User Adoption: Top Strategies, Challenges and Metrics

Understanding User Adoption in SaaS

Let's begin with a few definitions, just to make sure we're on the same page.

What is user adoption?

User adoption refers to when new users learn about, engage with, and ultimately commit to using a product. 

Adoption involves more than simply using a product once and forgetting about it. A user adopts a product once they've:

• Activated, in other words, experienced the value of the product first-hand
• Started using the product on a regular basis
• Built up a certain dependency on the product to solve an important problem

User Adoption vs User Acquisition

Two terms that are commonly conflated with one another are user adoption and user acquisition. Their meanings seem similar at first glance, but are actually different in one crucial way:

• User acquisition refers to the process of bringing in new users who have not yet used the product.
• User adoption refers to the process of getting existing users to use a product more effectively or frequently.

It follows that companies always have to acquire users before they can get those users to adopt their product. 

In a SaaS context, users that are acquired often go to a free trial initially, whereas users that are adopted are almost always paying for the product in some way. 

User Adoption vs Product Adoption

These two terms mean almost exactly the same thing. Both terms can be used synonymously to describe the process of a user adopting a particular product.

"User adoption" puts the emphasis slightly on the users that are doing the adopting, whereas "product adoption" puts the emphasis slightly more on the product that's being adopted.

But the term "product adoption" has an additional meaning, in the context of the market as a whole. 

It's possible to talk about the product adoption curve, which refers to how a product is accepted by the overall market.

As you can see, products are used first by early adopters, then by the average person, and finally by laggards.

Why is user adoption important?

Astonishingly, as many as 40-60% of people who sign up for free trials of SaaS products use the product once and then never come back.

It follows that companies who don't invest time and money into user adoption are leaving a vast amount of money on the table. 

Every user who doesn't activate or adopt your solution is a user who is churning and going to a competitor's product. And as many as 70% of your users are willing to leave at the click of a button. Ouch!

Companies that have high rates of user adoption tend to need to spend less money on marketing and sales. Why? Simply because they're more effective at retaining their trial users and converting them into paid ones, so they don't need to go chasing after as many new users. 

When you invest in user adoption, your product itself becomes your most important tool to persuade users to adopt your solution, in a model called product-led growth.

What's more, once a user has adopted your product, it creates opportunities for you to look for ways to get them to upgrade to a higher pricing plan, purchase an add-on, or look for other possible upsells. 

So boosting product adoption is also correlated with higher customer lifetime value as well!

Building a User Adoption Strategy

Now that we agree on a definition of user adoption and understand why it's so important, let's look at some tangible ways you can build a user adoption strategy for your business.

1. Define your key user personas and tailor onboarding accordingly

SaaS products typically serve diverse user groups with unique needs.

So one of the worst things that you can do is to create generic onboarding material and expect all your different user segments to be equally enthusiastic about it.

For example, let's imagine you're making a banking app, and you treat all your customers as if they're small business owners. 

Sure, the SMEs are going to be delighted, but your B2C customers are going to be very confused when you start offering them walkthroughs about raising capital and managing payroll!

A far better strategy is to tailor your onboarding to different personas. By doing this, you ensure that each user segment only sees the value that's relevant to them, which reduces the confusion – and accelerates activation. 

This is what high-performing companies do, as this graphic indicates:

How do you tailor your onboarding in practice?

• To get information about how different user groups plan to use your product, conduct customer development interviews. Ask lots of open-ended questions, focus the conversation on the user's problem instead of your solution, and listen actively. 
• Collect basic demographic and psychographic data about your customers during the sign-up and welcome flows, such as their job title and what they want to use your product for.
• Use a product analytics tool like Mixpanel to observe how different customer groups use your product, and which features they gravitate towards based on their respective use cases. 
• On the basis of the above points, define 3-5 segments from the patterns that you see. Create a persona document for each segment, so that your whole team has a mental picture of the sort of person in each segment.

