Outpost Community Demo

Our email digest open rates jumped 40% with one change

By mayaonfire ·

Sharing this because it surprised us. We were getting ~18% open rates on our weekly community digest emails. Made one change and jumped to ~25%.

The change

We switched from the default digest schedule (Monday 9am) to Thursday 2pm.

Our community is mostly indie hackers and solo devs. Turns out Monday morning they're heads-down planning their week. Thursday afternoon they're looking for a break and more likely to browse community content.

We figured this out from the Analytics dashboard — the "Activity by Day" heatmap showed Thursday and Friday as our highest-engagement days. Just aligned the digest to match.

Other things that helped

  • ✅ Customized the digest subject line to include the top topic title
  • ✅ Kept the digest to max 5 topics — less is more
  • ❌ Generic "Your weekly digest" subject lines → ignored

Would be cool if Outpost added A/B testing for digest send times. hint hint 😏

5 replies

codewitch ·

This is gold. We never thought to check the activity heatmap to optimize digest timing. Going to try shifting ours to match our peak engagement day.

marcusd ·

The custom subject line tip is huge. Generic "Your weekly digest" subject lines get ignored. Including the top post title gives people a reason to click.

Does Outpost support dynamic subject lines for digests or did you set this manually?

top-outpost-ninja ·

Currently the digest subject is customizable but static — you set it in the email settings. Dynamic subject lines with the top post title is a great idea though. Adding it to the roadmap!

And noted on the A/B testing. That's been requested a few times now.

elena_builds ·

Our open rate hack was different — we added a "Reply to this email to post in the community" note at the bottom. Would be amazing if email replies actually created posts though...

top-outpost-ninja ·

Email-to-post is actually on the roadmap! It's a bigger lift technically (need inbound email processing) but it's one of the most requested features. Stay tuned.