6 More Targeted User Education Tactics to Try

December 26, 2012


Last week, I shared  six innovative targeted user education tactics that B2B software companies are using to drive increased levels of customer satisfaction. This week, I will share six additional targeted user education tactics that your company can try out to drive higher levels of product functionality utilization and customer satisfaction.

  1. Create friendly and fun pop-up content and/or notices in the application that notify users about functionality they are not currently using that could be helpful with what they are currently trying to do. The key here is that the notices have to be targeted, not overly distracting or time consuming, but enticing.  There are lots of ways to do this. The easiest is to create a targeted user notification pop-up that notifies users that they are not currently making use of a certain functionality. To make this tactic more engaging, develop an animated user caricature that pops up to let users know about new ways to resolve issues. You can also do this by pairing notices with pop-up targeted user education videos.
  2. Run a contest to get users to try out new functionality that they are not currently using. Try a network contest like the Dropbox.com Great Space Race. The odds that the group will try using it is much higher because they will recommend it to fellow users. This extra exposure can be a great way to leverage a user network.
  3. Similarly, you could run a functionality use case contest where a prize is offered to the user network that submits the most creative and effective new product functionality use case. This is a great way to get users to tell others about how they are using under-utilized content and help foster a intra-company user company and create content to encourage underutilized product functionality adoption.
  4. Start a new case study series that profiles how customers from different target segments are using new functionalities and send it to the targeted user segments. This should help these users realize the potential value of these new functionalities and at least consider trying them out. Two of the biggest reasons users do not utilize new functionalities are because they are not aware of the functionalities and/or they are not sure how to make use of these functionalities. Providing targeted use cases should resolve both of these issues.
  5. Send a periodic product functionality usage report to users showing how their usage trends compare to fellow users and highlight how they could benefit from functionality that they are using less than peers. The key here is that this report needs to be simple and can be interpreted in a matter of seconds after looking at it. An overly involved table or chart will just confuse and frustrate users.
  6. Provide user certifications that reward expert users of key functionalities and provide them additional credentials for being a user community educator. This will encourage users to try out under-utilized functionality and strengthen the intra-company user community.

One factor to remember is that increased product functionality usage is only good when it increases the value of your services to a given customer.  So targeted user education tactics must be positioned in this way. The key is to drive awareness and get users to consider using under-utilized functionality.

Now you have some ideas to improve your company’s targeted user education process. Please share other ideas that you come up with after reading this blog in the comments.

For more on why companies must adequately fund targeted user education and customer marketing, see the first post in this series.

Marketing Manager, Pricing Strategy

<strong>Brandon Hickie</strong> is Marketing Manager, Pricing Strategy at <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/">LinkedIn</a>. He previously worked at OpenView as Marketing Insights Manager. Prior to OpenView Brandon was an Associate in the competition practice at Charles River Associates where he focused on merger strategy, merger regulatory review, and antitrust litigation.