Here's an example of a persona that could inspire your team:

• Use a tool like UserGuiding to assign new users to a segment early in the welcome flow process, on the basis of the answers that users are giving you.
• Customize onboarding flows and messaging for each persona to ensure users see content and guidance relevant to their goals.
• Never stop doing persona work. You might assume that you know your users, but the market is always evolving and it's essential that your understanding of their needs is accurate. 

We actually tailor our own onboarding on this basis.

In the following example, we ask users how technical they are, so that we can tailor the instruction of our tool accordingly:

2. Define aha moment and activation milestones for each segment

Once you've split your users into segments, it's time to delve deeper into the user journey for each segment.

Consider that each segment has its own reason for coming to your product – reasons which may be very different from those of other segments.

For example, if you use Google Docs:

• You might want to write something
• You might want to edit something that someone else has written
• You might be a manager whose job it is to give content the final approval
• You might be interested in sharing written content with partners
• You might not be interested in written content at all and only be interested in images or gifs

Your persona work in the previous step should help you identify the typical product goals of each segment. If you get stuck:

• Conduct more customer development interviews
• Consult sales logs and read about why people came to your product
• Talk to customer-facing teams, such as customer support and customer success

Once you have an idea about what constitutes value for each segment, consider that the process of unlocking value happens in several steps:

1. The user comes to your platform
2. The user thinks, "hey, this could be valuable for me." We call this the "Aha Moment."
3. The user actually experiences the value of your product, normally by using one or more features that are important to their use case. We call this "activation."
4. The user becomes a regular user

The key steps here from an onboarding point of view are steps 2 and 3. It's essential that you define what the Aha Moment and activation are for each user segment. 

Activation, in particular, has a higher impact on MRR growth than any other pirate metric:

Here are some examples of possible Aha Moments and activation points to get you thinking:

Aha Moments:

• Pipedrive: The realization that you can use this tool to tidy up your sales pipeline and chase up leads more efficiently
• Slack: The realization that you can communicate asynchronously with your whole team 
• Notion: The realization that you can store all your team processes and documentation in one place

Activation points:

• UserGuiding: Installing our code snippet on their platform
• Facebook: Adding 7 friends within 10 days
• Trello: Creating a project management board

3. Develop a multi-touchpoint onboarding flow

Here's an awkward truth:

Even if you define well-thought-out milestones for each onboarding journey, you still won't get all of your users to activate.

Data from Userpilot suggests that there's variability on this point, both by industry:

And by company size:

So that raises the question: how do you increase the odds of your users activating?

The first thing that you can do is develop an interactive walkthrough for each segment, and ensure that it has multiple touchpoints. To do this:

• Install UserGuiding so that you can create a checklist and guides without having to code
• Examine the activation point of each user segment, and set that as the final step of an onboarding checklist that you create with UserGuiding
• Create 2-3 more steps in the checklist that cover some important features that are relevant to this segment, and create tooltips and hotspots that walk the customer through how to use them
• Deliver this checklist to the user immediately after they are segmented, so at the end of the welcome flow
• Track the results of your efforts and see how many users complete each touchpoint – as well as the whole checklist 

Each touchpoint completed increases the chances of activating.

But you also can broaden your thinking here and imagine other forms of multi-channel touchpoints that aren't part of your onboarding checklist. 

As Gavin Heaton, Founder and Co-CEO of Disruptors Co, has said:

Other touchpoints in your onboarding process will vary from company to company, but they might include:

• A welcome email
• An email sequence explaining how to get value from the product
• A case study email outlining how another company in that user's segment got value from your product
• A call with the customer success team
• Online chat interaction with the customer support team

Just make sure that you spread out the touchpoints. SaaS products are often complex, requiring multiple engagements to ensure users understand the full range of features, but it's important not to overwhelm new users!

4. Incorporate progress tracking and gamification elements

We talked about the value of splitting up onboarding into milestones and touchpoints.

That's great from your perspective as a business, because it gives you little steps to measure the effectiveness of your onboarding. It's much, much easier to optimize the efficiency of one little step than it is to optimize your entire user adoption process!

