In the world of product-led growth (PLG), there are plenty of resources on different ways to improve retention, increase customer satisfaction, and create a great onboarding experience.
But to achieve these results, you need an effective product adoption strategy that gives you a competitive edge in the SaaS market.
This article is a comprehensive guide to understanding, implementing, and optimizing product adoption strategies for business growth. Learn what product adoption is, what drives it, and a structured six-step approach to building an effective product adoption strategy for your product-led business.
Let's start basic.
What is product adoption?
Product adoption refers to the process of users fully embracing and utilizing a product or service.
Without effective product adoption, companies risk low user engagement, poor customer satisfaction, and ultimately, failure in the market.
The general phases of product adoption include initial awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, activation, and adoption.
By understanding how the product adoption process works, you can develop improved strategies to lead prospects through their user onboarding experience, ultimately turning them into loyal customers.
How to drive product adoption in SaaS
Relying on guesswork won't yield the best results when it comes to driving product adoption.
Before moving on to the six steps to crafting an effective product adoption strategy (which we’ll discuss in the next section), it’s essential to grasp the factors influencing SaaS customer adoption and how they contribute to your overall strategy approach.
Now, let's examine the building blocks of your user journey, which, if not handled correctly, can result in onboarding friction and eventual customer churn.
Understand your users
For effective product adoption, understanding your users is key. This means gathering data and insights on their behaviors, preferences, and pain points.
By understanding your users, you can tailor your product and messaging to meet their specific needs, increasing the likelihood of adoption.
Provide seamless onboarding
Make sure your onboarding process is intuitive, easy to follow, and provides clear instructions.
Consider using interactive walkthroughs or tutorials to guide users through the initial setup and highlight key features. This will help users quickly grasp the value of your product and encourage them to continue using it.
Offer personalized support
Provide users with various support channels, such as live chat, email, or a dedicated support team. Tailor your support to address individual user needs and provide timely assistance. This personalized support helps users overcome any obstacles they encounter and increase their confidence in using your product.
Leverage customer success stories
Customer success stories are powerful tools for driving product adoption. Share case studies and testimonials from satisfied customers who have achieved positive outcomes using your product.
Highlight the specific challenges they faced and how your product helped them overcome those challenges. This social proof will build trust and credibility, encouraging potential users to adopt your product.
Continuously improve user experience
A great user experience is paramount. Regularly gather user feedback and analyze user behavior to identify areas for improvement. Implement iterative updates to your product based on this feedback, ensuring it remains user-friendly and aligned with their needs. This ongoing enhancement of the user experience will boost adoption and retention rates.
Implement gamification techniques
Gamification techniques can be highly effective in driving product adoption. Incorporate elements such as badges, leaderboards, or rewards to make the user experience more engaging and enjoyable. This can create a sense of achievement and encourage users to explore and utilize your product's features more extensively.
Measure and optimize
To ensure the success of your product adoption strategy, it's crucial to measure and optimize your efforts. Track key product adoption metrics such as user engagement, conversion rates, and churn rates to gauge the effectiveness of your strategies.
Use this data to identify areas that need improvement and make data-driven decisions to optimize your product adoption strategy.
Whether you're a startup or an enterprise, the need to consistently and effectively boost SaaS product adoption remains constant. Read “How to Increase SaaS Product Adoption Using Behavioral Science” on our blog.
6 steps to an effective product adoption strategy
To effectively plan and achieve success with a product adoption strategy, you need to understand the following first:
- Your Objectives: What you’re hoping to achieve
- The Rationale: Why you’re doing it
- Metrics for Success: How you measure success
Product strategy means taking a step back from different outputs and evaluating whether a particular strategy is worth doing. This decreases the risk of business failure by defining these objectives and key results (OKRs) before starting.
By converting your strategy into measurable and quantifiable objectives, your team will be better able to understand what needs to be done to ensure success.
Without further ado, here are the six steps to making an effective product adoption strategy:
- Make an objective to increase product adoption
- Understand and map out the customer journey
- Define your buyer personas
- Get experimenting
- Design an outcome-based roadmap
- Evaluate your strategy
Let's break down these steps in the following sections.
1. Make an objective to increase product adoption
First, make product adoption the North Star of your objective.
