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Are you looking for strategies to improve user engagement from day one? You’re in the right place—this blog post will give you an actionable, effective user adoption plan.
User adoption is more than just getting people to sign up. It’s about ensuring they find value in your product and keep using it long-term. A good user adoption strategy can lower churn, increase customer retention, and even reduce acquisition costs through positive word of mouth. Without it, even the best products risk being abandoned before users ever reach their full potential.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
– All there is to know about user adoption and the product adoption journey: definition, importance, example, plus challenges and expert tips to overcome them.
– How to build an excellent user adoption strategy: definition, tips for rolling out a solid plan, how AI tools can help, and metrics to measure success.
What is user adoption, and why should you care?
User adoption refers to new users starting to use a product or service regularly, making it part of their routine. It can also refer to existing users embracing a new feature, product, or service by the same brand. It’s also known as product adoption.
A high user adoption rate signifies that new users have found value in your product (yay). Low user adoption rates is bad news—it means that users have not yet realized the benefits of your offering.
Why? A complex product, an unstructured onboarding process, or poor user experience, like technical glitches, are common culprits—we’ll see how you can find out the root of the problem and fix it in a minute.
Is user adoption important? Absolutely. Successful user adoption equals:
Think of user adoption as the foundation for product-led growth. It’s the first brick. This is why it’s essential to follow user adoption best practices like it’s your favorite influencer and why you should always measure user adoption success.
What are the 5 stages of the adoption process?
Understanding the user adoption process is key to ensuring that potential customers don’t just discover your product but actually stick with it. Every new user goes through a journey—from first hearing about your product to fully integrating it into their daily routine. The better you understand this journey, the more effectively you can guide users toward long-term engagement.
Here’s a breakdown of the five key stages of the adoption process:
Awareness
The user first hears about the product. This could be through ads, social media, word-of-mouth, or marketing campaigns.
Interest
Now, the potential user gets curious and starts digging. Maybe they visit your website, watch a demo, or read reviews to gauge what other people say and whether it sounds like a good fit.
Evaluation
Things start to get serious. The potential customer compares your product with alternatives, weighs the pros and cons, and decides whether it’s worth trying it. This is where pricing, features, and benefits matter most.
Trial
This is a critical part of the journey where the user signs up for a free trial. User experience can make it or break it.
Adoption
The customer has dipped their toes in the water. If it’s warm, they’ll take a swim. They will explore the product further, upgrade their plan to enjoy more functionality, and finally make it part of their routine.
What is an example of user adoption?
A good example of user adoption is when someone switches from traditional spreadsheets to a tool like Notion or Airtable for organizing their work.
At first, they might hear about it from a colleague (awareness), check out customer reviews (interest), watch some tutorials (evaluation), and try it for a small project (trial). If they find it easier and more efficient than spreadsheets, they start using it daily (adoption).
Over time, they explore more features, integrate the product with other tools to streamline their work, and maybe even recommend it to others. The latter stage is called advocacy.
What is an adoption strategy?
As you might have guessed already, a user adoption strategy (or customer adoption strategy) is a plan that aims to help users adopt a product. An effective user adoption strategy covers all the stages of product adoption, from discovery to adoption.
Actionable strategies to improve user adoption for a new product
… or how to write a user adoption plan that rocks. Use the following steps as a template for building a strategy that drives user adoption.
We like to keep things nice and neat, so let’s take it stage by stage.
Phase one: Discovery
Essential steps
What to keep an eye on:
Phase two: Interest
Essential steps
What to keep an eye on:
Phase three: Evaluation
Essential steps
What to keep an eye on:
Phase four: Trial
Essential steps
What to keep an eye on:
Phase five: Adoption
Essential steps
What to keep an eye on:
Regular updates, educational content, and proactive support help users stay engaged, explore advanced features, and ultimately stick with your product long-term and boost customer lifetime value. Customer onboarding best practices emphasize that customer training must be ongoing.
