Are your patrons confused too?

Community Coffee Conversations
#1

I’m confused about posts. When I make posts for my patrons, they receive an email with the content of the post. That’s great. However, below my content, the email includes a button which says “View on Patreon”. That doesn’t really make sense in my case, because I put everything I wanted to say to the patron into the post which got emailed.

Worse yet, if they do click on that “View on Patreon” button, a web page pops up that says, “Unlock this post by becoming a patron” (unless they happen to be already logged into Patreon). That doesn’t make any sense, because those emails went only to patrons — why is it asking them to become patrons? This is not just confusing to me, but it’s confusing to my patrons, they’ve let me know.

Am I missing something? Are other people getting this same confusion, or am I doing something wrong?

How can I get rid of that “View on Patreon” button in the emails? If I can’t, how can I cause the landing page the patron sees to ask them to log in instead of asking the patron to become a patron? Any light shed on how to improve the patron experience in this case is much appreciated. What are other people doing about this?

I found that I had to end my posts with: “You can ignore the “View on Patreon” button that Patreon adds to these emails, since everything I wanted to say and the video link are in this email.” Does someone have a better approach to dealing with this?

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#2

I would like to be able to suppress the content links as well - the ones which allow downloading content without visiting Patreon. If I delete a post, the links continue to work, which can confuse Patrons if I’ve needed to replace the content.

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#3

Both of those things (the view on Patreon and the fact people aren’t logged in) are not controlled by you. It’s just part of the template email and the way the website works. Just because someone clicked on a link in an email does not mean they are logged into the site. That’s normal, standard website practice. And clicking a link in an email should never “assume” a logged in status. Just think if someone shared that email with a friend and that link did that?

The words for the link could be changed to “comment on Patreon” or “participate on Patreon” as the only way patrons can comment on your posts is by going to the Patreon link of the post. So, even though you said everything in the post, if a Patron wants to engage with you, they have to go to Patreon. That’s probably the purpose of the link to begin with.

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#4

The direct download links actually keep them AWAY from Patreon, so no, that’s not the case with my point at all.

#5

I sort-of understood the idea of the list of posts on Patreon, locked to those not in the right tier. That seems like good enticement for people to become patrons or to up their tier. But I didn’t understand why patrons would want to visit there, when they had already received the post in their email. Both of you have helped me see that there are at least 2 reasons: 1) there might be updated content; 2) to engage in conversation.

I think that changing the link in the email to say “participate on Patreon” sounds like a great idea! But I think that even more important is to avoid presenting PATRONS with a page that says “Unlock this page by becoming a Patron”. That’s fundamentally nonsensical and off-putting.

Email and web technology make it possible for the landing page to know that the visitor was referred by a patron email. It should say, “login as a patron to unlock page” or something like that. Or links in patron emails could refer to a patron version of the landing page. There are plenty of technological solutions. If the page for some reason doesn’t know if the visitor is a patron or not, it could have 2 buttons for then to choose from: “log in if you are a patron” and “become a patron”.

Any of those approaches would make perfect sense. The point of all of this stuff is to engage the patrons and make them feel that we care about them. Confusing them and saying off-putting things to them because “it’s just the way the website works” is not what I expected of Patreon. I hope they can fix that soon!

2 Likes
#6

Don’t expect them to do it soon. Their development team is sadly very lacking in productive resolution. So many of our complaints and requests for improvement fall into a queue never gets addressed and when they do fix things they cause more issues.

1 Like
#7

[quote=“SEA-Media, post:1, topic:10825”]
…participate on Patreon[/quote]|

I second this idea of changing the wording. It is certainly beneficial for people to comment and like our posts on the Patreon platform so other non-patrons can see there is a community to become part of.

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#8

All of this makes perfect sense, and would take about 2 minutes to implement, so… :joy:

Brian

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#9

Yes! I think changes in our landing pages will make the experience a bit less confusing.

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#10

Patreon could fix this by adding a query string to the URLs of “View on Patreon” buttons in emails. That way, Patreon would know that the visitor is probably a patron that arrived to the website from the email. Patreon could then show a different message, e.g., ”You have to log in to confirm that you are a patron.”

For example, if the new post has this URL

https://www.patreon.com/posts/weekly-bonus-16-44520291

then Patreon could add something like

 https://www.patreon.com/posts/weekly-bonus-16-44520291?from-email=true
#11

No, the industry standard in web development when someone follows a link in an email to a page that requires authentication to access is not to prompt them to create an account, it’s to prompt them to log in, and also have a “create account” link.

This is what every other content platform, social media platform, and for that matter retail site in existence does. What the OP is asking is nothing less than that Patreon conform to the standard practice.

Given that – as the OP pointed out – these emails only go to patrons, there’s no reason that the message they see on the site shouldn’t just be a username/password modal dialog. Good grief.

2 Likes
#12

That’s unnecessary. Frankly, Patreon shouldn’t be prompting drop-in visitors to secured pages to create accounts, but to log in – regardless of whether they came from an email link or anywhere else.

Prompting to create an account betrays that Patreon assumes visitors won’t already have an account. Way to signal insecurity.

All unauthenticated users who visit an access-controlled page, should be prompted to log in, with a smaller link to create an account.

1 Like