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How do you create a consumer adoption process that generates great results for your business?
One that gets customers on board and up to speed, quickly and efficiently?
This question is a major concern for any business that implements technology.
And today, that includes a great many businesses – not just technology companies.
Virtually every industry is implementing technology, web apps, software applications, or digital technology in some way.
User adoption is an essential part of the user acquisition process.
This onboarding process represents a customer’s first experience with a product or service.
It therefore impacts customer:
- Satisfaction
- Productivity
- Abandonment, or churn
- Lifetime value
It is wise to think of the customer adoption process as a funnel.
Well-designed funnels are user-friendly, cost-effective, and profitable.
Ineffective adoption processes, however, have the opposite results. They are more costly, have higher abandonment rates, and decrease customer loyalty.
Below, we’ll look at 3 key factors that make up effective, profitable adoption funnels.
How to Create an Effective, Profitable Consumer Adoption Process
Since your adoption process directly impacts the customer experience, it also affects the bottom line.
For this reason, that experience should be your top concern.
Let’s look at 3 ways to craft an adoption process that delivers great experiences … and more profits.
1. Focus on Usability
The first point to focus on is usability.
Usability is, in short, how easy a product is to use.
To illustrate the concept, think of a website.
A website with good usability has:
- Understandable, clear menus, making it easy to navigate
- Design that is clean and easy to understand
- A usage flow that helps users achieve their goals, quickly and easily
An important point to grasp about usability is that users are goal-oriented.
The less they have to work, the better.
Your adoption process should follow that maxim – the less users have to work or think, the better.
2. Design It Like a Funnel
Adoption is a process, and it is useful to think of it as a funnel or a customer journey map.
In marketing, a funnel helps attract, interest, and compel people to take action.
In the same way, your adoption process should help them become long-term customers.
However, along the way, people will inevitably drop out of the funnel.
Funnel leaks – in both marketing and your consumer adoption process – are unavoidable.
But they can be decreased.
And by optimizing the funnel, you can increase a customer’s lifetime value. This, in turn, has a positive impact on the business’s bottom line.
To design an adoption process that is like a funnel, divide it into stages, such as:
- Introduction – Introducing the customer to the product or service
- Onboarding – Bring the user into the fold, offer choices, and reveal what’s coming
- Training – Teaching and learning
- Closing – Finalizing the onboarding or adoption process
Each stage should have its own metrics, KPIs, and goals.
Those metrics will vary depending on the nature of your business.
An app company, for example, would be interested in metrics such as the churn rate, number of installations, and usage statistics.
As mentioned above, though, the ultimate metric to focus on is a customer’s lifetime value (LTV).
Every aspect of your adoption funnel should aim towards creating a great experience that improves loyalty, longevity, and profitability.
3. Speed Is King
Today’s consumers demand speed, convenience, and great experiences.
This fact has been well documented by a number of studies.
An often-cited study by Akamai showed that website loading time directly impacts visitor bounce rates, for instance.
In their study, 40% of visitors abandoned websites that took more than three seconds to load.
And nearly half of users expected websites to load in two seconds or less.
The takeaway from this should be clear…
Consumers want results fast.
When it comes to user adoption and customer adoption, the benefits of speed should also be clear:
- Faster onboarding improves the user experience
- Quicker learning times helps customers start using your product more quickly … shortening the adoption curve
- More efficient onboarding and training decreases learning times
Naturally, you don’t want to take shortcuts during user adoption.
However, today’s technology makes it easy to streamline the onboarding process.
Here are a few tips for speeding up user adoption:
- Use digital training tools, such as digital adoption platforms (DAPs), to offer contextualized learning
- Prioritize onboarding, building a training program that is as concise and on-target as possible
- Continually adapt to user needs, analyzing usage behavior and user feedback to improve your onboarding
As with websites, speed will impact your adoption process.
The faster you can move users through your funnel, the more satisfied, loyal, and valuable they will be.
As a final note, it should go without saying that you shouldn’t sacrifice quality for speed. That will only harm your adoption efforts and the customer experience.
Conclusion
A consumer adoption process should, of course, be focused on the consumer.
That is, you should put customers at the center of your adoption efforts.
Doing so will help you reduce abandonment rates and acquire customers that are more satisfied, loyal, and profitable.
