How do you know when people start using your product or site for what you built it to do? Helping customers get value from your product is key to converting occasional users into ‘sticky’ power users who stop looking for alternatives and incorporate your solution into their everyday processes.
This is where product adoption comes into play. Read on to learn everything you need to know about product adoption, including:
What is product adoption?
What’s the difference between adoption and acquisition?
Why increasing product adoption is critical to your business
Product adoption success metrics to track
The six stages of product adoption
The product adoption curve
Questions to help improve your product adoption rates
What areas of your product should you focus on to increase adoption?
Tools to increase product adoption
What is product adoption?
Product adoption, also known as user adoption, is the process by which people learn about your product or app and start using it to accomplish their goals.
Product adoption can also be expressed as the percentage of first-time users performing a certain set of behaviors. Your mission is to identify these behaviors. What actions do people take that prove they’re getting value?
What’s the difference between adoption and acquisition?
Acquisition is about bringing people to your site. It’s all the ways people learn about the value of your product or app and start using it to accomplish their goals
Adoption is about turning those visitors into users. It’s a better predictor of long-term product metrics (like LTV, ARR, or retention) than acquisition rate, because it includes the period of time during which the user is activated and retained.
You can acquire thousands of customers, but if they never use your product, you’ll never meet your long-term goals. While it’s important to discover which behaviors correlate with engagement and retention, for the sake of your business you need to find out whether users are actually performing them or not.
Why increasing product adoption is critical to your business
The simple answer is that a higher adoption rate = a larger user base. That’s why adoption is the key criterion for success in product & feature launches.
Adoption is all about the first few experiences with your product. It’s critical to figure out which actions provide new users value, and then encourage those users to repeat these actions soon after acquisition.
Marketing success does not equal adoption success. Simply bringing in thousands of new users doesn’t count. They need to be doing the right things!
A slight increase in product adoption makes a big difference. When users are successful from the start, their value begins increasing earlier and also accumulates over longer periods of time.
Strong product adoption rates are favorable for retention. This means people who discover your product tend to stay around longer, spend more money while they’re there, and drive predictable revenue for your business.
In fact, product adoption impacts nearly every key growth metric:
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Cost per lead
Cost per customer (CPC)
Average user MRR
Conversion rate
Retention rate
Churn rate
Key success metrics to track to measure product adoption
What exactly counts as adoption anyway? While the definition is simple—doing something your website or app was designed to help them do—figuring this out can be tricky!
The ‘adoption event’ should be the action in your product that best indicates a new customer is getting value from the product. For example, pageviews make a poor choice. While they are easy to track and simple to measure, they rarely indicate the value anyone is receiving.
Useful things to track might include:
Conversion rate from signup to first key action taken
Time to value (TTV), or the time it takes to reach a major activation event
Whether users complete your user onboarding flow or a tutorial
How closely doing so correlates with the frequency of use and feature adoption
Frequency of purchases
A team can also combine metrics from different events to see which mix best represents getting value from the product. By comparing these patterns to cohorts with the highest retention, you can see which adoption behaviors best predict retention.
Example: HelloSign
HelloSign is a product that lets users sign documents digitally. Upon sign-up, a user might do one of the following:
Upload a document
Request a signature
Add a team member
Turn on an integration
Or best of all, upgrade to a paid plan!
Each of these actions may count as adoption. So, what’s important to find out is how many times action X happened, how often action Y occurred, and which of these activities best correlates to retention and LTV.
The 6 stages of product adoption
The stages of product adoption for individual users are
Awareness: potential customers become aware of your product, though they may not yet know how it can solve their problems—they may also be unaware that they even have a problem at the start of this stage
Interest: your potential customer researches your product and learns how it can help them. The details they look for will vary depending on their needs and adopter profile (more on this below).
Evaluation: they compare your product to the competition and decide whether to sign up for a demo, trial, or freemium account. This stage typically includes reading user reviews and comparison pages and requesting pricing information.
Trial: they test out your product to see if it fits their needs and processes
Activation: they realize value for the first time, which convinces them it’s worth investing in your product
Adoption: convinced of the value, customers form habits around using your product and it becomes part of their daily lives or work
The product adoption curve
Product adoption follows a curve—different user profiles have different attitudes to new products:
First come the innovators, a small group of tech-savvy risk-takers. They enjoy discovering new products and are willing to try them before they have evidence that your solution will solve their problems—perhaps at the awareness or interest stage.
Next are the early adopters. Also tech savvy and risk-taking, these users are slightly more cautious and only willing to try your product once a few innovators have tested the waters.
After the early adopters, there tends to be a ‘chasm’ where little adoption occurs until your product evolves and is bug-free enough to satisfy the next group:
The early majority are more risk-averse and less tech-savvy. These users want hard evidence that your product will solve their problem before they try it. They’re likely to take their time to check it out thoroughly at the interest, evaluation, and trial stages.
The late majority comes next. These users want strong evidence that your product solves their problem, and that others have vetted it. They also tend to have a low tolerance for products that are buggy or still in development and are unlikely to sign up for a trial until you’ve accumulated a significant number of positive reviews.
