular comment thread, just for an explanation https://fluentcommunityaddons.com/launch-offer/ - it is an investment into a startup that promises to genuinely improve the user experience of your community.
If you'd like a multi-site license that's simply for demonstrating use cases to clients, I'd happily provide that for you :) If your goal is to truly show the full potential of the system you're selling then I know just the man to help 😄
Ross FCA Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.
Ross FCA One thing I will say is that some of the add-on pages need to have more info on them. For example the Progressive Web Apps page,Pages (post type) integration, 15+ community-requested UI improvements and customizations, Knowledge base etc.
While some of it is self explanatory, for those of us that would like to know more about the benefits or see it in action, there's very little details. If your goal is to actually sell people on those features, there needs to be more information.
Big thanks to the Fluent team for an amazing suite of products and for being so receptive to user requests! I love this feature request and hope it can be woven into F-CRM!
+1 great idea
Amazing to see the community support for this cool feature idea..
Missing You
Insta Net I'm pleased, because I think this is a feature about more than building a community, but about retaining members and keeping them from straying away. If we don't retain members, we're constantly fighting to find new members to take their place. That isn't growth. That's a hamster wheel.
I know that there are issues with this request. It requires a cron job and a counter if we look at the update requests. It could load up the database if not scheduled to prune old data. As the site grows and we track more members, it becomes more of a data and server resource issue.
Maybe some folks with smaller servers wouldn't want to run this feature, but I bet a number of us would use it.
William Beem good points 👍
I also posted something similar to entice "non-members" to join/return to the community..
Weekly e-mail digest summary for non-members https://community.wpmanageninja.com/portal/space/community-meta/post/weekly-e-mail-digest-summary-for-non-mem