Enhancing Sales Conversions and Customer Retention with Marketing Tech and Digital Adoption Strategies
Marketing technology has exploded in sophistication in recent years. Whether it's AI-powered tools that offer advanced automation, predictive analysis, and content creation or data analytics that unlock the power of hyper-personalized experiences, it’s clear that MarTech is having a huge impact on sales and retention.
However, no matter how slick and professional your marketing technology is, you’ll struggle to justify your investment if your team doesn’t adopt these tools to their full potential.
Let’s take a look at how you can combine MarTech with digital adoption tools to drive sales and retention.
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How digital adoption platforms (DAPs) help marketing teams
DAP helps marketing teams embrace new sales and marketing tools in a number of different ways. One of the most critical processes is helping teams to become fluent and competent with new marketing software.
Fast onboarding
When you bring new tools into your workflow, a period of adjustment is normal. In software circles, this is called time to value (TTV). In essence, that concept describes how long it takes for a team or individual to get value from the product.
Good onboarding is crucial for minimizing TTV. Digital adoption tools provide onboarding content that helps teams quickly absorb key information about how tools work and the role they will play in business processes. As new and innovative tools emerge, digital adoption tools are critical for helping marketing teams train their teams efficiently.
More productivity
DAPs allow your teams to learn to use software quicker and enable each employee to learn to adopt tools to their full extent, whether that's through building onboarding content that helps employees master tools or learning how they can fit within your workflows.
When you provide contextual, on-demand help, your team spends less time figuring out how to do their job and more time delivering value for your business.
Adopting new tools can be frustrating. Even experienced marketing professionals can become overwhelmed or dissatisfied when faced with new software. However, if you provide a great onboarding experience, employees feel more engaged and satisfied. Perhaps more importantly, they feel confident that they can do their job to the fullest.
How Marketing Tech and Digital Adoption Tools Complement Each Other
OK, so now that we’ve got the marketing employee stuff out of the way, it’s time that we turned our attention to the more operational aspects of how you can drive sales and retention by fusing MarTech with a DAP.
While much depends on the specifics of the MarTech tool in question, the rest of this article will provide a general overview of how you can use these tools to become more than just the sum of their parts.
#1 Driving user onboarding and adoption
In the section above, we showed how to use a DAP to help your marketing team learn how to use new tools. Well, the same principle applies to your users.
If you have an app, one of the most crucial parts of your customer lifecycle happens when users get their hands on your app. A large portion of your marketing effort involves funneling your target audience towards this point, and what happens from there will do a lot to determine the success or failure of your product.
Here are some of the key tools that you can use to ensure your conversion rates and product adoption are at an acceptable level.
Interactive walkthroughs or demos: Users download apps because they have a problem to solve. If your product solves that problem, you can use a DAP to usher your users toward their “aha moment.” In-app interactive walkthroughs help reduce the learning curve and increase the likelihood that users will discover why you built your app.
Tooltips: Not all in-app guidance needs to be complex. Sometimes, you users just need a little contextual nudge here or there to understand how an app or specific features work. Tooltips are a flexible choice when you want to deliver help right when your user needs it.
Self-service options: Walkthroughs and tooltips are great for showing off what your product can do. However, sometimes your users need a little more. Some DAPs also come with the ability to add an in-app knowledge base, FAQs, or troubleshooting articles. This additional content can help add depth to your onboarding while reducing user frustration and the need for customer services.
#2 Integrating DAPs with MarTech
MarTech tools and DAPs both play a role in increasing sales and retention. However, when you add the two together, you can enhance your overall operations. Here are some key ways that you can use both tools together to drive revenue.
Personalization
Your DAP can tell you a lot about how users engage with your app. You don’t even need personally identifiable information, just general patterns about how various segments behave when using your solution. Additionally, tools like Usetiful also allow you to build in-app surveys, which are a powerful method to gather feedback and other information.
Armed with user behavior and survey data, you can get much closer to your current user base and target audience. If you feed this data into marketing automation software, you can deliver high-targeted campaigns via email or PPC ads.
Lead scoring
Ai-driven lead scoring tools are very popular right now. Many customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation tools have this capability, with many of them able to predict which leads will turn into paying users. However, they are only as effective as the data you give them.
DAP engagement data is a good source of information for your lead-scoring models. While it might not be the only information you need, it adds some interesting additional details that could give your models an edge.
User behavior analysis, product usage metrics, and user feedback are all common data sources that you can pull from a DAP. They’re also valuable information for predicting the patterns behind user churn. When you draw from these sources and add them to ML-powered tools, you can get a good idea of who your at-risk users are and trigger remediative action.
#3 Feature adoption
Quite often, users aren’t fully aware of all the features of your solution. However, that can lead to scenarios where they don’t understand the full value of your product —which is a big problem for retaining users. While you can make content that shows off the full range of your app or even send emails to users, there’s no guarantee that they’ll actually see or read this content. Instead, if you really want to get a critical point across, you can do it with a DAP via embeddable content.
#4 Upselling
DAPs allow you to analyze user behavior and engagement levels. You can use this information to identify which audience segments are strong candidates for upselling and cross-selling. Along similar lines, if one of your users has viewed a product tour for a feature that is part of a more advanced plan, you can target them with an in-app message or relevant promotions.
#5 Feedback
One of the most valuable aspects of digital adoption tools is the way they can facilitate feedback. It’s not just that they provide a mechanism for feedback; it’s that you’re more likely to get a response. Indeed, the response rate when compared with email is around 25% vs 8%, according to research.
With the right surveys, you can get incredible data from your audience that you can use to improve your product and your overall service or, best of all, really get to understand your target audience. When you know who uses your product, you can use this information to improve your marketing content and targeting.
#6 Customer journey optimization
Another great thing about modern MarTech tools is their ability to facilitate customer journey mapping. However, accurately building out a topology of the various touch points your customers take on their path to becoming aware of your product to become loyal and paying users requires data.
While your DAP won’t provide you with everything you need, it can become part of the broader sources of data you use to populate your customer journey map. Get this right, and you’ll move closer to understanding what motivates your customers to sign up and stick around.
Final thoughts
Exciting new tools and advances in the marketing technology space are emerging each year. Automation, analytics, and other AI-powered features are changing the game for marketing teams and driving better sales and retention outcomes.
DAPs have a big role to play here in helping marketers learn to operate these tools, as well as improving conversion rates and generating the data you need to take your operations to the next level.