Use an LMS for customer training like LearnWorlds to streamline your initiatives. Using an LMS will enable you to not only launch a customer education academy you can easily manage but also unify all your training under one learning ecosystem.
💁Curious to know more? Watch our relevant webinar with customer education expert Vicky Kennedy.
Integrating AI tools to enhance user adoption
Relying on a static knowledge base and a few prerecorded tutorials doesn’t cut it anymore. Integrating AI tools into your onboarding flow is the most effective way to remove friction and help users learn faster.
Here’s how AI can help at different stages:
Discovery
AI can help you target potential customers more effectively:
AI-driven ads and recommendations help reach the right users.
Chatbots on landing pages can instantly answer common questions.
Interest
At this stage, AI can personalize the experience to engage different user segments better.
Evaluation
Help potential customers make a decision. AI tools can give them the nudge they need to hit the trial button.
Trial
At this crucial part of the journey, AI can streamline and improve the experience with a smooth onboarding flow and timely assistance.
Adoption
Turn new users into long-term customers.
By reducing friction, personalizing the experience, and proactively addressing user needs, AI makes adoption easier, faster, and more effective.
Overcoming product adoption challenges: three mistakes to watch out for
Overcoming user resistance to new software is a challenge in and of itself. But, feature adoption is necessary for your company to stay afloat and thrive.
Kinga Edwards, CEO of Brainy Bees shares invaluable advice on the matter:
1. The “if we build it, they will come” trap
Creating features without proper documentation. We’ve all been there—the dev team ships something brilliant, but users have no idea how to use it or why they should care.
The solution isn’t complicated, but it requires discipline: create clear, concise documentation with actual use cases before launch. Better yet, develop your docs alongside the feature, not as an afterthought. Short video walkthroughs consistently outperform text-only guides.
2. The “drinking from a firehose” problem
Overwhelming new users by introducing advanced features too early in their journey. Countless onboarding sequences fail because they try to showcase every bell and whistle instead of focusing on core value.
The fix is actually pretty easy (yet hard to swallow for SaaS who just want to “show it all”). Map your onboarding to match the user’s journey and introduce levels of complexity only after they’ve gotten familiar with the basics.
3. The “set it and forget it” mistake
This refers to neglecting ongoing educational nurturing after initial onboarding. Users might grasp the basics, but without continued education, they rarely discover the full value of your platform.
Creating a proper nurturing sequence (through email but also in-app messaging) can improve advanced feature adoption. You can also run webinars or demos if you have a chance, although email is more than enough. Don’t neglect those users, they are likely to be just confused by your product. Consider running regular check-ins or usage-triggered tutorials (again, if you have a chance for that).
💁We have more on this topic. Watch on demand our webinar on creating a high-impact customer education program with customer education expert Chris LoDolce.
Metrics for measuring product adoption
Measuring product adoption success is important. It gives you essential data to make informed decisions and tweak your adoption process marketing strategy and all relevant initiatives.
Product adoption metrics provide insights into user behavior, retention, and overall product success and will help you measure how effectively users adopt and engage with your product.
Here are your quintessential metrics:
Turning user adoption into long-term engagement
User adoption isn’t just a checkbox in the customer journey—it’s the foundation of long-term success. Without a strong user adoption strategy, even the most innovative products struggle with user adoption and customer retention. The key is to create a seamless experience that guides users from awareness to full engagement, making your product an essential part of their workflow.
By focusing on intuitive onboarding, ongoing education, AI-driven personalization, and continuous feedback, you can turn new users into loyal advocates. Whether you’re launching a new product or improving an existing one, refining your user adoption process is an investment that pays off in retention, growth, and customer satisfaction. Now it’s your turn—what’s one step you can take today to improve adoption for your users?
Androniki Koumadoraki
Androniki is a Content Writer at LearnWorlds sharing Instructional Design and marketing tips. With solid experience in B2B writing and technical translation, she is passionate about learning and spreading knowledge. She is also an aspiring yogi, a book nerd, and a talented transponster.
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