But your customers don't really care about the success of your user onboarding. All they want is an intuitive, rewarding product experience.

In the same way that you can break the process up on your side into smaller milestones, you can break the process up on the user's side with progress bars and gamification elements.

By a progress bar, I mean something like this that shows users visually how far they are through an onboarding flow:

And by gamification, I mean elements like:

• Points earned for accomplishing certain tasks
• Leaderboards that show who earned the most points in a given week or month
• Badges for users who are the most active, or contribute the most to the community
• User avatars that can be customized to look however you want

Gamification might seem trite or silly, but it's anything but. Data from Atto suggests that implementing gamification can result in a remarkable 47% boost in customer engagement! 

Progress bars and gamification increase motivation, keep users engaged, and allow them to visualize their progress, enhancing the likelihood of completing onboarding.

This is especially important in an industry like SaaS, where the onboarding process can sometimes be tedious. 

5. Use in-app messages to provide contextual guidance

So you've created beautiful walkthroughs for your customers, but they're still getting stuck on what to do occasionally. 

How can you help them when they get stuck?

Wouldn't it be convenient if you could provide help at the exact time they need it, with the help popping up next to the exact feature they're struggling with?

Far more engaging than having them poring over extensive documents for hours, just to get an answer to a simple question.

Well, you can do just that! And it's actually not that hard to create, either.

For example, you could:

• Have a guide trigger automatically when a user opens a feature for the first time

• Have an explainer tooltip pop up if a user takes more than 1 minute on one particular feature

• Or have a video open automatically at the beginning of a new process to explain how it works

With UserGuiding, you can not only create all these elements without code; you can also customize the conditions according to which each element will trigger!

6. Implement a dynamic resource center or knowledge base

But what if the automatically-triggered, contextual help doesn't solve the customer's problem?

In this instance, users need a place they can go to in order to ask for more detailed help.

Classically, this meant providing an email address, a phone number, or an in-app chat widget where users could go to get support.

And, to be clear, there's still something to be said for providing all of these options – perhaps especially the in-app chat widget. Just make sure that someone's manning the widget and is ready to provide answers – rather than having your user sit around waiting for a response!

But increasingly, SaaS businesses are turning away from these types of help resources towards self-service help resources.

According to Zendesk, 67% of customers prefer self-service support over speaking with a customer representative. And as many as 91% of respondents said they would use an online knowledge base if it were tailored to their needs. 

And it makes sense from a business perspective, too.

It's much cheaper to build self-support resources, rather than maintain a small army of support agents. 

The self-service resources that are the most popular are:

• A knowledge base: A standalone section of your website that lists answers to FAQs, complete with tutorials and screenshots explaining how to use parts of your product

• A help center: A widget in your app, often in the bottom-right corner, that brings up relevant resources from your knowledge base when clicked on.

Best practices for these self-service support resources include:

• Ensuring that content can be added and updated easily
• Ensuring that content is searchable, so that users can quickly locate what they need
• Using analytics to identify which areas are accessed the most often, so that your support team can see which areas users require more support in, and your product team can see where the UI needs to be made more intuitive

7. Establish regular feedback loops with new users

Even if you create personas, walkthroughs, onboarding email sequences, checklists, gamified guides and a knowledge base, you still won't get your onboarding right the first time.

‍Or the 15th, let's be real. These things take time, practice and dedication to perfect. 

So it's good practice to send users microsurveys or feedback prompts shortly after their onboarding, so that you can gain insights on their experience.

Surveys can be quantitative, like this NPS survey:

Or they can be qualitative, like this survey:

There's also nothing preventing you from using a mixture of both types of survey: the former to get some kind of score from your user, and the latter to understand why the user gave you that score. 

You can use the feedback you get to uncover common pain pains in the onboarding journey and make iterative improvements to your product. 

Note that we're not advocating that you send feedback surveys by email. There's nothing wrong with this per se, but it's so much more convenient to put those surveys in your product itself.