Finally, skeptical laggards are the last to adopt. They’re highly risk-averse, not tech-savvy, and dislike using new products—so they’ll take some convincing. They often spend a long time in the awareness stage, before their pain becomes so unbearable they’re forced to look for an alternative to the status quo.
Once you understand these different user groups, you can create and implement product adoption strategies to boost rates for each group across every stage of adoption.
Questions to help improve adoption rates for your product and its features
You’ll want to discern which appeals work best for your new customers—the early majority, the late majority, and the laggards. Are they finding the newest features, and are they engaging with them? You also want to know how much existing customers spend on your product throughout their lifecycle—and how often they buy. Ask yourself these questions:
How sticky is your product to new users?
Does it appeal to innovators and early adopters?
Which behaviors by potential customers best predict adoption?
Which acquisition channels have the highest adoption rates?
How does the speed of adoption impact your retention rate?
Note that to measure product adoption metrics properly, you likely need a tech stack that can track user behavior, combine qualitative data with quantitative data, and pipe that data to your supporting systems. This stack should include a product and behavior analytics solution (like Contentsquare—more about this below) that allows you to understand exactly which behaviors correlate with adoption.
What areas of your product should you focus on to increase adoption?
Adoption is about getting users to that first ‘a-ha’ moment. To do that, teams usually focus on the following elements of their product:
Customer onboarding helps get new users oriented so they can find value quickly
Product design helps active new users find key features and complete actions that drive adoption
In-product messaging and tutorials provide guidance to your product for people as they start using it.
Customer success workflows ensure any roadblocks to adoption are quickly addressed and solved
Behavioral data also helps product teams learn from their customers, plan updates to their website or platform, enhance popular features, sunset unpopular ones, and improve the overall user experience.
Tools to increase product adoption
The ideal product adoption stack includes several solutions that help you roll out changes driven by user behavior.
Behavior and product analytics tools. Tools like Contentsquare's Product Analytics and Experience Analytics help you identify the behaviors that best predict long-term value, launch and test improvements that encourage those behaviors, and measure the effectiveness of each change to the customer journey. This is the most important software to have in your product adoption stack, and we’ll tell you what features to look for in your analytics tools below.
Marketing automation software. Platforms like Marketo and HubSpot help you target users with product-related campaigns, onboarding flows, and timely tips on using your solution. When users read and act on the messaging in these campaigns, they’re likely to find value more quickly which improves both product and feature adoption rates.
Product-led growth platforms. Solutions like Appcues and WalkMe help show notifications and customer feedback right in your product, so you can offer guides and tours that help people learn how to use it quickly. You can continuously collect feedback from people already using your product and incorporate feedback from your most valuable customer segments into your roadmap, so you can ensure users aren’t missing the features you’ve launched for them.
Testing and experimentation platforms. Tools like Optimizely and AB Tasty help you conduct efficient, regular testing, and quickly gauge the impact of new products, features, and website changes, so you can focus primarily on tasks likely to increase your adoption rate.
Customer feedback tools. Solutions like Delighted, UserVoice, and Contentsquare help you survey people who have already adopted your product. This allows you to easily take action on responses from your most engaged customer base and get the data you need to make maximum-value updates to your website or app.
Customer support solutions. Customer support platforms like Intercom and Drift help you segment and triage customers to reduce churn. This lets you learn from users who’ve already adopted your product and make changes to your roadmap that are likely to increase adoption in the future.
What product analytics features are most important for improving product adoption?
There are plenty of behavior product analytics tools out there, but how do you pick the right one to help you improve product adoption? We recommend you choose a tool with the following features:
1. Automatic event tracking
To understand exactly which user behaviors drive adoption, you must be able to track them all.
Some product analytics platforms require you to manually track events and behaviors. This requires selecting them all in advance, and you’ll need engineers to write code during implementation.
See the problem? You won’t know which actions and behaviors drive adoption before you can analyze all of them in a single place.
Automatic event tracking solves this dilemma! You install a single snippet of code, just once. No engineering help is necessary. You can examine anything, anytime you want.
2. Data science
If you have to spend all your time digging through your data, you’ll never find the information you need. These days, good product analytics tools come with data-science-driven features that can analyze your data for you and point you to the areas of your product that need attention.
3. Session replay
Session replays are video playbacks of what users did on your digital product, so you can add qualitative context to your quantitative data. Replays are indispensable for building funnels, defining events, and investigating moments of friction.
And most important—when the replays are available within your analytics platform, there’s no need for the added complexity of exporting data to third-party applications.
4. Robust integrations
Combine marketing, sales, testing, and customer success team data with product analytics to see the full picture.
In a good tool, APIs and popular integrations will come pre-built, so it’s easy to share normalized product analytics data with apps like Marketo and Intercom.
Product adoption: essential to creating customer delight
When users realize the value your product offers, they’re more likely to make it part of their daily lives and stop looking for alternatives, giving you more satisfied customers—and a steady stream of revenue.
Help users quickly achieve their 'aha' moment—when they realize exactly how your product can help solve their problems—to boost adoption. This means putting product adoption at the heart of everything you do, from design, to marketing, to customer success. Teams with high product adoption rates never stop looking for ways to improve.