Product Adoption Process: How It Works and How to Fix It

No matter how good your existing product is, if you don’t have your users using it, it isn’t worth much to anyone. That’s why product adoption, or the process aimed at solving the problem of converting visitors into users for a product, is one of the most important metrics to measure when running or managing a business. If your product isn’t adopted by enough customers, your company will fail.

In this article, we’ll explain what product adoption is, why you should care about it, and what are the stages and the ways of improvement for it.

Product adoption is the process that helps your product truly meet its users, which means saving costs on redesign after its launch. Generally, phases of adoption include awareness, interest, evaluation, and purchase. In this overview, Arounda experts will share their knowledge of truly valuable product adoption, describe the peculiarities and metrics for each product adoption stage, and share our tips and best practices to make this process work for your business benefit. 

Why You Should Care of Product Adoption

In essence, product adoption is the moment when a user starts interacting with your product to achieve the exact aims its capabilities initially wanted to serve. This achievement can be represented in the percentage of users completing the defined set of actions after an encounter with our product. However, it’s more accurate to determine the desired user behavior beforehand and select the exact actions that demonstrate the product brings true value.

Generally, businesses consider these product adoption metrics:

• Conversion rate percentage from registration till the first key action completed

• Time for creating value or time till completing the main action

• Does a user complete the whole product adoption process 

• Purchase frequency

At the same time, the presence of a well-built product adoption strategy means the product becomes so valuable for users that the revenue exceeds the time and money spent on launch and usage. That’s why working on product adoption timely means you can prevent redesign and budget losses. It provides valuable knowledge and brings confidence on how many people will actually buy your product so you can determine the prospects of your product idea more clearly.

Product Adoption Process Stages and How It Works

The product adoption process describes how customers start using a new product to them. Five key product adoption stages include awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption. In the section below, we’ll describe this framework in detail.

Awareness (Introduction Stage)

This stage happens when a user gets to know your product, meaning hearing something and knowing almost nothing about it. The awareness channels may include recommendations from friends, relatives, and sellers or by spotting an ad. At this stage, users are dismissive of a product, that’s why it’s important to invest enough effort, so they know it exists, imagine how it works, and understand why they should care about it.  

Interest (Information Gathering Stage)

Here, interest in your product appears, so users are motivated to collect as much information about your product as possible. Usually, they refer to your marketing materials, sales consultants and read customer reviews to understand the product’s quality, characteristics, functions, risks, manufacturers, and branding. Simply put, users want to create a detailed image of your product in their heads, so again, you need to invest in marketing, advertising, and social media campaigns to get people talking about your product. 

Evaluation (Consideration Stage)

All the information gathered before becomes the basis of product evaluation. Here, users consider all the aspects that matter to them to make judgments — usually, by relying on the presence of innovations, quality standards, expected productive capacity, and price and comparing with the competitors. After that, they decide on whether it’s worth trying your product. You can get an idea of how people will perceive your product by simply Googling similar products within the same industry as well as researching how much profit they are making.  

Trial (Sampling Stage)

When users are ready to test your product, they research it and try an innovation in its limited scope to draw their own conclusions after the trial. At this stage, users can buy a product or take a free trial (which happens more frequently for SaaS products). In any case, the sampling cycle is essential as users make their final decision here and determine whether to become paying customers. That’s why a tiny mistake matters: if you haven’t invested in making it easy for someone to sign up for an account, your potential buyer may abandon your service quickly, leaving you with nothing more than an enthusiastic email address. 

Adoption / Rejection (Buy or Not Buy Stage)

If the trial is satisfactory, a user decides to buy the product and starts using it, independently or with other participants. That’s how the adoption/rejection model defines how product lifecycle happens over time. As it’s always the result of successfully passing 4 prior stages, the strength of your messaging, meaning marketing campaigns among all, will have a big impact on their decision-making process. They are all about creating demand for specific products in specific markets for specific customer segments at precise times in their buying journey. 

Post-Adoption

An important component of ensuring that your product has a successful launch is getting user feedback in order to fix bugs, problems, or features. If you’re able to identify issues in your product before you release it, you can be sure that your product will resonate with users when they first try it out. This is crucial for retaining customers after the purchase happens and encouraging them to bring their friends and relatives as other users to the awareness stage.

3 Ways to Improve Product Adoption

Product adoption assists in creating your next great thing. However, you should keep in mind that before anything else happens for a consumer, an emotional connection has to be made that will drive desire for your product, both before and after it hits the market. That’s why we recommend considering these three recommendations to overcome the most common adoption challenges of a product. 

Improve Onboarding 

Since onboarding shows users not only particular functions but also the overall value of the product, it’s crucial to invest enough work and attention to it. A good practice is to consider the basic aims of users: save time, earn money, or connect with other users. In this case, onboarding should guide them to these aims.

Take Care of an Image of Your Product

For any product, it’s important to create a good impression and proactively address buyer resistance head-on. To drive adoption, pay special attention to your messaging. Instead of telling people what they should want or need and talking about how good your product is, show why it solves buyers’ problems. Furthermore, make sure that when customers receive their new product, they immediately see its core benefit. For this, consider adding additional features to enable easy use right out of the box. Also, it’s helpful to include written instructions for setup.

Invest in Product Quality

No marketing can save a product of poor quality, while a high-quality product usually speaks of itself. That’s why investing in extra features that provide real value to users, and relevant changes that affect usage frequency is always worth time and money. At the same time, marketing, design, and development should run together, meaning providing improvements directed at attracting a greater number of target users. For example, you can advance your support system by introducing a chatbot or adding short demonstration videos via pop-up screens.      

Arounda Can Help You Increase Product Adoption

As you can see, product adoption is the way of getting people on board with your idea and leading them to become happy customers of your product. Considering the business benefits and importance of this process, it’s important to get a professional consultant who will guide you through all the stages of product adoption and share the best tools with you.

You can contact us for help! We have experience in guiding product adoption for startups and mid-sized Software-as-a-Service providers, and we’re ready to dedicate our expertise to your product too. Let’s get to know each other and show your product in the limelight to its users!