Not to mention, your user's email address is full of distractions. Why would you have them go there when you could keep them in your app?

8. Make your onboarding continuous and adaptive

Remember that onboarding means customer education, and that this should be an ongoing process, rather than something that's confined to the first half an hour after a user signs up for your product. 

As such, your onboarding should be continuously evolving to meet the evolving needs of your customers. 

For example:

• Don't forget secondary onboarding: the process by which customers learn to use secondary features. The secondary features that a user values could well change over time, so make sure you're responsive to those changing needs.
• Periodically launch targeted feature discovery emails or in-app announcements that focus on underutilized features, encouraging users to explore the full value of the product over time.
• Constantly review your onboarding analytics, so that you can see where users are getting stuck in your onboarding flows and where they need more support. 

And speaking of metrics – which ones should you choose, and why?

Optimizing and Measuring Success in User Adoption

You won't get your user adoption right the first time – so how do you know if you're on the right track?

Very simply: you can identify some metrics that you can use to track your success. 

If the metrics move in the right direction month after month, keep doing what you're doing.

And if not, you can conduct A/B tests to experiment with whatever hypotheses you have, and keep the option that works best!

Alternatively, you can do a cohort analysis to see which segments are churning the most and the least, and see if you can derive some patterns from that to help you make the changes you need.

But before you do any of that, you'll need some user adoption metrics to gauge whether what you're already doing is successful! Here are some metrics to consider tracking:

1. Activation Rate

What it is: Activation is the point at which users experience the value of a product first-hand for the first time. The Activation Rate measures the percentage of new users who successfully complete this milestone within a specific time period after they first sign up for a product.

Why it matters: Activation is an indication that users are engaging with the product after their initial sign-up. A high activation rate typically suggests that users find value in the product quickly, which increases the chances of them becoming long-term customers.

Example: Josh is measuring the activation rate for his project management app. He defines "activation" as a user creating their first project within 7 days of signing up.

• Over the last 30 days, 100 new users signed up.
• Out of these 100, 50 users created a project within the first 7 days.

To calculate his activation rate, Josh uses the formula:

This gives 50/100, or 50%. 

2. Time-to-Value (TTV)

What it is: Time-to-Value measures the time it takes from a user signing up to the point when they experience their Aha Moment — when they perceive real value from the product.

Why it matters: A shorter TTV generally leads to higher engagement and retention rates. Users who experience value quickly are more likely to continue using the product and become long-term customers. 

Example: Sarah wants to figure out the Time-to-Value for her fitness app. She defines the Aha Moment as a user completing their first workout.

• Sarah tracks the time from sign-up to the first workout completion for her users.
• For the last 30 days, the average time from sign-up to the Aha Moment is 3 days.

3. Feature Adoption Rate

What it is: Feature Adoption Rate tracks the percentage of users actively using a specific feature within a product. It helps measure how well a feature is being embraced by users after it's been introduced or updated.

Why it matters: Feature Adoption Rate is important because it reveals which features are valuable to customers. A low adoption rate might indicate that the feature is not well understood, lacks value, or needs improvement. 

Example: Alex is tracking the adoption of a new task management feature in his sales tool. Out of the 500 users who signed up last month, 200 actively used the task management feature during the first 30 days.

To calculate his Feature Adoption Rate, Alex uses the formula:

So, the Feature Adoption Rate for this new task management feature is 40%.

4. Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active Users (DAU/WAU/MAU)

What it is: DAU, WAU, and MAU measure user engagement by counting the number of unique users who interact with a product within a specific timeframe—daily, weekly, or monthly.

Why it matters: These metrics are important because they provide insight into user engagement trends. A high DAU or MAU suggests users are regularly finding value in the product, while a sudden drop could indicate disengagement or a product issue. These metrics also help in tracking retention and growth over different timeframes.

Example: Jane wants to measure user engagement for her time management app.

• Over the past 30 days, 500 unique users used the app daily
• 1,200 unique users used the app at least once during the past week
• 2,000 unique users used the app at least once in the past month

Jane should now look at the historical trends to see if her number of active users is going in the right direction.

