Adoption Marketing: It’s a Thing!
There’s always some new buzzword in the tech world. Over the past 7-10 years, Customer Success has been regarded as the new “Thing” for companies to embrace. I’m predicting that hot on the heels of the Customer Success movement will be Adoption Marketing.
In fact, it’s already becoming a Thing. Here’s what it is and how it works:
Adoption Marketing Defined
Adoption Marketing is the methodology that companies use to nurture and engage every end-user of their product(s), services, and/or brand.
Adoption Marketing is designed to increase customer retention and growth by enabling practitioners to deliver personalized and programmatic messaging that drives users’ adoption behaviors.
Adoption Marketing uses a perpetual three-step lifecycle that maximizes user adoption:
- Listen. Collect product usage data and survey responses that fully describe the sentiment and adoption behavior of every user
- Learn. Use product usage and survey data to identify the structural barriers of adoption and segment users into meaningful categories
- Engage. Use data to trigger and deliver the right messages to the right users at the right time
Benefits of Adoption Marketing
When you employ personalized messaging, you’re better equipped to develop richer relationships with each and every end user. This can overcome the situation where you might be focused on key stakeholders at an account, and don’t have the bandwidth to be able to work with hundreds or even thousands of your end users.
Successful and happy customers are but one benefit of Adoption Marketing. Other benefits include:
- Improved retention
- Fewer escalations
- Up-sell and cross-sell
- Higher Net Promoter Scores
- Increased trial/freemium conversions
- Customer advocacy
- Hassle-free renewals
- Value from new features
- Better focused Customer Success team
8 Scenarios for Adoption Marketing
Companies organize their Adoption Marketing approach around scenarios that generally correspond to key stages and/or milestones in the user’s journey. These stages or milestones are either an event (such as a user logging into the product for the first time) or a date (the date when you announce a new feature for example).
Each scenario uses a series of messages that are personalized to each end user, based upon where s/he is in their journey. The objective is to encourage users to take the next step in deepening their adoption of your product or service.
Free trial / Freemium conversions
In this scenario, Adoption Marketing is used to encourage adoption that results in a free to paid conversion. Typically, this is a scenario that uses an engagement cycle over the course of the trial period, such as 14 or 30 days. Over that period, you present users with getting started materials, and other related messaging that informs the user on why and how to use the product.
Onboard new customers
Employing an engagement cycle to help drive the onboarding process helps you to improve time to value for your customers as well as an onboarding process that is more consistently followed. In this scenario, you present users with technical materials on onboarding, content on how to use the product, and training materials over the course of the onboarding/implementation period.
Onboard new users at existing accounts
Many times after an account is onboarded, a new user arrives at that account but is not onboarded in the same way as the initial users were. You can use this scenario to perform the necessary knowledge transfer for the new end user to successfully get started with your product/service.
Engage disengaged users
This is a great scenario to present best practice content, how to articles, and other useful content to nurture your users back to the product/service. News of recent product improvements can also motivate disengaged users to return.
Promote new features or products
Many end users may not know about a new feature of your product. This scenario enables you to present an introduction of the new feature along with subsequent knowledge base articles, and supporting best practice content that encourages the end user to adopt the new feature.
Encourage adoption of important features
This scenario is very similar to the aforementioned scenario. The difference is that the you’re not introducing a new feature of a product. Rather, you’ll be serving up content to encourage the user to adopt existing features that are known to be “sticky” for the sake of retention.
Drive repeat purchases, up-sells and cross-sells
Here’s another great scenario that helps you drive revenue. You can determine when a customer is at capacity for their subscription and encourage additional purchases. Additionally, you can also use this scenario to introduce new product modules or add on services.
Collect customer feedback with Net Promoter Score
If you own the Voice of The Customer program for your company, deployment of NPS surveys and corresponding follow up campaigns are more efficient through Adoption Marketing. You can automate the program and gather continuous feedback more easily.
The journey toward being a customer-centric business continues, driven by factors such as subscription business models and rising customer expectations. Given the direct relationship between user adoption and customer retention, it seems only natural for the industry to expand their focus on the customer and bring adoption into view. Exciting times are ahead!
