How to Increase Product Adoption for SaaS

What Is Product Adoption In The Context Of SaaS?

In the context of a SaaS business, product adoption is when a customer uses your SaaS tool on a frequent basis to solve a problem that they have.

Adoption implies:

• Regular product usage. Depending on your product, this could be every day, every week, or even (in the case of tax software, for example) every year.
• That the user builds your product into a recurring workflow that's important to them.

Often, but not always, the customer chooses to become dependent on your product in some way.

Adoption can happen at the level of an individual feature, a group of features, or your entire product. It really depends on the needs of the individual user. 

Why Focus On Product Adoption?

Product adoption has a huge impact on the second half of the pirate metrics: retention, revenue, and referrals.

Put another way, if your users never adopt your solution, you won't retain them – they'll go somewhere else to solve the problem they have. This will result in less revenue and fewer referrals for your business. 

Turning this around, a customer who enthusiastically adopts your solution is likely to stick around for a while. This means more recurring revenue as a SaaS business, and if they really like your solution, they're likely to tell all their friends about you as well.

Having more users inside your product on a frequent basis means that you'll have more accurate data about how people like to use your product, resulting in better feature prioritization. 

And it also means you'll have to spend less money on marketing – simply offer higher pricing plans to your engaged users as a way of generating upsell revenue. 

Leaving metrics to one side, there's something quite sad about building the sort of product that only your founding team thinks is cool. It's a trap that lots of founders fall into, unfortunately – founder hubris is a real thing.

But it's far better not to be one of those people and to make a SaaS product that customers actually want to use and adopt because it solves a real problem. 

Common Obstacles That Block Product Adoption

Customers don't understand your UI

In my experience, this is the biggest obstacle to product adoption.

You've done the customer development work to create a product that users need, but then your UI looks like this:

Consider that if your product isn't intuitive to use, most users won't persevere in trying to figure it out – even if the product solves an important problem of theirs.

More likely, they'll just Google a competitor.

Your UI is generic, not segmented

71% of customers expect your product to cater to their individual needs, as a matter of course.

So, if you release a generic product that tries to be all things to all people, they'll get frustrated quickly and churn.

A common example: When SaaS companies give all new users a generic product tour that walks them through all the main features, rather than focusing solely on the ones that are relevant to a user's particular segment.

Resistance to change

"We like our existing solution already." 

How many times have you heard this in sales meetings or demos with prospective customers?

Humans are creatures of habit, and we're psychologically wired to not want to change unless the pain of keeping things the same is greater than the pain of change.

This is especially relevant if your SaaS product is designed to shake up an existing industry. Unless you find an early adopter, most people will stick to what they know.

Multiple decision-makers

This one is especially true if you're selling to enterprises. 

Very often, you'll need to get the go-ahead from multiple stakeholders in the enterprise before they're ready to buy.

For example, if you sell them a CRM, you might have to talk to the head of sales, the head of marketing, several junior marketing people, and the financial controller. All of those individuals have different needs and priorities in the sales conversation.

This can be very frustrating if you're a small business owner. The enterprise might have seemingly limitless resources, but your cashflow won't let you wait a year for them to say yes or no.

From the enterprise's perspective, involving multiple decision-makers is about reducing risk, as well as the office politics of having someone else to blame if something goes wrong.

Adoption creates new pain points 

If you've read the market correctly, your SaaS product solves a pressing problem that your users have.

But have you considered that adopting your solution might cause your customers a new type of pain, one that's quite different from the pain they're currently feeling – but no less bothersome?

For example, if you sell onboarding software, you're alleviating the pain of your customer losing their users through churn, which is costing them money and stressing them out.

But to get to the point where you can help them, they'll need to install your software and connect it with their product. 

This sometimes requires coding knowledge, and perhaps they can't spare any developers right now.

In this instance, the technical installation of your product becomes a friction point to getting it adopted.

Inadequate product-market fit

Sometimes, you can put loads of effort into marketing, sales and onboarding but still feel like you're hitting your head against a brick wall. It's a frustrating place to be.

In this instance, it's likely that you haven't listened to your customers sufficiently in order to really truly understand what their pain points are.

As a result, your product and your messaging don't connect with your audience.

High price point 

For some more technical industries, the cost of innovation is very high. So it can be tempting to want to pass on those high costs to your customers in order to recoup your investment.