5. Retention Rate

What it is: Retention Rate tracks the percentage of users who continue using a product over a specific period of time after their initial use.

Why it matters: Retention Rate is a key indicator of user satisfaction and product value. High retention means users are consistently finding value in the product, which is crucial for long-term growth. Low retention might suggest that users aren't finding the product useful or are experiencing issues that lead them to stop using it.

Example: Rebecca is tracking retention for her online learning platform. She defines retention as users who continue to engage with the platform 30 days after their first course enrollment.

• 1,000 users signed up and enrolled in their first course during the month.
• After 30 days, 400 of those 1,000 users are still actively completing lessons or watching videos on the platform.

To calculate her retention rate, Rebecca computes the following:

Rebecca’s retention rate for the first 30 days is 400/1000 = 40%. 

6. Churn Rate

What it is: Churn Rate measures the percentage of users who stop using a product or service over a specific period. It's an important metric for tracking user attrition and customer dissatisfaction. 

Why it matters: High churn is a warning sign that users are not finding enough value in the product, which may be due to issues like poor usability, lack of features, or stronger competition. Monitoring churn is critical for businesses because it helps identify potential problems early, so corrective actions can be taken to improve the product or user experience. 

Example: Michael is tracking churn for his subscription-based online magazine. Over the past month, 300 users canceled their subscriptions. During the same period, there were 2,000 active subscribers.

To calculate his churn rate, Michael uses the formula:

This gives 300/2000 = 15%.

7. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

What it is: CLV is the total revenue a business expects to earn from a customer over the entire duration of their relationship with a particular product or service. 

Why it matters: CLV helps businesses understand how much a customer is worth over time, which is incredibly helpful for predicting long-term revenue trends. With their CLV in mind, companies can make better decisions about marketing budgets, retention strategies and product improvements.

Example: Jessica owns an online subscription service for digital design tools. On average, each customer subscribes to the service for 2 years and pays $10 per month.

To work out her CLV, Jessica calculates as follows:

This gives 10 x 24 = $240. 

In effect, this means that Jessica can expect an average of $240 for every sale she makes. If she wants to stay profitable, this is extremely useful information when calculating marketing spend. 

8. Product Stickiness

What it is: Product Stickiness is a metric that measures how frequently users engage with a product by calculating the ratio of DAUs to MAUs. It indicates how often users return to the product on a daily basis relative to their monthly usage.

Why it matters: Monitoring stickiness helps businesses assess user engagement and identify areas where they can improve the product to drive more frequent usage. A lower ratio may indicate that while users sign up or visit occasionally, they are not finding enough value to engage on a daily basis.

Example: Emma is tracking product stickiness for her social media app. Over the last month:

• 5,000 unique users have used the app daily
• 15,000 unique users have used the app at least once in the past month

Given that:

Emma's product stickiness ratio is 0.33 (or 33%).

9. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

What it is: NPS is a metric used to measure user satisfaction and loyalty. It's typically measured by surveying users and asking them: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?” Based on their responses, users are categorized into three groups:

• Promoters (score 9-10): Loyal users who are likely to recommend the product.
• Passives (score 7-8): Neutral users who are satisfied, but not enthusiastic enough to actively promote the product.
• Detractors (score 0-6): Unsatisfied users who are unlikely to recommend the product and may share negative feedback.

Why it matters: NPS is a reliable indicator of user loyalty and product satisfaction. A high NPS score correlates with strong user adoption, repeat usage, and advocacy. 

Example: Liam wants to measure the NPS for his productivity app. He surveys 200 users and asks them how likely they are to recommend the app, with the following results:

• 120 users responded with a score of 9 or 10
• 50 users responded with a score of 7 or 8 
• 30 users responded with a score of 0 to 6

To figure out his NPS score, Liam calculates the following:

There are 120 promoters from a total of 200 users, so that's 60%. And there are 30 detractors, so that's 15% of 200.

This gives a total NPS score of 60-15 = 45.

