What is product adoption?
Product adoption is the process where an individual learns of a new product and becomes a user of it, learning what it does, how it does it, and applying the value it offers to their daily life.
Making a person sign up to your product and pay once is not as hard as it sounds for many businesses since it is possible to push a purchase with a false claim. Solving a user’s problem easily for them and offering value to their day-to-day work or personal life is much more difficult but when accomplished, it can be key to success.
There are various ways to improve product adoption, which usually fall under 3 categories:
- Improving UX and Product: removing any pain-points, adding requested features, fixing bugs and errors
- Improving user onboarding: smoothly pushing users to their aha moments, personalizing the experience, removing any pain-points
- Increasing user engagement: sending behavioral emails, in-app messages, increasing feature adoption
Why is product adoption important?
Product adoption is important to a business because only when it is fully accomplished users will become fans of a product and actively use it in their daily lives.
As more users adopt the product, retention rates will skyrocket while churn rates become minimal. Users will be more likely to stay around and improvements in revenue can happen.
Using the product adoption data at hand, the users who could be targets for upselling and promotion campaigns can be identified.
Also, when users fully adopt a product a bond of trust and love between them and the business is more likely to occur. A product’s fan will be more eager to promote it in their communities and leave positive reviews.
What are the stages of new product adoption process?
The new product adoption process consists of 5 stages:
1- Awareness
This is where the potential users learn about the product and its value proposition, in short where they see the front face of the business.
At this stage it is highly useful to provide future customers with only correct information about the service or the product, being transparent and honest is key.
2- Interest
This is where users have an active curiosity about a product or a service and are eager to learn more about it. For this stage, providing potential customers with the resources with which they can learn about the product can be helpful in pushing them further through their journeys.
3- Evaluation
This is where users decide to try a product or not. Removing any frictions to trying the product is the main goal for this stage. It is best to have a free trial that users can start achieving value in, and making signing up to this free trial as simple as possible.
The amount of users who move to the next stage will dramatically improve if the trial is risk-free.
4- Trial
This is where users get their hands on a product or a service and try to achieve value with it. The impression left at this stage is crucial as it will determine the status of the next stage. Creating a seamless user onboarding experience helps users see the value you offer first-hand and how they can achieve this specific value by themselves. The more easily comprehensible process of achieving value is, the better will be their impressions going out of this stage.
5- Adoption/Rejection
This is where trial users determine whether a product is worth using in the future or not. If they have easily achieved value during the trial period, they will be more likely to purchase the product and keep using it in the future.
