Here's a recent Showcase customer email asking us about a feature that would allow Showcase Admins to email their users and give them more detail about updates.
Just thought I’d flick you a quick note with a little suggestion for Showcase Workshop (unless it already exists and I just can’t find it).
Having a feature where we can send an email update to users would be helpful. This would be for instances where we’ve created new or add revised content and want to send an accompanying note explaining exactly what we've changed or what's new.
As it so happens this is a nifty feature that is available to all Administrators and Editors and we'll show you how to use it in this blog post.
But first, a quick recap of the 3 kinds of standard push notifications which tell users in a generic way that updates have been made to a showcase/s. The appearance of these will vary a little across operating systems but here's how they look on iPad and iPhone:
1. On screen push notification (optional). You will receive these if you have Showcase push notifications turned on in your general phone Settings.
2. On app notification - this is also technically a push notification so may not appear if you have push notifications turned off.
The number will change to reflect how many updates are available. In this case, there's just the one.
3. In app notification - these will be green for new showcases that you haven't downloaded yet and orange to signal updates to showcases you've previously downloaded to your device.
But sometimes updates are specific and important and you want your users to know exactly what they are. So here's how:
Next to each Showcase you create there is a 'More' dropdown with a series of options.
The fifth option available to you is 'Email Users'
This option will allow you to type an email message that can be sent to all of the Viewer Users. It won't email everyone in your Showcase account, just the users who have access to that one showcase. So if you have a highly segmented user base you can be sure it's only going to email users of that one showcase.
You'll get a notification of how many users are about to receive your message along with a preview of what it will look like in their inbox.
We hope you find this feature really useful.
PS. We genuinely like getting customer suggestions & feedback. Even though this happened to be a feature we'd already created we'd love to hear from you if you have other ideas you think will improve Showcase. Email them to us anytime.