10. Customer Effort Score (CES)

What it is: CES measures how much effort users feel they need to put into using a product or completing a specific action, such as resolving an issue or making a purchase. Users are typically asked to rate their experience on a scale (e.g. 1 through 7), with the focus on how easy or difficult the process was.

Why it matters: CES correlates directly with customer satisfaction and retention. A high CES (indicating that users find it easy to complete tasks or use the product) suggests that the product is user-friendly and has a smooth user experience, which positively impacts adoption rates, customer loyalty, and the likelihood of repeat use. Conversely, low CES can indicate friction points that need attention.

Example: Olivia is tracking CES for her customer support team, where she asks users to rate the ease of getting their issue resolved. After resolving 100 support tickets, she surveys the users with the question: “How easy was it to get your issue resolved on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is very difficult and 7 is very easy?”

Here’s the breakdown of responses:

• 1 (Very difficult): 2 users
• 2 (Difficult): 3 users
• 3 (Somewhat difficult): 5 users
• 4 (Neutral): 10 users
• 5 (Somewhat easy): 20 users
• 6 (Easy): 30 users
• 7 (Very easy): 30 users

To calculate her CES, Olivia averages the scores using the following formula:

This gives 553/100, for an average CES of 5.53. Not bad!

11. Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate

What it is: Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate measures the percentage of users who move from a free trial or freemium plan to a paid subscription. It reflects how effective the product is at convincing users to pay for the full version after experiencing its value during the trial period.

Why it matters: Lots of SaaS companies use a product-led growth (PLG) model, where they aim to bring on lots of trial users and then convince those people to sign up for a subscription on the basis of the value of the product. But PLG only works if the SaaS company in question can actually convert trial users to paid ones! Otherwise, there's no revenue.

Example: Rachel is tracking the Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate for her SaaS product. Over the last month, 1,000 users signed up for the free trial, and 200 of them converted to a paid plan by the end of the trial period.

To calculate her Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate, Rachel uses the formula:

This gives 200/1000 = 20%. Not bad, but Rachel's still losing 80% of her trial users. That's a lot of money that's left on the table!

12. Qualitative User Feedback 

What it is: Qualitative user feedback involves gathering non-numerical data from users through methods like surveys, interviews, reviews, and feedback sessions. 

This feedback often includes open-ended responses where users can share their experiences, thoughts, frustrations, or suggestions in their own words.

Why it matters: While quantitative metrics like NPS provide valuable insights into user behavior, they often miss the more emotional or subjective aspects of the user experience. 

Qualitative feedback helps businesses understand the "why" behind user actions, offering deeper context and insights into user sentiment, pain points, and unmet needs. By capturing this type of feedback, companies can uncover actionable insights for improving product design, user experience, and overall customer satisfaction.

Example: Daniel is gathering qualitative user feedback for his e-commerce platform. He sends out a survey asking users to provide feedback on their experience. Here are some responses from users:

• “The checkout process was confusing, and I had trouble finding the discount code field.”
• “I love the variety of products, but the website could be faster when loading pages.”
• “Customer service was very responsive and helpful when I had an issue with my order.”

These comments offer insights into potential areas for improvement, such as simplifying the checkout process and optimizing site speed.

Addressing Common User Adoption Challenges

Identify drop-off points in onboarding flows

Even with the best-designed onboarding flows, your users won't always do what you want them to. Sorry to break it to you!

So you will need to look at your product analytics to see where exactly in each flow users are dropping off.

What you'll generally find is that the percentage of users going through each step of a given flow diminishes for each step taken, because users complete each step in turn, rather than being able to start arbitrarily part-way through.

For example, imagine you have data that says:

In this particular instance, something's not quite right with step 3. There's a huge drop-off rate compared to the other steps.

So as a product manager looking at this data, it would be sensible to go back to look again at step 3, and experiment with some different ways to improve it. 

Identify underutilized features

As every product designer knows, not all features are created equally! Some are more popular with users, others less so.

