The drivers of product adoption

Creating a SaaS product and having recurring customers sounds like a dream.

But fulfilling this dream is no pic nic.To retain your customer, you need to accelerate product adoption. It means educating your customers about your product — why they need it, how they

should use it, and how they can simplify their lives more with it.

To understand this better, you need to know about product adoption and its drivers. When customers leave the shop, checking 10 things but not buying any, there is an obvious problem.

Keep reading, and we will help you in uncovering this mystery. Here is what you will learn from this guide.

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What Is Product Adoption?

As I said, you might have a lot of people signing up for the product, but the graph falls flat when it comes to actual product usage. What happens in that period?

Here product adoption comes into effect. It is a process by which customers come across and use your product to the utmost efficiency. It holds great significance in the customer success journey.

❝ Saurabh Jindal, from Bidfortune.com defines product adoption as, "We say a product has been fully adopted, when the users start advocating it to others and thus become its brand ambassadors.”

For SaaS-based businesses, it is a crucial part to ignore. Because you can have people sign up for your products, but if you cannot retain them, it will be a severe failure.

Increasing the product adoption rate is crucial in blocking those drivers that lead customers to churn or stop using the product.

We will dive deep into each of the factors and strategies regarding the same, but first, we need to know why these metrics are such a great deal in the first place.

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Why Is Product Adoption Important?

Product adoption will help your company to move from the she-loves-me-or-she-loves-me-not stage to take-my-money. It takes an absolute level of commitment for your customer to drive past the stage.

Product Adoption Decreases Your Churn Rate

Churn rate is a word that is no less than a nightmare for any SaaS-based entrepreneur. Your goal is to reduce it as much as possible.

But, how can you identify any sorts of issues if you haven't measured them?

Measuring Product adoption will help you recognize those shortcomings and analyze any change in customers' behavior regarding product usage. Even if you get more new customers every day, it doesn't solve the problem.

You can create more MRR by improving the customer experience for existing ones than acquiring new ones now and then. But to do that you need to know about the factors of initial product adoption.

Product Adoption Curve

A product adoption curve shows at which rate and when a customer adopts your product.

It has 5 segments that you need to focus on.

Innovators

These are a small group of people who are the first to invest in your product. Generally, these are known as technology enthusiasts and like to stay upfront with all the developing technologies.

They don't mind if there are any issues or bugs in your product. If you notice, then this group is small, so you have a small number of sales initially.

Regardless of its small market segment, innovators are crucial because they are a great source of feedback and resources.

Early Adopters

At some point, you will have a steady conversion rate because of early adopters. Unlike innovators, early adopters don't like to invest in products that are filled with bugs.

Early adopters are people who have been eyeing your product, but they are also looking for some reviews to pop on.

Once you have grabbed the attention of early adopters, this means you cannot slack off, and they expect excellent customer service.

Early Majority

It holds the maximum space in the graph, and these are the users that won't trust your product in the early stages. They will only invest once it is free from any bugs and it has established itself.

To retain the early majority, you need to build a strong relationship between innovators and early adopters.

Late Majority

The late majority holds a similar space as the early majority, but the only difference is that they are even more sensitive towards risk. They won't tolerate any sort of technical issues. So they will purchase your product only if they feel it's safe enough to do so.

Laggards

These are people who like to stay in their comfort zone and refrain from technical experiments. They prefer the ones they have been using, and they would switch to anything else only if that's a sheer necessity.

Stages Of Product Adoption

In SaaS, the customer journey starts way before the purchase of the new product. You can break down the customer journey into 5 stages.

Awareness Stage

It is the moment when a user lands on your website and has just seen your product, but they don't have enough knowledge about it. So you need to educate your customers with videos, blog posts, and live chat assistance.

Interest Stage

Out of every visitor, there will be some prospects that would be interested in your product. They will be searching for ways to know more about it. So make sure you have your customer service team ready with helpdesk and live chat software.

Evaluation

At this stage of product adoption, prospects will evaluate your product and compare it with your competitors. You need to have a top-notch product and customer service with crystal clear messaging to beat your competitors.

Demo or Freemium Stage

This is the stage where your prospects are convinced to have a taste of your product, and they have decided to sign up for the demo or freemium. To ensure they don't ghost you after that, you have to remove any apparent bugs and focus on your onboarding process.

Purchase Or Rejection Stage

It is the moment when your prospect has passed every stage and is ready to decide if your product is convincing and good enough to invest in or not.

How To Improve Product Adoption

As you are familiar with product adoption and its stages, it is essential to understand how to improve it.

