Tips for driving continuous engagement across a large set of users

Hi, all,

I need the help of this community to figure out some creative ways of driving continuous engagement of many users with a product.

A little bit of a background info: the product is a sales enablement software. The customer is an enterprise level account with thousands of sales reps. Obviously we want all of those thousands of sales reps using our software daily and have it embedded into their individual operations that they cannot live without us

Does anyone have any tips or tricks for driving engagement across that many users?

Here is what I have so far:

1. Webinars
2. Live virtual trainings for a segmented group of users
3. Knowledge base
4. Online tutorials

But I feel like all of these drive Customer Education but not necessary Engagement.

For engagement, I am thinking we need:

1. Post webinar/training automated drip email campaigns
2. In-App walkthroughs
3. Usage based interaction triggers

Is there anything else that worked well for you?
Our executive sponsor wants us to turn a certain number of users into power users/champions and then have them coach/get other reps excited about using the product but I REALLY struggle to see it working at scale.

HELP!

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Tatyana Ventura
Customer Success Strategist
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Andrew Marks

Oh yeah!

I had a LOT of success finding those Power USers/Champions and turning them into "Agents of Adoption". Over-index on training and support for them, and let them be your voice inside the customer. That strategy also creates the added benefit of reducing support needs, because these folks become a de-facto tier 1 support team within their own organization. Those folks also can serve you well when it comes to uncovering new opportunities.

I've been very successful with that strategy throughout my career.

Andrew

Tatyana Ventura

Thank you, @Andrew Marks. Love the idea of the easy app access - simplicity is always the key to success.

For the drip campaigns, I was thinking different scenarios base on how user is engaging with the app after the training. For those, who get more active, send them relevant tips, congrats on reaching milestones, pointing out value derived or outcomes achieved. For those who do not engage, perhaps some how-to tips/videos, links to case studies showcasing the benefits, etc.

Have you ever had success with using Power Users/Champions to drive multiple user engagement?

Andrew Marks

I like the ideas of webinars and in-app guides. Just make sure when you're planning these, you're thinking outside-in.

How do your users access the app? Something I've found really helpful and its really simple, is to show them how to bookmark your site in their browser, add it to the bookmark toolbar and add it as an icon on their desktop as well. I know it sounds basic but if you want people to engage, you want to stay too of mind. So make sure your name and logo stays out there.

What kind of content are you thinking about for the drip campaigns? These can be great but they can also be damaging. These drip mails need to be focused on the things that your users care about, not what you, as the vendor, care about. So some amount of personalization is recommended. For example, one of our clients is a software vendor serving law offices. We wanted to make sure they stayed too of mind so we created a monthly newsletter that lead with articles, white papers, blog posts that were relevant and informative. Things that would add value to the users if they read them. But because they served all types of law offices, we needed to segment their customer base by the type of law they practiced, and curate the content we sent them based on that.

Make sense?