What is Product Adoption?

Product adoption helps you understand how users accept and integrate your product into their routines. Several metrics enable you to track how well your target audience embraces your product.

Higher product adoption rates are usually a positive sign that customers have responded well to your product launch, find it valuable, and enjoy using it.

Product adoption offers insight into your customer's thought process, like how they initially discover your product, things that pique their interest, and what hooks them for the long-term.

This information helps you make product changes and enhancements based on objective customer feedback. These improvements help increase your product’s value, making your customers more likely to stick around and continue using it—a key part of a sustainable business.

Your product adoption rate provides invaluable insights that can help boost revenue and retention. Low adoption rates can indicate product usability, marketing, or value proposition issues. You’ll want to address these swiftly and realign your strategy to improve your product’s likelihood of success.

A customer usually completes a series of steps before fully integrating a new product into their routine—the product adoption stages.

The names and number of stages can vary, but the process typically follows the AIDA model: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. This conversion funnel framework can help you understand what happens when users encounter and explore your product, so you can apply specific strategies to meet their needs and optimize their experience.

We’ve renamed some of these steps to better explain their function and added another pivotal stage: adoption. This is, after all, the process’ ultimate aim.

Awareness

Awareness is when potential users first become aware of your product. You can use marketing and advertising tactics to grab customers’ attention and introduce them to your service.

Interest

Once potential users are aware of your product, they typically explore more about its features. At this stage, their interest is piqued and they consider if and how your product could benefit them.

Evaluation

During evaluation, customers assess your product more thoroughly and determine how much they need or desire it. They might compare it to your competitors, assess its value proposition, and decide if it meets their needs.

Trial

In this stage, users take action and try your product. Customers might purchase the product, sign up for a trial, or engage in another form of hands-on evaluation. Trial is a pivotal stage as it helps determine your conversion rate, a crucial metric for analyzing growth potential.

Adoption

After taking action, the goal is for users to fully embrace your product. In the adoption phase, customers begin using it regularly, integrating it into their routines, and becoming loyal customers.

High-adopting customers may also become advocates for your product, helping grow your customer base without extra effort.

For an effective real-life product adoption example, we can point to Zoom.

1. Awareness: The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns forced people to adapt to remote work and communication. During this time, Zoom gained widespread attention through media coverage and word-of-mouth recommendations, creating overall product awareness.
2. Interest: Businesses and individuals needing remote communication solutions visited the Zoom website to learn more about its features. They discovered how Zoom could facilitate virtual meetings and collaboration, making it a potential solution.
3. Evaluation: Many users signed up for free Zoom accounts to evaluate their capabilities during the early days of the pandemic. They tested Zoom’s video conferencing, screen sharing, chat, and recording features to see if it met their requirements.
4. Trial: Many users found Zoom easy to use for virtual meetings, and as the pandemic continued, they increasingly relied on Zoom to stay connected.
5. Adoption: Zoom quickly became the go-to platform for online meetings and many organizations adopted it as their primary communication tool. They signed up for paid plans to unlock more features and host larger meetings.

Zoom’s success shows the power of product adoption in response to changing conditions. It addressed a timely need, offered user-friendly features, and provided scalability to cater to different users—all prime attributes for effective product adoption.

Several adoption metrics help provide a clearer picture of your customer engagement and product performance.

The metrics you monitor will vary depending on the nature of your product, business, and overall goals.

Whatever metrics you track, ensure they give you adequate insight into how your customers interact with your product. You can use this information to inform your product development and marketing strategies, making vital improvements to help you succeed.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the most significant product adoption metrics.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate measures the percentage of users who perform an action you’ve specified as desirable according to your marketing strategy. You usually specify your desired conversion actions during product development. Example desired actions include signing up for a free trial or completing a purchase.

A high conversion rate positively reflects your product’s ability to persuade users to take your desired action. A low conversion rate might reflect a need to improve your onboarding process, pricing, or messaging.

Adoption rate

Your adoption rate measures how many users embrace and actively use your product.

A high adoption rate indicates that users find your product valuable and are on their way to becoming long-term customers. If your adoption rate is low, you might consider enhancing your product features or rethinking user education.

Time-to-value

Time-to-value (TTV) is how long it takes a user to realize your product’s full benefits after their initial purchase or interaction.