This doesn't always work. Only the most enthusiastic early evangelists will adopt your product if the price is too high.

But sometimes, this is a necessary price to pay. There are some industries in which the high price paid by the early adopters pays for more R&D, and then that R&D work eventually brings the price down for the mid-market adopters.

That being said, that particular adoption curve is more commonplace in industries like space, mobile phones or 3D printing than it is in the SaaS world.

Now that you know what product adoption is, why it matters and what some of the barriers to it are, let's explore some actionable ways that you can boost it.

13 Steps To Increase Product Adoption

Know your users, their pain points, and needs

This is the first point for a reason: without user research, you won't understand the problem you're trying to solve, and all the rest of your efforts will be a waste of time.

The single best action you can take in order to understand your customers, their pain points and their motivation for using your product is to conduct customer development interviews in tandem with product development.

Cindy Alvarez, in her book titled Lean Customer Development, gives a useful framework about how to know your users:

• Have your founders schedule as many meetings with early customers or prospective customers as possible. At least 100 of them.
• Focus more on listening and note-taking than on talking.
• Ask open-ended questions about the pain they're experiencing.
• Do not talk about your solution, as far as possible. Focus the conversation on understanding the customer's pain point.

Do this enough, and you'll have enough data to start creating one or more personas that actually reflect reality, instead of the customers you'd like to have. 

As you acquire users, you can also use product analytics software like Mixpanel to analyze their in-app behavior. Focus on:

• Understanding which segments use which features, and why
• Learning which features are the most popular overall, and why
• Discovering which features your customers don't find useful, and why

This comes back to understanding your users' pain points over and over again. And you can never do enough of this work – you can always learn more. Your founders, in particular.

Encourage users to take the first step to get to know the product

Those first few hours of product adoption are the most critical. Very often, it's during that time that a user decides if they want to commit to trying your app or if they want to churn and find another solution.

There are three steps that you can take here to increase the likelihood of users adopting your product.

Firstly, make the sign-up flow as frictionless as possible. Concretely, you can:

• Remove all unnecessary modals and questions from the sign-up flow, and keep fields to an absolute minimum
• Allow new users to sign up using their Google accounts to save them from making an account with you
• Get any segmentation data you need from new users during the welcome screen and product tour, not during the sign-up flow

Speaking of welcome screens, that's our second point to cover here. 

Consider the following:

• Use your chosen onboarding tool to make a welcome screen that greets all new users in a warm, friendly way
• Have the welcome screen use the customer's first name, so they feel personally addressed
• Use the welcome screen as a way to reiterate your value proposition, so it's clear what your product does and why they should use it
• And ask new users segmentation questions during the welcome screen flow, so that you can personalize the subsequent product experience accordingly

Once the welcome screen is done with, it's time to give the user a product walkthrough. Here, ensure that you:

• Give the user a walkthrough that's specific to the answers they gave you in the welcome screen flow, not something generic
• Highlight the features that the user will need according to the segment you've assigned them to

• List the first 3-5 actions that the new user will need to take in order to activate in a checklist
• Give the user credit on that checklist for action already taken, for example, signing up for your app

Provide interactive experience with tooltips and hotspots

For features that extend beyond the initial product tour, your best bet in terms of encouraging users to adopt them is tooltips and hotspots.

Onboarding software such as UserGuiding will allow you to build these in 15 minutes or so, completely customized to your brand's color scheme, without having to use any code.

Tooltips are essentially little arrows that point to important features, often with an explainer text that either appears automatically or opens when you mouse over an "i" symbol.

Hotspots are arguably even more subtle. They're small, flashing dots that blink next to features that you want to highlight, just subtly catching users' attention. Again, they'll normally provide more information when a user decides to hover over them.

Hotspots and tooltips are great for making your product experience more interactive, bringing important features into your customers' awareness and encouraging them to adopt those features.

Engage with them through in-app messaging 

Humans are social creatures, and so no-one likes an app that seems like it has no community and no interaction with other people.

There's a lot to be said for an in-app chat function that allows users to reach out to you when they get stuck.

If you're worried that the in-app chat will take up too much of your agents' time, consider adding an AI element that answers most of the questions automatically, based on crawling your website's help center.

Are you planning on releasing a new feature that you think will be beneficial to a particular customer segment? The simplest way you can boost adoption of that feature is to tell them about it, in-app.

