Does your software company have a new product and struggle to get consumers to adopt it? Understandably, product adoption is a challenge most SaaS brands face, particularly those new to the industry.
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You want users to use your product to increase sales and revenue continually. For this, your primary objective is for consumers to embrace your SaaS product.
However, irrespective of the business model or marketing strategy you employ, you will accomplish your goal when users find your product delightful and make it a primary part of their daily life.
Thus, how can you make consumers switch products and convert them to product adopters and paying customers? How can you impress users and give them that delightful moment?
To address those questions, you need to understand the stages of product adoption and the associated principles. You can sum up the process of getting consumers to switch products or services and start to use your brand in six stages.
What are the Six Stages of Product Adoption?
It takes a multifunctional approach and effort to convince consumers to switch from their comfort zone and start using your product. You have to walk them through the feature adoption stages, or sales funnel to help users understand the values your product brings to the table.
During the final stages of their journey, consumers can decide to buy or reject what you’re offering. After that stage, they may renew their subscriptions and extend their customer lifetime value (CLV) if they find the aha moment.
- Awareness: The user becomes aware of your offerings
- Interest: He shows interest and researches further to gather more information
- Evaluation/Trial: Based on the collected data, he decides to examine the product and consider all vital factors. Then, he tests the service and makes comparisons with other alternatives. This stage determines whether he converts (pay for the product/service) or not.
- Adoption/Conversion: With his understanding of how your product or service works and the value it provides, he switches products and invests in your offer.
- Retention: Here’s the stage where you got people to use your product; they experience the aha moment and become repeat users by renewing their purchase or subscription plans.
- Brand Ambassador: After a user tests your offer, experience the aha moment, he invests in your creation. Thus, your new customers will gladly tell others about it. They use various means, including social media, to brag about their new commodity or service.
Why is Knowing the Stages of Product Adoption Important?
Knowing these journey stages enables you to accelerate the adoption and sales techniques to establish good business bonds with prospects. It also helps you move users forward in their journey and amplify their adoption stage.
With knowledge of a user’s journey, you can use customized marketing content to walk him down the funnel to conversion and advocate.
Moreover, understanding the adoption stages is essential because it lets you visualize the buyer’s journey from the first touchpoint of awareness to the final conversion point. As a result, you can segment users according to their adoption stage.
That way, you can provide personalized messages and support to each group stage with better ROIs. Besides, with knowledge of the settings, you can seamlessly examine your marketing strategy, pinpoint your strength and weaknesses, and make improvements where necessary.
How to Speed Up Product Adoption for Your SaaS Business
Accelerating product adoption enormously influences consumer engagement, sales, and retention. But it would help if you put effort into getting users to the aha moment as soon as possible to achieve your goal. This article shares five practical marketing strategies to accelerate the adoption of your SaaS product.
1. Make first-time User Experience Impressive
A user’s first-time experience is critical because it defines the entire experience for the user after the first encounter. The first impression is the deciding factor to whether the prospect develops a habit of using your product or services daily or not.
Thus, you must prove the value of your offering asap to get consumers coming back to your products or services daily. So, demonstrate the importance, user-friendliness, and efficiency of using the asset to meet your objective compared to other alternatives.
You can create different marketing content, including in-app tutorials, how-to guides, or onboarding emails to demonstrate the importance of using your product. Even if the subject matter is complex, use tutorials to create a straight path that illustrates the product’s value proposition and ease of use.
It helps simplify customer onboarding and gives first-time users impressive experiences (the aha moment) that lead to adoption and conversion.
2. Refine Customer Onboarding and Make it Constant
There’s no guarantee that if users purchase your product, signup, or pay for your services, they will keep using your merchandise. There’s every likelihood that some users may not find the aha moment in the onboarding.
Product onboarding is a crucial part of speeding your SaaS adoption process. It enables new users to learn about a product’s features and lets the existing customer understand how to use new features.
So, you need to enhance customer onboarding and keep it constant because the first signup or subscription is not the end of it. Your product or services continues to evolve; as one feature becomes obsolete, your company develops new ones and gets users to adopt them.
In other words, your onboarding must evolve to improve the user experience (UX). So, let consumers seamlessly walk through your onboarding flow with experiences that speaks directly to their objectives.
For example, Omnisend, a platform for email marketing, SMS, and marketing automation, created a simplified user onboarding system. New customers only need to sign up with their Shopify or email account without a credit card.
Omnisend’s onboarding approach smooths out any possible friction point and creates a flawless UX. Since there’s no credit card needed during the signup process, more people will gladly create free accounts to try the product or service.
*Important* Consumers may want to adopt your services for various reasons. So, accelerate product adoption by using customer data to personalize user onboarding based on particular needs.
3. Use Blog Post Writing to Increase Product Adoption
What is one of the most effective ways to generate buzz for your products? Blog content writing. Blogging allows you to increase organic search traffic and drive new readers to your blog, thereby boosting search visibility and awareness.
When you put your offer in front of the right people, you will attract new users and retain existing customers. But you must write about topics that relate to your product or service and wisely state your offer.
It’s a win-win content marketing hack because readers get to know what you’re offering and learn how it can make their lives better. For example, you can write a “guide on how to use your product” or develop related topics and gently mention how your service can help users.