A shorter TTV is generally better, as it means users experience value quickly. If TTV is long, users might become disengaged or frustrated.

Analyzing TTV helps you spot areas to improve user onboarding or product usability.

Engagement score

An engagement score measures how frequently and actively users engage with your product. Logins, feature usage, and time spent on the platform are valuable in generating your engagement score.

A high engagement score suggests users actively use and value your product. Consistent low engagement may indicate usability issues or a lack of interest in the product.

Purchase frequency

Purchase frequency is how often a customer purchases your product within a specified time.

It’s a valuable metric if you offer monthly plans or upgrades, as you can see if your retention strategy or product enhancements are effective.

High purchase frequency indicates you have strong customer loyalty and a robust opportunity for repeat business.

So you’ve made a product but are struggling to entice customers. Paying closer attention to your product adoption funnel can help.

Increasing product adoption requires work and continuously fine-tuning your strategy and tactics. But by listening to your users and keeping product value in mind, you’ll see improvement.

Let’s highlight some ways to achieve this.

Create high-quality products

Creating a high-quality product sounds obvious. Yet many companies rush products to market and overlook quality and customer value.

First priority is ensuring your product is useful to your target audience. It should solve a specific problem, be easy to use, and perform better than market alternatives.

Prioritize a user-friendly design and functionality—customers are likelier to adopt and continue using an intuitive, well-made product.

Regularly testing your product can help you ensure its delivering on quality and value. Quality assurance helps you fix bugs, enhance performance, and provide a seamless product experience.

Focus on engaging onboarding experiences

A lengthy, complicated onboarding experience is a surefire way to disengage your customers and increase the likelihood of them dropping out of your adoption funnel.

Personalizing your onboarding experience is a great way to prevent this from happening. Tailor your onboarding experience to the user’s individual needs, helping them get the most out of your product quickly.

Guided tours and tutorials can accelerate your customers’ understanding of your product so they can hit the ground running. Use these tours to highlight your product’s value, explaining how it solves their problems and fulfills their needs every step of the way.

Have support teams in place

Even the best product-led strategies should be accompanied by customer support resources. For a more hands-off, self-service experience, you could offer a knowledge base, FAQs, and tutorials to help users find solutions independently.

Additionally, for more complex inquiries and issues, ensure that human customer support is easy to find and accessible—nothing is more frustrating than searching all over a website for support when you have a problem. Live chat and email forms can help you address user questions promptly and gather valuable feedback.

Engage with users

Don’t forget about the customer once they’ve adopted your product. Regular, ongoing communication helps your product stay at the forefront of their minds and offers opportunities to upsell.

Keep users informed about product updates, new features, and improvements through channels like email newsletters, in-app notifications, or a blog.

Depending on your product type, you may benefit from a customer community where customers can connect, share experiences, and help each other. Here’s Amplitude’s Community, for example. This can boost brand loyalty and alleviate pressure from your customer service and product teams.

Adapt and improve based on customer feedback

Show your customers you’re listening by asking for feedback to discover their pain points, needs, and desires—and then act on this information.

Analyze their feedback to identify common issues and feature requests. Pinpoint and prioritize the requests that will have the most significant impact on user adoption.

Close the feedback loop by letting your customers know when you’ve made improvements based on their suggestions. They’ll feel heard and will hopefully use the product more.

Adopting an agile approach where you make incremental changes based on customer feedback can help you establish a more consistent and data-backed development process.

Product adoption decides whether your product withstands the test of time or is a fleeting success. It helps you see your product go from a mere concept to a valuable solution your customers love.

Understanding its stages, from awareness to integration, is important for guiding your product’s journey and ensuring its success.

Amplitude can help you navigate this intricate path to adoption.

It empowers you with tools and insights to understand your users so you can make data-backed decisions that boost product adoption.

You can use analysis and testing features to create clear strategies for product improvement, user onboarding, and personalized engagement. And collect real-time user feedback within your product so you can address pain points and adapt quickly to changing needs. Amplitude is a comprehensive tool to help your product adoption soar.

Ready to experience happier, more engaged customers? Get started with Amplitude today.

Other Product Guides

• What is Product-Led Growth?
• What is Product Development?
• What is Product Differentiation?
• How to Launch a SaaS Product