Are you done producing your first product? It's now time to get it into the market. How do you ensure customers actually fall in love with your product? How do you ensure more and more purchases of the product?
This is where product adoption techniques come in handy. Product marketing is such an important aspect of getting your product out into the world. However, it is not a guarantee of sales. Many people will have knowledge of your product but not a large number of them will take the next step and buy it.
In this article, we delve deep into product adoption as a business tool. What is product adoption? Why do you need it? What are the stages of product adoption? This article offers answers to these and many other questions regarding product adoption.
Let's dive right into it!
What is Product Adoption?
Product adoption is the process through which a visitor learns of your product or app and integrates it to accomplish their tasks. This process involves a person learning about a product and acquiring it for their personal use. There are some characteristics of products that aid in achieving product adoption.
Some include user experiences with the product. Others include the overall view of the product. An encounter with the product usually offers information on these issues.
The ease of use of the product is another feature. As the product maker, you ought to ensure that the product is centered on the user, the product is easily understood and can be easily used by the customer. Further, the product ought to easily integrate with the digital work environment of the user.
Digital product adoption is specific to the adoption of digital products. It ensures that every digital tool is efficient and can be used for its intended purpose.
Product adoption is done in steps and stages. Here are all the stages of product adoption.
What Are the Stages of Product Adoption?
Marketing and support communications
This is the first step when a potential customer gains interest in a product that your company is offering. The communication between the potential customers and the marketing and support team is a key parameter. It highly influences the customer’s decision to buy and use a product.
User onboarding
This is the process by which new users become proficient in the use of your digital product. It is the process of helping new users understand and experience how your product is going to help them achieve their goals.
It's about proving to them that your product is the solution to the problem that motivated them to find you in the first place. You should check out these best practices for great user onboarding experiences.
Product tours
This is the process by which a company introduces a new customer to its product. This usually is via a step-by-step walkthrough undertaken by the company explaining key features of their software to the client. It helps with user onboarding.
Product Training
This is deliberate training undertaken by the company in order to show the customers how to utilize the product in order to attain its value.
Why is product adoption important?
Product adoption is very important for your business. This is because it ensures that customers who have purchased your product are able to use it and choose to keep using it over time.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. It is only through customers choosing your product again and again that enables your business to grow sustainably. The value customers derive from your products is what keeps you in business.
Driving product adoption has a positive effect on a company’s position in comparison to other companies. Due to the retention of customers, the company is able to remain and stay in competition with other companies.
Product adoption as a process reduces the amount of user frustration that you as the product maker have to deal with. This is because the stages of product adoption ensure that a user is well-prepared for the product and they can be able to use the product efficiently.
To that effect, there are ways in which a company can measure its product adoption strategies. These are ways that show if the product adoption has performed as well as it should.
This is because product adoption techniques do not involve shooting blanks. We need to have measurable outcomes. So how do we measure the outcome of product adoption?
How do we measure the effectiveness of product adoption?
Product adoption can be measured from analytics made by software from the data acquired from purchases. How many users complained about a certain feature? How many customer support tickets were registered under this particular feature?
These analytics may be in terms of bar graphs, line graphs, or bar charts. Getting feedback from customers is also crucial. Positive remarks indicate better product adoption by the market while negative feedback indicates vice versa.
Looking at the frequency at which customers buy your products or use your services is also a measure. A high purchase rate indicates a better adoption of the product.
How can you drive better product adoption?
Having an attractive product design is a key step in driving product adoption. The branding and labels as well as the casing of the product should be stellar. The view of the product is the main attractive feature. Unique and stylish designs have proven to be the deal closer to product adoption.
Your marketing strategies are also key in driving product adoption. You should make a point of adopting digital marketing tools such as social media marketing, influencer marketing, and television advertisements. With the widespread usage of smartphones and computers due to good internet connectivity, people spend a large part of their day scrolling through social media. Thus, your marketing strategies should focus on social media.
Getting celebrities and influencers with thousands of followers to advertise or review and recommend your products is a good place to start. The more awareness of your product is made, the more buyers you will attract.
You can also have an email listing of your customers. Through this, you can update them on improvements to the products as well as offers and discounts.
Creating a better user experience is also another strategy. For example, quick responses to queries, better customer care services, and proper handling of complaints are great ways to enhance user experience. This not only helps you retain old customers, but it also helps you get better referrals in order to get new customers.
Having perfect knowledge of the market is a useful tool in product adoption. This is essential in knowing how certain changes will affect the customers.
Making everyone feel like they are part of the success of your company is very important. Making customers feel like they are partners in the company can stir them to ensure the success of your product. They can take up personal responsibility to ensure product adoption by the general public.
Strive to eliminate barriers to the adoption of a product by responding to any concerns that may arise from the general public regarding the promise. What did your product promise the customer? Have you fulfilled that promise? If you have, does the general public feel that you have?
This also includes educating the public on how the product works and what it does. Highlighting some of the side effects is key to keeping the promise. Enlighten the public on how to counter these side effects.
Creation of incentives for adopting the product. Bringing in new products to the market is usually tricky, people are accustomed to their own products that they have used and trusted for years. Having free samples for new products, and lowering prices for the first batch of sales to ensure as many customers as possible get to use the product and experience its benefits.
Be sure to continually keep on learning and testing out new methods to ensure better product adoption strategies. Being curious and adventurous in ways to get more people to know of and adopt your product is a good place to start. Set up a whole team to research marketing strategies and implement the ones that are feasible and in the financial capacity of the company.
Usetiful: The Digital Product Adoption Tool
Usetiful is a tool to help you improve digital adoption without any coding. It helps you increase user retention and engagement in any digital software.
The reviews about Usetiful are all positive as this tool is one of a kind. For example, YSoft Clerbo, a company that initiates new hires into the company and the company’s culture, was seeking an interactive product tour tool in their customer’s native language. By using Usetiful, they were able to reduce the number of questions they received from new customers.
The story is similar for Ahruf and Hissah. Ahruf works toward children's development and learning while Hissah leverages online connectivity to help students and educators connect in ways that enhance education. Ahruf sought to discover, attract and retain new users while Hissah sought to enhance user engagement. By using Usetiful, Ahruf and Hissah were able to reach their goals.
You can also drive product adoption with interactive walkthroughs, in-product campaigns, and step-by-step tutorials and improve your user retention. Try Usetiful today for the best product adoption!