Modals are also a great way of making engaging in-app announcements – perhaps to tell users about a new webinar that will help them, or to celebrate a particular user who came top of your leaderboard last month.

Personalize onboarding experiences by segmenting users

We've already mentioned that you should segment users with your welcome flow and give them a product tour that relates to their segment's unique needs.

But it's worth touching on why this will boost your product adoption rate.

No one likes generic product experiences: we expect that products will understand what we need, as a matter of course.

So when products give us a generic experience and plainly show us that they aren't listening to our needs, we feel disappointed, get frustrated, and go Google a competitor. 

Conversely, when SaaS products speak to our needs directly, we're delighted and much more likely to adopt those products.

Concretely, you can personalize the user experience by:

• Varying the copy you use around certain features by segment
• Only promoting secondary features and account upgrades to segments who need them
• Offering different segments different levels of support and different types of support topics, depending on their needs

Clearly articulate your product’s value

This one follows on from customer development. If you've conducted enough customer development interviews to the point that you can see patterns in your users' pain points, you're in a position to articulate why your product is a good solution to the pain they feel.

You can bolster the persuasiveness of your copy by:

• Speaking to pain points wherever possible (even inside your app itself)
• Using the language "you" as often as possible
• Keeping the majority of the text on your site brief, skimmable, and easy to understand
• Not using product jargon – unless your industry expects it
• Speaking to the benefits of your product for your users (there are those pain points again!), instead of belaboring the features

There should be a clear, consistent narrative about why your product has value that spans your home page, your help resources, your blog, social media, landing pages, and even in the product itself.

Prioritize usability and accessibility

Your SaaS app should be designed so that it's as easy to use as possible, regardless of whether the user is neurotypical or neurodivergent in some way.

Here are some simple best practices that you can follow to improve your product in this area:

• Employ color contrast, but don't rely solely on color to convey meaning, out of respect for color-blind users
• Make hover effects obvious, ensuring that they take place over a large enough area
• Use text on CTA buttons that states clearly what the button will do, and then deliver on that promise by ensuring that where the user is taken matches the text you used
• Use navigation, headers and even breadcrumbs to improve the page structure and make it easy for readers to jump to the sections that are most relevant for them
• Always ensure that any modal that pops up has an obvious X on it, so that users can close it if they want to

Collect feedback to improve the product regularly

Even with the most rigorous customer research process, your SaaS product won't get everything right the first time.

So it's essential to stay in regular dialog with your customers, so that you can listen to their feedback and use it to improve your product and boost adoption rates.

For example, you can send NPS surveys in-app to gauge how content users are with your product overall.

It's a very good idea to analyze this NPS data by user segment, as that might allow you to detect patterns in terms of which users view your app more favorably and less favorably. 

My personal favorite type of in-app survey is the qualitative survey. Here, you're asking the customer more open-ended questions to understand why they gave you the NPS score they did.

Provide exceptional customer service

It's really important to show your customers that you care about them – even before they sign up to your product.

Here at UserGuiding, we can say from experience that we've boosted our adoption and retention rates solely by having a high customer service rating on G2.

But what matters even more from your customer's perspective is whether you can actually follow through on those high ratings. To that end, ensure that:

• You are consistently polite and professional with customers, even if they don't return the courtesy
• You go out of your way to help them solve any problems they run into
• If you make a big mistake, look to give customers some sort of discount, voucher or merch
• Have your whole support team take courses in active listening

Offer self-service training and resources

You know what's really frustrating for users of SaaS apps? When they have an important question, but no one from your incredible support team is online to help them answer it.

For situations like this, you can empower your users to answer their own questions by including a knowledge base in your app.

A knowledge base is basically a widget that connects to your help center and other support resources and puts them inside your app, ideally in a searchable format. This allows users to find their answers super quickly and efficiently.

As a nice bonus, it also means you don't have to spend as much money hiring and training support agents!

Have a success team to build strong relationships with customers

If you look at all the top SaaS companies, they all have a dedicated customer success team. 

The job of these people is to ensure that customers are getting value out of your product. They're the first people the customers go to when they have a problem, they're the face of your business, and they're also the best line of defense against churn.