Product adoption isn't a one-time event; it happens at various points throughout the customer journey. Consequently, it’s not something that can realistically be attributed solely to the responsibility of one team.
This objective may be further broken down into potential sub-objectives, each with its key results that allow you to measure progress.
For example, you might want to improve the onboarding experience for your customers, so increasing sign-ups by 10% might be a key result that is part of that objective.
2. Understand and map out the customer journey
Now that you’ve set your North Star objective, you want to understand and map out the customer journey.
This will vary based on your particular product or service, but here's an example of what that customer journey might look like:
- Awareness Phase: You first have an initial awareness phase where the user is just learning about your brand.
- Education Phase: They may start a trial and start educating themselves.
- Activation Phase: A trial conversion that turns into activation when they become a paying customer.
- Retention Phase: They may look into renewing their subscription.
Product adoption happens at every single one of these phases.
Sales and marketing teams will likely take the lead in the early stages, while customer success and product teams will handle the later phases.
This is precisely why increasing product adoption is set as an objective – it ensures that all departments understand how their work will make a meaningful impact.
Regardless of the industry or whether your product has a free trial, it's important to make sure every member of your team is aligned. However, it’s worth noting that the different phases for this may vary.
3. Define your buyer personas
Before you can persuade users to adopt your product, you need to create user and buyer personas. This is the next step in creating an effective product adoption strategy.
Users and buyers can vary. Some may be advocates with no decision-making power, while others can make purchasing decisions. Additionally, there are those making purchasing decisions without a clear understanding of why they're choosing your product.
It's important to cater to different types of user and buyer personas to make an easier transition from awareness to education to activation.
It can become overwhelming to cater to every type, so prioritization is always essential.
If your objective is to cater to the purchasing persona, concentrate solely on their unique journey, and adjust your product adoption strategy as needed based on data and pivot as necessary.
4. Run experiments to make smarter decisions
The next step involved experimentation, where you're going to try out different methods to determine their effectiveness in achieving the set North Star objective.
There are a myriad of ways of outlining different experiments you can conduct.
Opportunity Solution Tree by Teresa Torres is one of my favorites.
The opportunity solution tree framework allows you to look at all possible opportunities with the perspective that there are not inherently bad ideas, just potential ideas that can lead you to desired outcome. This approach helps you prioritize problems to solve instead of features to build.
If something doesn't give you a desired outcome, it doesn't get done.
5. Design an outcome-based roadmap
Unlike the old-school way of creating feature and time-based roadmaps, an outcome-based roadmap focuses on aligning potential projects to objectives.
When you translate this into a strategic document, it may look something like this:
At the beginning of this section, I referred to three underlying components of a product adoption strategy: what, why, and how you measure success.
The objectives are established as a way to understand how you achieve that.
When addressing each problem, you're considering its impact on a specific stage of the customer journey and the corresponding user and buyer personas involved.
While this particular outcome-based product roadmap is for the product team, a similar structure can be applied to your sales, success, and marketing teams. As all these departments are working together towards the same set of objectives, you're still aiming to impact and achieve the same goal.
6. Evaluate your strategy
If your experiments don’t yield the expected results, you can document the outcome. Make sure to note what went wrong, and if it was successful, consider how you can replicate that success in future experiments.
Here’s an example of what this evaluation might look like:
With that, you’ve mapped out a solid product adoption strategy.
We started with our North Star objective to increase product adoption. This may be distilled down into smaller group objectives that will roll up to that North Star objective based on different teams, such as sales, success, or product.
These OKRs will allow us to measure the success of our experiments, always with the thought in mind of what we're doing, why we're doing it, and who we are impacting in the journey.
How a product adoption strategy fits into your SaaS growth plan
Product strategy involves defining the goals, objectives, and measurements of success for a product or service. It helps businesses determine if a particular initiative is worth pursuing and how to assess its impact.
By defining product strategy upfront, you can mitigate the risk of failure and align your efforts toward achieving desired outcomes.
To build a winning strategy, you need to focus on:
- Where you play
- How you’ll win
- What capabilities you must have
- What strategic choices you must make
In ProductLed's coaching program, Wes Bush helps you and your product-led team tackle these four elements in the first Strategy component of our three-phased system that will help you scale your business without a sales team.
Learn more about the ProductLed Academy, the benefits, and how to apply.
