Beyond email, what other channels have you found most effective and/or impactful in terms of communicating with users?

It depends on your product and business model. Since Quizlet is a freemium model that offers a ton of value to more than 50 million students each month, we focus a lot on the onsite placements that capture active user attention.

Pop up modals and banners can be really useful to get your message out there, as long as you reserve them for special launches (so as not to diminish their attention grabbing value). We often build these placements with a feature flag so we can easily turn them off if they are too aggressive against other health metrics, but on the whole they've been great surfaces to drive awareness and consideration.

Also, shameless plug -- if you're curious about Quizlet, we're hiring on the PMM team!

This is a really interesting question! I work in B2B and always think about the channel relative to the goal of the message.

For broadcasting a message to the widest possible audience, I find comms/PR to be a very effective way of communicating with users. If you're looking to gain reach and help reaffirm your position in the market with your users while also communicating to prospective users, there isn't really a better channel. Comms strategy can be as broad as targeting major news outlets or as targeted as niche trade publications. Impact is measured by number of articles and ideally projected audience reach.

For ongoing innovation announcements, I like to establish a few tried & true places where your users know they can find the latest information. This might be a blog you maintain, or even release notes. Build the channels, stay consistent with them, and don't introduce new channels to confuse your audience. Impact is measured by views.

For back and forth conversations, I find social channels as well as user communities to be the best spots to engage. You need to staff these appropriately with either people across your organization or with outside advocates of your products and make sure you are continually involved in the topics being discussed. We use X, formerly known as Twitter, Discord channels and more. Impact is measured by the amount of engagement.

For deeper conversations, you can never go wrong with a customer advisory board, focus group, or other in-person forum that lets you dig into the nuance of where you're going and get reactions. If you find a representative audience, a few hours of conversation with only a few customers can get you 80% of the insight you need to create your narrative and marketing strategy. If you have these conversations with influencers in your industry, you may be able to also create a broadcast channel based on these interactions as well.

Finally, you can make the biggest impact by using multiple channels at once. Just make sure to tailor the message to the channel!