Clearing the Basics Around Product Adoption
Product adoption also called user adoption is about helping target customers recognize the value of your product. Confused? Don’t be. Everyone thinks that product adoption is how many people are using your product, but it’s not.
User adoption is not conversion. Instead it’s about knowing whether your customers can or have realized the full potential of the product. Moreover, it will take some time for the users to realize this potential or what we call the ‘aha’ moment.
It’s the feeling customers get when they realize that your product or service can be used in so many ways. As I said earlier, you cannot measure product adoption right after launching the product or even after one month.
The adoption comes in stages, represented in the table below;
Observe closely that every stage is related to the next one. Accomplishing the goals you have set for each stage is essential to advance to the next one.
While we are at it, let me clear the air around two more related concepts, Feature Adoption and Product Acquisition and discuss how they are different from product adoption.
Product Adoption and Feature Adoption
Often used interchangeably, product and feature adoption rate are different. The latter aims to maximize the utilization of specific features within a product. It’s resorted after launching a new feature within the product and when a specific feature is underused.
On the other hand product adoption is a wider concept focusing on the utilization of all the features. However, product adoption may not always ensure feature adoption.
Product Acquisition and Adoption
Product acquisition focuses on bringing potential customers to the website or application page and letting them learn the value your product offers. Product adoption, on the other hand, is about converting the visitors who are in the awareness stage to paying customers.
Why Product Adoption Matters?
Product management thought leaders are often found saying, “Businesses that don’t understand how their users are using the product, are flying blind.”
This user adoption rate is required by sales, marketing, customer support, customer success, and product teams. All these professionals must know how many people use the product to achieve long-term success.
- Customer Success: For every business, the focus should be on retaining customers more than acquiring new ones. A small improvement in the retention rate can take you one step closer to success.
So strong adoption means users understand your product and it helps them achieve their goals. The more your customers use the product, the better they are at promoting it, sharing positive reviews, and being loyal to the brand. A higher product adoption rate is indicative of a strong customer community.
- Reduces Churn: Naturally, when adoption rates are higher, it will reduce customer churn. The churn rate is less because customers find value in your product and are less likely to abandon it or cancel subscriptions.
Several experts suggest organizations at all levels to focus on churn more than revenue as when churn is lower, the revenue will automatically increase.
- Better Customer Retention: Customer retention is akin to a golden egg for businesses. Retention like adoption, comes at the end of the stages of product adoption and successful retention depends on several factors.
Where a customer finding value in your product is essential, retention also depends on customer onboarding, support, and your ability to foster long-term relationships with the customers.
- Revenue Streams: Better adoption, regardless it's about a subscription service, a physical or a digital product, brings reliable income. Given the value your customers receive from the product or service, their willingness to pay is determined.
This financial predictability driven with measuring the product adoption rates allows for better planning and investment in product development or improvement.
- Cross-Selling and Upselling: The adoption rates are used to determine how receptive your customers can be to the product and its offerings. Engaged users with a higher rate of adoption will be more receptive to additional offerings.
This is because customers who use your product understand the core value you are offering. So, selling them premium products, features, product updates, and complementary products is easier than those who are still in the decision-making stage.
- Product-Market Fit: It’s the ultimate product validation test you need to know how well your product aligns with the market and customer needs. Higher adoption rates means a higher product value and is a strong indicator of product-market fit. At the same time, a lower adoption rate means the product needs fine-tuning to align with the market needs.
Companies offering digital products like SaaS solutions will need to work harder to maintain adoption rates. It’s easier to switch a SaaS service than it is to switch a washing machine, don’t you think?
So, your approach to understand the adoption rate should include the customer’s motivations, needs, and pain points for using your product.
Teams Likely to Collaborate for Product Adoption
From product launch to product adoption, it’s a collective effort. Multiple teams and professionals must come together to contribute with their findings and to leverage the information to improve customer experience in the way they do best.
- Marketing: They attract leads with marketing campaigns and sharing resources to help the potential customers understand their pain points. The marketing team set a goal to make potential customers check out the product and its offering while sharing how it can solve their pain points.
- Sales: Sales representatives work with the warm and pre-qualified leads to demonstrate product value. Giving out demos, sharing documentation, creating videos, etc. is a part of the exercise that will help customers identify the value of the product.
- Product: Product teams working together with content teams must prepare end-user documentation to use the product. They also create in-app training material to help the end users identify the product or service applications.
- Customer Support: When customers need support for using the product or troubleshooting, this team comes forward with their expertise. The customer support team resolves problems while reassuring the customers that they won’t have to face a similar experience in the future.
- Customer Success: This team works to help existing customers to extract more from the product.