In cases where features are being adopted less often than the average features, there are 3 explanations to consider.

It's possible that your onboarding for that feature needs some work.

The feature itself might be great, but if it's not apparent how to use it… it doesn't matter.

In the following example, there's a survey and a checklist on the same screen, and so it's unclear to the user what to do:

It's also possible that the feature itself is poorly designed, or hard to find in your UI. In this case, no amount of onboarding will convince users to adopt it.

In more serious cases, it might be that the feature isn't a good fit for your users. It's well-designed, the onboarding is clear, but it's just not something that your users really care about or think is a problem.

This is a particularly humbling problem for entrepreneurs, who tend to be emotionally attached to their product vision.

You can resolve this problem by developing humility, going back to the drawing board, and improving your understanding of what users really need. 

I strongly recommend doing more customer development interviews, and listening more than you speak. 

Improve onboarding completion rates

Not all your users will finish your onboarding walkthrough, and that's ok.

But if the last step of your walkthrough equates to activation, let's face it: we want as many of your users to finish their walkthrough as they possibly can!

Because the more users that activate, the more of them will stick around to become long-term users – people that will eventually refer your product to their friends.

So how can you increase the number of people who finish onboarding?

• Ensure that your onboarding is personalized to the activation needs of each segment, not something generic that is designed to appeal to everyone. 
• Keep your walkthrough as short as possible. 3-5 checklist items that focus on key features is more than enough – there will be opportunities for users to discover your other features later!
• Keep the text short and concise. Break up complex ideas into multiple steps.
• Listen to the feedback you get from users, and leverage it to make the walkthrough even better.
• Observe where in the walkthrough flow users are dropping off, and improve those sections – just as you would any onboarding flow, as we discussed earlier.  

Make the most out of power users 

Every app has power users: the customers who use the majority of your features and seem to be online all the time. 

But leveraging those users to help you grow? That's something that a lot of companies struggle with. Somehow, marketers always want to take the high road, go it alone and try to bring in new leads – even when leveraging existing power users' networks is much easier. 

To make the most out of your power users:

• Offer them incentives to refer you to their friends. Perhaps a few monthly subscriptions for free, or at a discounted rate. Or perhaps you send them swag in the mail. 
• Email them asking for referrals. You'd be surprised how many companies are too shy to ask for this.
• Co-organize events with them. Present them in a favorable light, get them to leverage their expertise with your product, and get them to invite all their friends. Social proof works wonders!
• Write a case study about how they've excelled by using your product. Get them to share it on social media to all of their followers. Did I say social proof already?
• Offer them a booth at your next company event. Or pay for them to have a booth at the next industry conference you'll both be going to. 

The customers you pick up from your power users' network will onboard that much more smoothly, just because they already trust you.

Some Resources to Learn More About User Adoption

Want even more information about user adoption?

You can find a ton of information on the UserGuiding blog, but we also like to listen to what external experts have to say, every now and then. 

In this episode of the WAY2slow podcast, Steve Bussey, the co-founder of Supered, shares his thoughts and first-hand experiences regarding user adoption.

We also recommend following Wes Bush, the founder of ProductLed.com, and Aakash Gupta, who writes the well-regarded Product Growth newsletter. Both of these individuals are authorities in this space.

If you're not a fan of following influencers on LinkedIn, it's also worth checking out Kristen Berman's product teardowns on Substack. You can learn so much from the mistakes made by other product owners.

Final Thoughts on the Importance of User Adoption Strategies

It should be clear from reading this article that implementing an intelligent user adoption strategy is a key part of success as a SaaS business. 

An effective user adoption strategy:

• Drives growth
• Improves retention
• Reduces your customer support load

If you'd like to start improving your user adoption rate in your business, we invite you to bookmark this article and use it as a resource on your journey.

When you're ready to start creating onboarding materials like walkthroughs, checklists, in-app surveys and a knowledge base, go ahead and check out the UserGuiding app as well.

It will help you build and refine all those onboarding elements without having to code. And you can even try it out entirely for free!