So you built out your community, added a dazzling array of categories, and have tons of cool badges standing by for your users to earn. You invite you early adopters and beta testers and then… very little happens! What is going on, you wonder, and what can I do fix this? 🤔
Below, you will find some best practices that we’ve identified as almost-universally applicable - whether you have a small, niche community, or are launching a global powerhouse that will connect millions! 😎
Table of Contents:
First, it is good to know and acknowledge that it is not uncommon that a share of the soft-launch members may remain inactive. Chances are quite high that in the beginning you may have a very low amount of users accessing and meeting in a - beautifully styled, but - largely empty community. So you may have as few as one or two users per category.
Second, Community is a numbers game. So, the more users are visiting the community, the more likely people will be active & engage with each other. Even if you start with a number of (somewhat) committed users, this does not mean that all of them become active right away, or even in the near future. We’ve seen it often that only about half of all soft-launch participants become active. Do note that this does not mean anything about potential engagement once the community is live.
A good analogy to think of here is to imagine your users as folks going to restaurants - with the categories being your restaurants. So in your case there are lots of empty restaurants where they would be the first customer... that can be quite daunting and even scary for a lot of users. There, we recommend to rather start with a reduced, more general categorization.
So, with these two larger ideas in mind, here are some specific tips and tricks you can try as you try to engage more of your users!
Take your users by the hand and give them specific assignments📚
It is an accepted and recommended practice to have a guide for your new users - check out this article on some best practices for this type of content. However, this information may not be relevant or specific enough for your founders. Creating some specific content which speaks to them and what you are trying to achieve, is a great way to not only acknowledge their commitment to your community, but also to give them specific guidance on the role you expect them to have now and moving forward. Ask them to write a concrete piece of content (e.g. their most frequently asked question, their biggest hack in onboarding, a success story, etc.). Some of these users may not even be sure if they are "allowed" to post somewhere, or what kind of content they could be working on. Make sure they know what they can do - and indeed should be doing - in your community.
An example of this could be that you ask users to upload a profile pic, but you do not explain where they can find this setting (the url actually is the same for all: https://communityURL/settings/profile). By taking them by the hand a little bit more, friction can be removed and users will feel more welcome.
We recommend to even feature this content on the homepage, with the title addressing the founders, making it clear that this is where they need to start.
Content strategy📋
A strong content strategy is integral to make any type of community and community launch successful. This works on multiple levels:
- Your own, actual content calendar
- You cannot simply fully on your early adopters and/or users to generate all the content for your community. Instead, you will need to create some initial content. Define your calendar (e.g. based on top support requests) with the goal of 3-5 pieces of content per category. In addition, make a plan to ensure activity in all categories - whether that is driven by key stakeholders, someone at your company, or the community team. Check out this article to help you develop a more robust content strategy.
- Soft-Launch content calendar
- Define a series of content pieces which cover all the things that you want to review with your early adopters. Depending on your timelines, you could think about having a new topic to review every 3 days: Starting with the categories (what they stand for, grouping, hierarchy, etc.), then continuing with the layout, continuing with content strategy, notifications, gamification and so forth. By asking concrete questions, your early adopters will feel more invited and have a clear question to focus on.
But why do early adopters sometimes require so much ‘hand holding’? We have found that if users only have a loose indication of what is expected - “Please create some content and have fun!” - they are less likely to make that step as they might doubt their own approach, be worried about the level of quality of their (potential) contributions, or what they are supposed to do in each category. By providing clear and specific engagement opportunities, such as concrete questions, CTAs (calls to action) to reply, or engage in polls, inactive users will be much more likely to test the waters and be less hesitant to create content themselves.
Email campaigns / Communication📬
A strong email campaign and proactive communications can also help you engage your early adopters. Creating an email campaign - go here to learn more about the how-to - to give the founders weekly updates on the progress towards the launch. This will bring users back to the community and remind them of this project and how important their own contribution is to it. Pointing to specific content pieces and asking them to perform specific actions (ideally again by taking them by the hand as much as possible), are great ways to provide them direct input on what they should be doing.
You can also share milestones / examples of good behavior. Don't be afraid to share your own learnings, mistakes, and successes as part of this process as well - it will help you to build a stronger relationship with your users. And behavior like this may also help support you leverage your community to support your larger Customer Success strategies.
Give them their own space🏡
We all have a place where we feel automatically comfortable. Harking back to our earlier idea of imagining your community as a set of restaurants, sometimes guests want a table off to the side, in a more quiet part of the restaurant. If you have not done so yet, we recommend that you create a group or a category where you - your early adopters and community team - can all meet. During the soft-launch or beta phase, you will also want to also highlight this part of your community on the community landing page, in categories, and on topic pages (sidebar). This will ensure that users can always find their way back to it.
In this space, you should proactively share updates, encourage users to introduce and share more about themselves, and you can create centralized topics to collect UX feedback, bug reporting, etc. It is also particularly important to reassure your users that their test content and/or feedback will not be visible after launch, by either telling them that it will be hidden from the rest of the community or deleted prior to launch.
Research their experience🕵️
The likelihood is quite high that your super users and early adopters are not representative of your complete, future user base. This can stem from a myriad of reasons, but most likely is due to them being a smaller group of hand-picked or self-elected individuals that you have relied on and will continue to rely on for honest and open feedback for topics also related to things outside of your community.
In your community, however, they will help you by pointing out where they are facing challenges or where they had different expectations. Thus, it is particularly important to survey them and conduct interviews with them, and then improve your workflows and community practices based on these insights. If they cannot find where to start a new topic, you ought to add more CTAs or make existing buttons more visible, by using a floating header, for example. Improve navigation (mega menu, breadcrumbs, navigation widget, or category sidebar) and streamline the onboarding experience (welcome email, registration flow, and community onboarding content). There will be lots of things you may not notice, but you should engage with and rely on your users, who can point you to those items.
Gradually increase reach🤝
Starting with a small, highly-motived group of early adopters is a good practice. However, part of your launch strategy should also involve sourcing more founding members as you ramp up towards your ‘full’ Go-Live. Many communities in soft-launches increase their user base over time, specifically to nurture more p2p (peer to peer) engagement. Talking to and involving your marketing, CS (community success), or product team, may allow you to bring more users into and activate them in your community . By doing so, you achieve a couple of related things: first, you are increasing the User ↔️ Category ↔️ Content ratio, making it more likely that the average user is more active than he or she is currently. Second, by you are bringing in a wider range of voices - all of which can create and engage in more dynamic, meaningful discussions.
We hope you at least find some inspiration from the items above, and ideally are able to implement some (or all) of them in your own community.
What have been some of your most effective strategies to make the early part of your journey more effective and meaningful? Drop your comments below, and we’ll expand this list with your ideas!
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Lasted Edited: March 29, 2023