That way, you’re covering a topic that connects with what you’re selling and incorporating your product’s value. In other words, you’re using tactical content marketing to promote your product. For instance, Ty Magnin’s blog post about how HubSpot carry out product launch is an ideal example of how to mention your product in blog articles.
While discussing how in-app announcements are vital for a successful product launch, Ty disclosed that HubSpot uses his product (Appcues) to get consumers to activate its new features.
Thus, he indirectly promotes his services by telling readers the value of his product. You can use a similar approach to increase adoption via article writing. Show how others benefit from it and how it will help your audience. But to achieve your product adoption goal via blogging, it’d help develop a reverse outline.
A regular outline guides your processes and content structure to engage readers. But according to Writers Per Hour, a reverse method will generate much better ROIs. Therefore, use these tools to drive product adoption.
4. Use Contextual Email Marketing to Re-engage Users
Contextual email marketing for SaaS is a valuable tool that will help you boost new user activation or product adoption. It allows you to engage new and inactive users outside of the app and get them to adopt your offer.
According to subscribers’ data, savvy marketers customize these emails to recipients’ needs. It considers consumers’ behavior, location/geolocation, past purchases, and more.
Besides, contextual emails have two primary benefits:
- Personalized email content: Your contacts’ details let you send personalized appropriate email content that targets recipients’ pain points.
- Improved email performance: Targeting consumers’ needs enables you to send emails that align with users’ interests at each stage of the adoption process.
By sending a fitting email campaign to the target, you stimulate attention and further interest in the service. However, note that this process requires email automation.
Thus, use your desired tool to create and automate a series of emails to educate users and nurture them from the first touchpoint to conversion. The email sequence should include a welcome campaign and a succession of emails to help provoke user interest in the product.
Your welcome email will trigger a succession of supporting emails relative to the user’s in-app behavior. Let’s see an example of contextual email series.
Contextual Email Marketing Example
For the records, you can also apply this email marketing strategy (contextual email) to other business models, including service businesses. In this example, Karolina (my email address for experimenting with various offers) signed up for Tom’s email course on making money on Medium.
Here’s a welcome email from Tom that leads to a series of contextual emails:
The welcome email activated a succession of email campaigns that supported the first one. These messages educate Karolina about Tom’s offer and bring her closer to paying for his digital product.
Contextual email string example:
These emails have one primary goal—to convert the recipient from lead to adopter or repeat customer. This email hack is efficient because it lets you set off particular messages aligned with the customer’s in-app activities.
Consequently, increase product adoption by transmitting your messages to contextual user operations. It helps boost product acceptance because recipients will likely open emails that remind them of prior activities.
How to Boost Customer Experience With Contextual Email Marketing
Understandably, users may not find the satisfaction they need from using your product or service during onboarding. This experience may lead to them not coming back to try the offer. Otherwise stated, a terrible user experience (UX) will prevent people from using your services. So, how do you bring them back to have a look and show interest?
For this, contextual email marketing comes in handy. Here’s what to do:
- Select the stage of the adoption journey to focus
- Concentrate recipients’ pressing needs
- Create a sustained path for your email campaign
- Establish the tags, events, scores, and other elements for a successful campaign
- Establish your objective and key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge your success
- Create your email sequence and automate your campaigns
- Split test your emails for optimal results
5. Demonstrate Your Product’s Value With Personalized Trials
Free trials effectively onboard users because they allow consumers to experience the product personally. They get to see what’s in it for them before converting to paying customers.
But in most cases, consumers may not find their aha moment during the trial period. Hence, how can you get them back to use your product? For this, you need to employ personalized trials systems.
According to Accenture, over 90% of consumers will readily do business with a brand that recognizes them and provides relevant products and recommendations. Why? Because such organizations use personalized trial marketing based on consumer data and interactions. It makes users feel special.
When you give users a solid customer experience (aha moment) from the beginning, they’re more likely to come back to use your product. Therefore, give users value earlier to boost adoption.
A typical example of a brand that provides value earlier with a personalized trial is Calm’s meditation app. The software’s onboarding introduces users to the meditation app by asking a personalized chain of questions.
Image source via Calm App
The answers help Calm better understand users and allow the software to segment consumers according to interests, objectives, and other factors. As a result, the meditation app uses the corresponding answers to personalize users’ experiences. How?
Based on consumers’ preferences (goals and interests), the app can provide users with personalized onboarding structures that accurately spotlight what they intend to accomplish.
Image source via Calm App
Thus, the meditation app demonstrates its value quickly via relevant queries and customized results that create terrific first impressions. These unique impressions give users the aha moment (satisfying user experiences) that opens the way for sustained adoption. Consequently, people who went through the onboarding system become repeat users and loyal customers.
Are You Ready to Increase User Adoption?
Increasing consumer adoption of your SaaS product is not rocket science. You only need to apply a result-driven product adoption strategy to get more people using your products or services.
The product adoption framework above is a simple structure that shows how to increase user adoption. Therefore, apply these product adoption tips to get more people to switch products. What other tips can you add to this article to benefit our readers? Please, tell us in the below section!
About the author
Moss Clement is an expert business writer for B2B SaaS brands and individual digital marketers. He is also a content strategist at Moss Media and blogger at Writers Per Hour. He works closely with B2B marketers, helping small & medium-size businesses build their online presence and brand reputation with SEO-friendly content that drives organic traffic and converts. Reach out to him if you need help with content writing. You can connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn.