User adoption is a crucial element for all new products and services. In order to maximize your user adoption, you’ll need to do some research. That research entails looking at specific user metrics, understanding your target audience, and tailoring features to work smarter, not harder.
This article explores why user adoption is essential for your business, how to measure it accurately, and how to improve your rate.
What Is User Adoption?
User adoption is when a new customer sees value in your company’s products or features and then implements them into their daily tasks. This process, sometimes known as onboarding, describes a user’s willingness to learn and acclimate to a new product and continue using it after dealing with the learning curve.
Depending on the effort it takes to learn to use your company’s products, they may decide that the effort is not worth the benefits. A high user adoption rate indicates that your company is bringing on new users who keep using the service.
Why Is User Adoption Important?
User adoption shows your product is providing value to customers and marketing is keeping users invested in your brand. Also, higher retention through user adoption leads to higher customer lifetime value.
When it’s easier to attract new customers because of your brand reputation, you’re going to see an increase in profit.
How Do You Develop User Adoption?
Developing user adoption means focusing on your customer’s goals through product-led growth. By using your product or service, those customers seek to accomplish specific goals. As long as your service is furthering their goals, they’re more likely to continue buying from your brand or using your product. It’s crucial to research those customer goals to ensure that your product is always best for your customer.
How Do You Measure User Adoption?
Measuring user adoption requires a team to choose their intent for a product, select the metrics that best reflect their goal, begin with a baseline, and then monitor ensuing differences in user adoption rate as changes are implemented.
That sounds complex, but by breaking down the steps involved, your team can gather crucial information about the audience to which your product appeals and their expectations.
Pick a Goal
First things first, you must know what user adoption looks like for your company. SaaS companies need to monitor users who begin a paid subscription, install the software, and continually use it for their needs. Car companies might monitor repeated sales of units to enterprise clients.
Select Metrics
The metrics your company monitors largely revolve around the goal your team created in step 1. To track your user adoption rates, you’ll need to know your number of new users and your total number of users.
You’ll need powerful product analytics tools like Kissmetrics to help you and your team view these valuable insights.
Develop Your Tracking Plan
Once your team has decided which metrics to monitor, they’ll need to lay out their plan to track users. They should list the tracked events, how often they will be recording their tracking, which tool they’ll be using, and the overall timeline for monitoring.
This is also the step where your team learns to look for any flaws or weaknesses that their plan should account for.
Capture Your Baseline Metrics
Most pictures show a before and after when they want to capture major change. It’s essential for your team to take the before picture by establishing a baseline of customer metrics for whatever events they plan to track in a given period. Otherwise, your team has nothing to compare user activities to in the future or to see how changes have caused a distinct difference.
Implement Changes
After the baseline is in place, your team can make any changes that they brainstormed back in step 2. This is where your company has the chance to monitor how those changes are implemented and whether users are responding favorably.
You’ll want to watch a range of customers, both new and returning, to ensure that your product or service is adequately meeting their goals and expectations.
Repeat
The changes have been implemented, and now it’s time to re-evaluate your metrics to see any differences in your user adoption rate. Depending on what challenges your users face in using your products or services, these changes may look different for every company.
Measuring the same metrics and comparing them against your baseline will demonstrate whether or not the changes had a tangible effect on the user adoption rate.
Sometimes changes can have the opposite intended effect. Simplifying your app by getting rid of a certain process might seem initially appealing, but if it turns out to be a core feature that users frequently relied on, it could cause a problem.
Users might discontinue their business with your product because it no longer helps them achieve their desired goals.
It’s also important to remember that initial fluctuations in user adoption rate right after implementing changes may not reflect users’ true intentions. Instead, a sharp drop in user adoption rate might show that users were intimidated by the changes and weren’t looking for software that requires different processes to operate.
How Can You Improve User Adoption?
Improving user adoption doesn’t have to be complicated. The most important thing is to understand your audience beginning with tracking user metrics such as new users and total users and identifying potential problems if the two begin to fluctuate or drop.
By setting up measures to address those problems, your brand will become known for its positive attitude and beneficial services.
Track Metrics
One of the best ways to improve any part of your product, service, or brand’s reputation is to track your metrics. It’s impossible to know how users appreciate your products or have negative experiences unless you have a team assigned to track metrics.
Guesswork has no place in business, and with metrics, tangibly measuring how users interact with your products is possible.
Help Users Identify Key Features and Benefits of Your Product
Like many things in life, perception is vital for your brand. When you ensure that potential users know what your product offers, they’ll know how it compares to the competition.
By advertising the features and benefits of your product, you’ll instill the idea that your product provides value. Perception automatically adds value to your brand as a whole.
Help Users with Technical Implementation of Your Product
Learning new things costs a fair amount of time and brainpower, two things that your users want to avoid as much as possible. By assisting users with the implementation of your product and making it straightforward to operate, you reduce the amount of effort needed to continue using the product and accomplish customers’ goals.
Conduct User Experience Testing
Like tracking metrics, conducting user experience testing is key to understanding where your users are coming from. Without seeking their opinions, your teams will be taking shots in the dark to address criticism of your products or services. User experience testing allows your teams to experience the same things that users do.
If your app is a hassle to set up, this is where you’ll learn that as well as ways to simplify the process.
Analyze Customer Interaction and Make Relevant Changes
As noted in the previous section, knowing your customers is critical when developing a product or service to meet their expectations. Tracking user adoption metrics isn’t a one-time project; instead, it needs to be an ongoing effort over time.
Your company will add updates and new features or get rid of outdated ones, and you’ll need your team to stay on top of customer opinions regarding these changes.
Conclusion
Understanding product analytics and user adoption is a critical element of ensuring your product’s success. By comprehending audience expectations and monitoring how many users continue to utilize your company’s product or service to achieve their goals, you and your teams can brainstorm better ways to appeal to your customers and bring them products they’ll be happy to continue paying for.
Need to better measure user adoption? Kissmetrics’ website has more information about essential metrics for connecting with your customers and tailoring your business for a better appeal.
Sources:
How To Develop And Measure A Product Adoption Strategy | Mixpanel
