Driving Engagement: Increase Your Chances of User Adoption Success

National lotteries often advertise, “if you don’t play, you can’t be a winner.”

Seems rather silly, right? But it’s surprising how many people talk about winning the lottery without actually buying a ticket. They’re skipping the necessary first step in hitting the jackpot!

Forgetting for a moment that actually winning the lottery is a low-probability event, user adoption of a software solution or knowledge management platform isn’t much different. Proactive engagement has significantly better odds than playing the lottery, but government agencies and organizations must purchase the equivalent of a ticket, if you will, in order to increase their chance of adoption success. 

Here are five strategies on how to improve your organization’s odds of successful user adoption.

Optimized Onboarding Drives Adoption

Engagement is when users realize value, so make sure onboarding drives them towards your product or platform’s “a-ha moment” early. 

Provide the training and resources necessary to get new users engaged as quickly as possible. Training sessions are critical touch points for integrating users into communities, and these sessions can share your vision for the systems you operate and how they align with users’ missions. 

Tesla Government worked with one federal agency in February 2021 to leverage training with a small but critical group in hopes to strengthen buy-in and drive adoption. As a result, the agency’s monthly active users of our platform increased by 145%.

Personalizing the Experience Drives Adoption

Every user is different. That’s why it’s important to put in the work upfront to understand what an agency or organization needs from their product or platform. Once you understand the mission, you can identify user segments and build targeted  pathways through the platform. The users get the content they need, when they need it.

For instance, if your users are geospatially savvy, you may want to display their data in a map. If they prefer digging in and researching for themselves, perhaps presenting searchable raw data and accessible files is the way to go. Either way, when users come to expect relevant results from the platform, they’re much more likely to become active community participants.

Turning Superusers into Platform Champions Drives Adoption

Among user segments, identify the most engaged users on a platform, the ones who regularly use the product and contribute their data. Find out how and where they get value because they are the influencers who convert passive users into more active users within their organization. Tracking superusers is also a great indicator of overall platform health. Drops in superuser activity may mean it’s time to make changes in content presentation and structure. Spikes could indicate that a specific type of content is particularly valuable and is a candidate for other replication across other areas. 

Focusing On Communication Drives Adoption

Personalized and relevant messaging can help engagement and reduce churn. 

But resist the urge to bombard users with emails. Instead make each email relevant and guide users towards the next logical step in your product or platform. Use triggers to automatically send the right email at the right time. 

You can also chat in real time when you see users online. A friendly, personalized welcome text can also help capture users’ attention every time they log in. Feature descriptions and short and descriptive calls-to-action help users identify and understand the features they’re looking for quickly, reducing the time they have to wait.

At Tesla Government, we use personalized outreach to develop working relationships with our community of users, keeping them active and engaged. We’ve seen users engaged through this strategy go on to generate roughly 50% more logins and 300% more relevant page views than other similar users. 

Offline Engagement Drives Adoption

User engagement happens outside of a product or platform, too. Whether it’s through conference calls, training sessions, or working groups, look for trends or opportunities to engage with your users in the real world. Those who participate offline are much more likely to engage online.

Increase Your Chances of User Adoption Success

Increasing user engagement in a knowledge management system is a lot like playing the lottery. But user adoption strategy doesn’t need to be a gamble. Every improvement you make—optimizing onboarding, personalizing the experience, turning superusers into platform champions, focusing on communications, and engaging users offline—can improve user experience and ultimately drive user adoption.