Success teams are especially important if your customers are wealthy or enterprises (or both). These types of customers expect white glove treatment, as a matter of course. If you don't provide it, then they will churn and go elsewhere.

One specific practice I've seen a lot of SaaS companies do well with is when the success team works with an individual customer to define success metrics for that one account, and then walks with them until they achieve the results they wanted.

This is almost like a coaching approach to customer success, where the success team takes the view that the customer is the best expert in their business, and acts as a guide on their journey.

Include thought leadership in your content marketing strategy

Do you or your founders have an unusual take on your industry? Perhaps that was why you got into SaaS in the first place.

Or does your team have a vast amount of industry experience that you know your customers could benefit from?

In both cases, it's smart to convert your knowledge advantage into exceptional content and publish it on your blog.

If the thought leaders on your team are in senior management and don't have time to write, have a writer interview them and condense their thoughts into a blog article.

You might be surprised at just how good these types of articles are for building long-term trust with your audience.

If a user reads exceptionally well-articulated content over and over again, from the time they first discover you and throughout their product journey, they're more likely to trust that you know what you're doing – and less likely to churn.

Measure KPIs for product adoption

What's measured gets managed, so the saying goes. And it's as true for product adoption as it is for anything else.

Here are the metrics you should use to track whether you're on the right course with product adoption:

• Activation rate
• Feature adoption rate – especially for key features
• Feature adoption rate by customer segment
• Retention rate
• Lifetime customer value
• Referral rate

You can find more details about how to calculate these metrics in this helpful article.

If your metrics are on track, keep doing what you're doing. If not, use them as ways to identify opportunities for improvement.

3 Inspiring Examples of Successful Product Adoption

If our list of tips was overwhelming and you don't know where to start, here are 3 examples of companies whose thoughtful approach to product adoption is something you can emulate.

1. Genially

Genially is a design platform, somewhat similar to Canva.

As part of their product tour, they include this tooltip to highlight the menu in the Editor part of the platform:

This tooltip is likely to boost product adoption, because:

• It's large enough to get the user's attention
• It has graphical elements that illustrate the feature it's describing
• It has interactive elements – the user can click on "next" to see additional parts of the menu
• The color scheme and minimalist design of the tooltip match Genially's overall brand
• Users who are irritated by the tooltip always have the option to click on the X to close it

For most users, this is going to make them somewhat curious and aware of the menu feature and what it can do. One would imagine that using the menu skillfully is a good step on the path towards the adoption of this product.

2. Grammarly

Grammarly is a grammar and spell-checking app.

There's a great moment in Grammarly's product tour where it asks the user to personalize their goals for using their app:

This is intelligent product design, because Grammarly has learned that not every user of their product wants the same register of language in their content.

To give a simple example: if you were writing an academic paper, you'd need a very different register of language than if you were creating an informal blog post for a food website.

Grammarly's tool can cover both use cases easily enough, but it's also able to personalize the vocabulary choices it recommends on the basis of these answers.

Does this mean that Grammarly is more likely to help users create text that resonates with diverse audiences than a competitor who doesn't offer this level of personalization? Absolutely, and the number of people who use Grammarly proves it.

3. Evernote

Evernote is a note-taking and task management app, known for the cleanness of its interface.

And this fabulous little survey is no exception:

The amount of white space used here gives this in-app survey a wonderfully clean and tidy feeling. Given Evernote's customers are using their app in an attempt to bring more order to their lives, this feels very appropriate.

And note how little effort is required by users in order to complete the survey. There's no text to write – just a few star ratings. There are only 5 questions as well.

From the user's perspective, this means that this survey is unobtrusive and easy to fill in. From Evernote's perspective, this means that more users will fill out the survey, giving the company more data to make their tool even easier to adopt. 

Wrapping up

Having read this article, you should now know:

• What product adoption is and why it matters
• What commonly gets in the way of product adoption
• How you can boost product adoption at your SaaS company, and
• Which businesses you can emulate in doing so.

If you need a tool to help you with product adoption, consider taking a look at UserGuiding. 

Remember how we talked about how tooltips, in-app surveys, knowledge bases, product tours, segmentation and in-app messaging can help you get more users to adopt your product? UserGuiding will let you build all those things in your app – without code, in a matter of minutes.

If that's something you're interested in exploring, you can sign up for a trial version of UserGuiding for free, play around a bit and see if you think the software could help you.