Product Adoption Process: How to Get Customers to Embrace Your Product

The main task when creating any product is not just to make it intuitive and useful (although these two aspects certainly affect a lot of indicators), but to create products that people will use!

Product adoption is one of the most critical business goals. If your product is accepted, you will build a customer base and position yourself in the market. A product adoption process marks the transition from being an unknown and alien product to being used and welcomed by users. In this article, we offer you a guide on correctly introducing your project to the market so that your potential users become your customers forever.

Product adoption is when customers learn about a new company’s product or service and become their regular customers. Your potential customer base has different types of user personas, each with its own values, goals, and desires for a product or service. Product adoption depends on many factors and is critical to future product success.

Product adoption describes the process when users learn about a product, understand its value, and use it. The process is usually broken down into five steps: awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption.

Adopting a new product is the thought process that a person goes through from first exposure to innovation to final acceptance and acceptance as the person’s decision to become a regular user of the product. To describe the different types of buyers who purchase a product during its life cycle, marketers have proposed an implementation process. Management must understand the customer adoption process to build an effective market penetration strategy. The consumer acceptance process focuses on a person’s mental process from first hearing about an innovation to final acceptance. Let’s go through these five steps briefly:

Awareness stage

The process of deciding to buy or use a service begins with the buyer’s awareness of the need. The need may arise under the influence of internal or external stimuli. By studying the consumer’s behavior at this stage, the marketer must identify his problems and needs and understand what factors cause them to appear.

At the first stage, social networks and banner advertising arouse a person’s interest and desire to buy. For example, the audience does not yet know about the existence of a super weight loss application, but thanks to banner ads and posts on social networks explaining the benefits, they begin to think that such an application will come in handy for them to lose weight or keep their figure in shape. The tools at this stage are targeted advertising and SMM. You can also use influencer marketing when you buy ads from many bloggers praising the weight loss app massively.

Interest stage

The interested consumer proceeds to search for additional information.

Sources of this information can be:

• Commercial references (ads, packaging, storefronts, websites)
• Personal contacts (family, friends, neighbors)
• Public Sources (media)
• Personal experience (using the product before)

The degree of influence of these sources depends on the product and the buyer. As a rule, the buyer receives most information from commercial sources. However, the most effective are personal. Commercial sources inform the buyer, while personal sources give the necessary weight and evaluate the information. As information accumulates, the buyer’s awareness of the availability of goods and their features grows. Now comes the evaluation stage.

Evaluation stage

Choice evaluation is the stage in which the consumer evaluates different options based on the information obtained in the previous step.

Each consumer forms his opinion about similar brands based on the evaluation. How this process takes place depends on the situation and the consumer. In some cases, buyers resort to careful analysis and logical reasoning, in others, they do not resort to evaluative methods and make a purchase impulsively or rely on intuition.

Let’s say a buyer wants to buy a camera. He identifies the most critical characteristics for himself and evaluates each of the goods for compliance with these requirements. If one product surpassed similar effects in all critical parameters for the buyer, the buyer would buy it. But such cases are rare, so the buyer has to evaluate each product according to their indicators and derive a comprehensive assessment.

Marketers should study consumer behavior to determine how they evaluate the brands of the selected product. If it is known that the buyer has yet to make a final decision and is in the evaluation stage, then the marketer can take specific steps to influence the buyer’s choice.

Trial stage

The consumer tries a new product on a small scale to improve their appreciation of its value. If the consumer is satisfied with the product, he enters the adoption stage, deciding to use the new product carefully and regularly.

Potential users study, test, or try the innovative product during this stage to determine its usefulness.

At this stage, they use or experience the product for the first time, perhaps by purchasing a small quantity, by taking advantage of a free sample or demo, or by borrowing the product from someone.

At this stage, potential users determine the product’s usefulness in the specific conditions they need.

The testing stage of innovations takes time and effort. Successful implementation largely depends on the new product’s characteristics, benefits, and perceived risks. Effective communication is the key to getting a product to be tried by consumers.

If, after launching the product, you are still waiting to see the expected results, then we advise you to apply these 5 techniques for your users to accept your product and appreciate it.

Refine the product

Obviously outrageous. If your product improves and is perceived as more valuable, its acceptance will improve. Need to know how to make your product better? Ask users about it. By offering them something new and useful, you can convince them to try your product and adopt it.

Make support more responsive

There is nothing perfect in the world, and your product is no exception: no matter how long you refine your product, there will always be a couple of flaws that can cause it to be abandoned. But not if every time the user encounters a problem, you will be ready to offer your help to him.

Make sure that contacting the support service is not a complicated and intricate process, and this feature will be located in the most prominent place in the application interface itself. And, of course, support representatives must be polite and competent.

Read more about responsive web design in our previous article.

Invest in developing quality onboarding

The problem of poor product adoption lies in poor onboarding. In most cases, low adoption rates are due to poor onboarding. The logic is simple: if you can’t teach people how to use your product, they won’t be able to use it.

Therefore, you should carefully study the user onboarding process and determine if any problem areas could be corrected.

The ability to easily create, maintain, and update onboarding experiences will allow you to improve product onboarding on your own! Read our article Effective User Onboarding: Top Proven Tips and Examples on how to do it right.

Interact with users within the product

Detailed comprehensive product guides and checklists are necessary and important things, but this format is only suitable for some users.

It is in your power to organize a targeted, less burdensome, but just as useful communication mechanism, in which you could give hints to customers directly in the process of interacting with the product or motivate them to take specific actions. Sending in-app messages is ideal for such purposes. Through such a communication channel, you can collect feedback, call for a specific action, share valuable information, etc.

Interact with users outside the product

It can also happen that the user exits your application with no intention of ever returning to it.

In this situation, it is possible to convince him to give your product a second chance by contacting him outside the product, for example, by emailing them to their mailboxes. Using email to improve product acceptance is not new, but it works great.

Product adoption process is arguably the most important discipline that product development teams deal with. You must try to find out what techniques you can use to improve this process to avoid falling behind your competitors.

Upgrade your onboarding! And Gapsy will be happy to help you with this. Having many years of experience in creating designs for various types of businesses, we know exactly how to design an application or website so that the user would not only accept it, but also fall in love with it! Convince yourself of our professionalism. Here are our works and cases that prove our expertise in the design niche for companies worldwide.