User Engagement vs. User Adoption
In a previous article I outlined the numerous ways that an end user might engage with your product or service. What I didn’t address is the fact that customer engagement and adoption are not the same thing. Engagement is good, but is it good enough?
What Are Engagement Activities?
Marketing and Support teams spend countless hours (and dollars) working to influence end users to continue to consume your company’s materials. Typically engagement is measured by your customers doing the following:
- Using social media to interact with you (likes, shares, comments, etc.)
- Consuming your content materials (support articles, eBooks, webinars, white papers, blog articles, etc.)
- Providing sales references for you
- Presenting at your events (webinars, case studies, etc.)
…and the list can continue depending upon the maturity of the marketing program at your company.
What Are Adoption Activities?
There’s confusion between the terms engagement and adoption. Adoption is typically defined by an end user’s actual consumption (usage) of your product and is measured by usage events. To consider something “adopted” depends upon what your company determines to be “sticky” behavior. Adoption revolves around that “activity” or series of “activities” that you want each of your end users to do with (in) your product.
As an example, it may not be considered adoption for an end user to simply log in to your product. Perhaps that end user needs to perform some other task in your product like build a report, or invite a friend/colleague.
- Number of logins per <period>
- Number of <feature> events per <period>
- New users added
What Are the Engagement Activities That Lead to Adoption?
The cool thing about engagement is that it can lead to adoption. Leaning heavily on your service channels is a great way to convert engagement activities into adoption activities.
Consider beefing up:
- Knowledge bases / product documentation
- Support center
- Product announcement emails
- Training materials
- Tool tips
You may have other resources that you use to support your end users. Whatever they may be, the spirit here is to leverage all of your resources to assist your end users with *how* to use your product.
By providing excellent documentation you can lead your end users from engagement (of your service channels) to deeper adoption of your product.
Which is Better? Engagement or Adoption?
Both! Engagement and Adoption are symbiotic in that each feeds the other. Engaged customers adopt and adopted customers are engaged.
If it’s not already, adoption should be a metric of focus for your company. Keep an eye on adoption as it stems from engagement channels. The ability to correlate a direct relationship between certain content pieces or service channel consumption against an uptick in usage is exactly what you’re shooting for!