Contextual Onboarding

The way you welcome your guests in your home determines their behavior towards you. So you need to invest more in a smooth onboarding process.

Contextual onboarding means that the product guides its users. It means that your users will receive triggers throughout your product with tooltips.

So when a user clicks on a particular feature, the trigger is fired, and your onboarding messaging shows.

With Successeve you can customize your existing attributes and events. You can change and update the way they are displayed and add a description to it. So once a user hovers around that feature it will show up as a tooltip.

Engage Users With In-Product Walkthroughs

Designing a responsive interface is essential and significant, but you need to provide some extra help for new users.

You can create different playbooks with Successeve which will act as your personal assistant during the onboarding process. You can create a playbook to generate multiple sequences of steps— email tasks, auto-emails, assigning customers to a teammate, slack notification, and email notification.

Most new users will sign up to solve a specific issue, but they will be unaware of how they can do that. To help and retain them, you need to create in-product walkthroughs. This will increase your product adoption rate as you help them in solving their issue with your software.

Enhance Your Support Team

You can create a number of blogs or videos to help your users, but there will always be some issues. These issues might be the reason for churn. Avoid this churn by assisting them whenever they need you.

To do that, you need to improve your support team with regular training and Salesmachine will help you with an improved way of communication. With Successeve you can see your intercom chats, support tickets, and intercom chats in one place. So you get a unified view of everything and don’t have to switch between multiple tabs or software.

Improve Your Product With Feedback

You can assume that your product is flawless and users are not facing any issues.

But that's your illusion. The best way to look for any loophole is by directly asking your customers. Feedback and survey forms are the best way to get those bugs or issues out of the way.

You can integrate Satismeter and run event triggered NPS surveys directly from the Successeve platform. This way you will have everything in one place to look for.

So refrain from assuming everything and ask for feedback to improve your product and retain your users.

Use Email Marketing To Engage Your Users

Emails are a great way to communicate with your customers about your product. You can use it to educate your users regarding your product or send a subtle notification if they haven't used your software for a while now.

You can also target users based on their actions regarding the product and send them an email with tips and resources.

How To Create A Product Adoption Strategy?

A product adoption strategy will help you increase your product adoption. However, it can be a complicated process, but we have broken it down into 4 key steps.

Segment Your Users As Per The Buyer Personas

In business, intuition doesn't work. So, if you assume that someone from a particular background is your customer, then you are wrong. Avoid that and make decisions based on accurate data and analytics.

Use Cohort Analysis To Understand Your Customer Behavior

Once a person signs up for your product, what do you think they do with it? Again you can have your guesses, but test them with cohort analysis to dive deep into the reasons.

Identify Key Activation Points

What is that particular action that shows your customer has finally adopted the product? Sit down and think about the key activation points that will lead you to a positive signal for your product adoption.

Pin Every Feature In The User Journey

As a SaaS-based business, you must have a user journey. You need to pin certain features of your product according to the level of their user journey. The user journey will be entirely different with every user, and you need to mould your strategy according to that.

How To Measure Product Adoption?- Through Metrics

There are a lot of metrics that you can use to define your product adoption. Here are some of the crucial metrics that you need to keep an eye on:

PQL

PQL or product-qualified leads are people who are almost convinced enough to purchase your product.

You need to keep an eye on this metric because this will ensure that you don't waste your time converting a lead with no interest. PQL will filter your prospective customers so that you can focus on the bigger picture.

Time-to first Key Action

This refers to the average time for a new customer to use an existing feature or vice versa.

Time To Value

This is the time a user takes to reach that moment where they can finally get some work done with your product. You need to focus on decreasing time to value as that will help you in boosting your product adoption.

Product Activation Rate

Determining any particular feature for your product activation is tricky. So, you have to choose any specific feature or event that indicates this activation. After you have decided on that milestone, you can start measuring the user activation rate.

Customer Life Time Value

When you see people adopt your products more and you have a low churn rate, you have a higher customer lifetime value. It shows you the value in terms of the currency that a customer provides you in their entire lifespan.

Keeping an eye on this metric will ensure that your customers are sticking with you for a longer time.

Customer Engagement Rate

A customer cannot solve its problem if they don't use your product. So to avoid this circumstance, you need to track the customer engagement rate.

Product Adoption Is A Process

Product adoption is not a magic wand that will create the business of your dreams in just a wave. It will take you some time to master this and convert visitors to your customer.

You need to remember that you have to create your customer journey and nurture your prospects with it.

You can track your customers and understand them better with Successeve. Begin your journey of product adoption with Successeve today.

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