Build a Slack Subscribe Feature in 3 Easy Steps.
I built a subscription feature for my slack channel. It took less than 10 minutes to setup, and it’s helped to double my average daily viewers.
The pace of innovation at Salesforce means there is a lot of information about the latests product features, upcoming events, architecture and more. It takes a lot of sifting through Slack channels to get the full picture. It can be a lot of work.
So, to take some of the burden off of my colleagues, I run a digest channel that centralizes a few dozen threads into a single weekly feed. The aim here is high signal / low noise.
If you run any large broadcast channels, you know that there is no faster way to get users to hit the mute button than by spamming them with unwanted notifications. To that end, I needed a way for users to be able to opt-in for notifications when they wanted, while keeping my channel generally notification free.
To solve for this, I used the Workflow builder to create simple subscriber model.
Here’s how it works:
On my channel, a user can run a workflow to ‘subscribe’ for notifications. This flow adds them to a group. When I tag a post with the group name, each of my subscribers receives notification of the new post.
If they want to stop receiving notifications they can launch an ‘unsubscribe’ flow which removes them from the group.
Easy.
Here’s how to set it up:
1. Create the user group
Click: Your Organization | People | User groups | New
Give your group a name that corresponds with your channel. The Handle is what you will add to your posts when you want to notify your group. Since this is an opt-in subscriber model, I choose not to add any group members by default.
2. Create your workflows
Open the Workflow Builder:
- Click Create From Scratch.
- Start from a Slack link - so you can share the signup flow in posts / canvases / emails etc.
- Click Steps | Users | Add people to a user group
Make a duplicate flow which removes the users from the group, to give them an easy way to unsubscribe.
Personally I like my flow to send a message to the user to give them details about the groups purpose, how to unsubscribe if needed, and how to interact with the digest — more on that in a future post.
Optionally, I added a step which copies the date and user’s name to a Google sheet, which helps track subscribe / unsubscribe metrics.
3. Publish and @mention to notify your subscribers!
To make it easy for users, keep the subscribe buttons visible on your posts and canvases.
To notify your subscribers of updates, simply @mention the group in your posts!
This setup enables users to opt-in for notifications, maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio in your channel.
— Reed
