While working on a web-based business management tool, we're looking into adding forums.
Let's say a user has notifications turned on, for every time someone posts in a topic you've created or responded to. They get an email the very moment someone responds. (let's put aside for a moment the spamminess of this practice)
In that email, do you put:
- The topic title, linking to the topic & post
- The topic title, a teaser of the text inside the post, the link
- The topic title, full text of the post, the link
Or, of course, anything I'm missing here.
The reason I'm asking is because I think it's important to get users to actually go to the site, because they might click around a bit and see other (new) topics, and be more likely to engage. Apart from that, there's some other functionality on the site (like personal messages, action lists etc) that will make the user stick around a bit longer once they're there.
For bonus points:
How would you approach the engagement question in general? Is the above way too forced? Should I just build everything with a usability-first mindset? At some point, does usability get trumped by the fact that you won't get content if people don't visit your site?