Product adoption has different dimensions and all the teams are somehow involved in driving better rates. Although these teams work together, the product analytics and metrics for different product adoption stages are different.
While I won’t go into the details of every metric they use, rest assured that cross-functional teams working together is an essential aspect of product adoption.
Product Adoption is also Essential for the Product Management Team, Here’s How.
Adoption is the most important metric for product managers, even more important than retention. It’s that one metric which can end meetings and debates, but product management teams use it to weigh several other parameters.
The adoption rate impacts customer lifetime value, churn rate, customer satisfaction, net promoter score, usage frequency, among others. Product management is always concerned about how much money a product or service is generating.
Good for them, knowing the adoption rate will help identify the customer loyalty levels along with potential revenue it can generate.
Decoding the Product Adoption Curve or Five Product Adoption Stages
A user’s perspective towards a product differs and each of these attitudes matter. A good team harnesses these perspectives to identify their product’s capabilities and potential to succeed.
Geoffrey A. Moore discusses the concept of five stages of product adoption in his book Crossing the Chasm. It’s a must read if you are a marketer, brand owner, product manager, or have any role in building and promoting a product.
- Innovators
These are tech-savvy users who are fond of trying new products and services. Being comfortable with taking risks and facing potential failures, they are important tech enthusiasts. It’s easier to approach them given their risk-loving attitude and as they are less about mainstream acceptance, they can help build your product’s public image.
- Early Adopters
Early adopters are opinion leaders, but they are also tech-savvy and risk-lovers, but they are a bit more cautious than innovators. More importantly, they look towards innovators who have already tested the waters before trying out a new product.
The early adoption of your product is instrumental for marketing and to align your product with what the market needs. Early adopters influence product adoption as they help other customers gain first-hand information about the product.
After this, there’s a small window when rarely any new user or customer comes. This is the time you must take to improve your product according to the experiences shared by innovators and early adopters.
- Early Majority
These are risk-averse and less tech-savvy customers who will only adopt a product or service after they have hard evidence about its capabilities. These users are looking for solutions that will solve their problems, but don’t have the time or resources to check all the available ones.
So, using reviews from the last two types of users, they take out trial offers of the product and decide for themselves. That’s why it's important to establish social proof ensuring your product works and can help the target audience.
- Late Majority
The late majority, although skeptical of the new products, wait for widespread adoption before even considering using them. In terms of percentage share, Early Majority and Late Majority are similar.
This implies even after you see a lot of new customers, rest assured that these many need time and more social proof. Once they’ve adopted your product, you can start calling it a success. More importantly, this customer segment waits to learn about your product from other sources and may be driven by necessity to adopt.
- Laggards
These people are resistant to change. They prefer working with their existing products, even when significantly better products are available. Getting them onboard is going to be a monumental challenge.
Customers at this stage in the product adoption curve will only use after a significant amount of time or if your product becomes a norm.
Understanding customer preferences, their needs, and the differences in what drives their opinion is critical to boost adoption rates at each stage.
How to Measure Product Adoption?
Adoption is directly proportional to user base. Larger the adoption rate, the larger the user base. Even the best of products can fail if the users can’t find value in it.
Amazon Fire Phone, built by the eCommerce giant was launched after extensive research to build a better phone. It had features like Firefly, which could identify objects just by pointing the camera. But it failed as these features weren’t well-received.
Could it have been that Amazon didn’t get enough information on their target audience before launching?
For a product to work and get mass adoption, it needs to be carefully groomed. This grooming depends on the information you collect from the target audience. Here you are with the 13 most important metrics to measure production adoption.
Best Practices and Methods to Drive Product Adoption
A customer’s continuous usage of a product depends on how effective you are at listening to them and making the required changes. Customers want to get value from your product in terms of money, time, and effort. More importantly, a customer won’t hesitate to switch between products, as their needs change.
I have seen several brands eat dust just because they held their product to high standards and failed to recognize the changing customer preferences. With those stories in mind, here are a few best practices we follow at Qwary to improve overall product adoption.
- Understand your Users
Even before building a product, deep dive into your target audience’s needs, pain points, and challenges. Create a map of the ideal user journey to understand them better and create a user-centric product design. This research is also essential to establish product-market fit.
- Educate your Target Audience
Create educational content related to your products according to the end-user’s profile and product adoption stage. Add to this, build relevant marketing material addressing the customer’s pain points while specifically showing how your product can address them.
For instance, create appealing material for innovators harnessing their desire to try new products, first.
- Smooth Customer Onboarding
Using a product adoption software, design a smooth customer onboarding flow. Build targeted resources and customer support, at all points where customers may find some issues. Here the customer journey map you had created earlier will be useful. You must take a proactive approach by creating product walkthroughs, onboarding checklists, and in-app chat support.
- Aim for Impressive Product Experience
Optimize Product Experience (PX) to ease customer journey within the product. This part is especially important for SaaS organizations as PX is the area where the majority of the users will interact with the brand and product.
So, focus on sharing resources to help your customers improve understanding of your product. To better analyze product experience, use heatmaps (available with Qwary) to pinpoint the areas of frustration. Spot the barriers customers face to sign up, set up a trial, or complete a desired action.
- Customize Subscription or Product Purchase Plans
Reiterating my point, customers look for the highest value of their money and time spent on your product. In order to maximize this value, customize subscription plans for different customer segments.
Like you might have seen the different pricing structure for startups, enterprises, solopreneurs, etc. Follow this approach in the applicable products while offering an incentive to increase adoption.
- Continuous Improvement
Frequent appropriate application updates are essential to make your product useful, adaptable, and reliable. Improvements according to customer preferences and industry trends, create an appealing product catering to every type of customer.
How Can You Use Qwary to Increase Product Adoption?
Understanding user behavior and optimizing your product for maximum adoption is critical to build a successful business. I know this from firsthand experiences and knowledge sharing with industry experts. Where traditional methods to know and research your users can consume a lot of time, Qwary can speed it up for you, here’s how;
First off, Qwary lets you go beyond the generic insights and take a granular approach. Use multiple filters for each of the tools to find granular insights and improve production adoption.
- Heatmaps and Session Recordings: Go beyond simple screen recording to identify key areas of concern as you track the user’s path and check out heatmap. Pinpoint the exact points of friction and identify areas of improvement.
Create session recordings with multiple triggers like new signups, cart abandonment, product page visited, etc. while customizing settings to start recording.
Used alongside session recordings or as an independent tool, heatmaps allow you to gather user sentiment at precise moments. Capture moments of friction in real-time and address the user’s needs, immediately.
Qwary clients have recorded a 24% increase in product adoption by uncovering previously ignored issues.
- In-Product Surveys: Obtain real-time feedback from customers allowing you to capture user sentiment while the experience is still fresh in their minds. From this, you can create a feedback loop while addressing the user’s needs at every point.
Analyze the results according to different precise parameters. You can filter the results based on the timeline ranging from one week to all time. Check out ratings and responses for each question and analyze customer sentiment for them as well.
- Conversion Funnel Analysis: Using a suite of in-built tools, Qwary’s customers have improved user journey experiences leading to 35% increase in conversion. Use these insights to address conversion roadblocks that’ll pave the way for higher adoption rates.
- Close the Feedback Loop: Combine real-time user research with actionable insights leading as you link specific behavior with customer insights. Through this, you can prioritize product improvements that will make a significant impact while satisfying users.
Conclusion
Improving product adoption is something every brand wants. But to achieve it is easier said than done. Instead of focusing just on product adoption, ensure you are working to build a product worthy of becoming a part of the user’s daily lives.
The motive is to stop them from looking for alternatives. This means integrating a new product into your customer’s lives and helping them reach the ‘aha’ moment. Once they realize the value your product brings, adoption comes naturally.
At Qwary, we allow organizations to understand their customers with a wide array of tools. Using authentic insights and real-time data you can know exactly what’s wrong with the customer journey and customize further engagement accordingly.
Want to check out how it works? Book a demo today.
FAQs
- What is the correct order of the five stages of the new product adoption process?
Customers adopt a new product in five key stages, Awareness, Interest, Evaluation, Trial, and Adoption. To make the customers transition from one stage to the next one, use customized marketing and knowledge sharing, while focusing on depicting the true benefit of your product.
- How to measure product adoption?
There isn’t a single metric to measure product adoption. Instead, we use a range of metrics like DAU, NAU, CLV, customer retention, NPS, etc. to determine and boost adoption rates.
- How to increase product adoption?
Begin by knowing your users, create user personas, and identify that will lead customers to experience their ‘aha’ moment. From here you can personalize the onboarding experience and use marketing to drive feature discovery and adoption. Continue engaging with the users and make all the teams work together to take the customer from awareness to adoption.
- How to drive product adoption?
Build a consistent process to measure and analyze product usage and customer sentiment towards your brand and product. Harness these insights to execute measures that improve customer’s understanding of your product, which will increase adoption.
- What is a good product adoption rate?
The adoption rate differs for different industries. For instance, the median adoption rate for SaaS companies is 17% but the top performing companies have also reached 65%. Similarly, find the average adoption rate for your organization to build bespoke strategies to increase the rate.
