Enough has been said about feature adoption. But let’s reiterate. Having feature adoption strategies is a must for any website or mobile app. It is especially true if the product owners want to gain rewards from the efforts, time, and resources put into developing a particular feature.

In the vastly competitive market of today, brands and product owners race to develop features that are both innovative and of high value for users. A lot of hard work, market research, design, and development goes into building a new product feature.

But often, even a well-developed feature fails to create an impression in the audience’s mind primarily because of a lack of understanding of feature adoption strategies.

As the name suggests, feature adoption means your users are “adopting” a feature of your product, be it a mobile app or a website. Adoption doesn’t mean a user using a feature just once, but it is a long process of a user trying out a new feature, finding it of value, and then developing a habit of using it daily because they derive value from it.

To know more about feature adoption, read What is Feature Adoption and How to Measure It!

How to drive higher feature adoption rates

High feature adoption rates greatly impact the user experience and the product as a whole. Teams should have a plan for each step of the feature adoption funnel. Here are the top 8 strategies to help you build your feature adoption framework.

1. Have Thoughtful Feature Announcements

The most common yet overlooked reason that a particular feature has low adoption rates is that users might be unaware that it exists. In order to prevent this, each feature announcement should be treated like a mini-product launch.

Do a feature hunt. Devise an email drip campaign strategy. Create buzz among users about the upcoming feature. Use relevant influencers and social media to your advantage. Try using methods of announcements that can’t be easily ignored, like in-app messages. These messages enabled with deep links are highly contextual and guide users to feature discovery.

Thoughtful feature announcements help in feature discovery

Feature announcements aid in feature discovery. Promote new features both inside and outside the platform.

2. Use Interactive Walkthroughs to Facilitate Discovery

Interactive walkthroughs or coach mark tutorials are excellent tools to help users understand a new feature of your app or website. They provide users with step-by-step guidance on how to use the feature and how it will add value to their product experience.

Tutorials are a part of feature adoption strategies

Interactive walkthroughs also introduce existing users to secondary, more advanced features. It is wise to provide personalized walkthrough tutorials to different segments of your user base according to their requirements.

Interactive walkthroughs help in feature adoption

Upshot.ai helps you perform user segmentation and build personalized interactive walkthroughs for each segment. Book a demo now to know more!

3. Create Seamless User Onboarding for Early Aha Moment

First impressions matter. Your users' first experience with a new feature launched is crucial. This initial encounter sets the tone for all subsequent interactions. A good feature onboarding experience helps users realize the value of the feature faster.

Often termed the “Aha” moment, users need to discover and acknowledge the usefulness of a feature early in the feature adoption journey.

User onboarding are a part of user experience

Use welcome messages, in-app tutorials, or screen tips to demonstrate the usefulness of a feature head-on. If your feature is complex, try simplifying it by illustrating the core value proposition early. Identify and remove friction points to streamline the feature onboarding process.

4. Remind users it’s there

Users often realize the usefulness of a feature but then forget it exists the next time they need it. Users must be reminded that a feature exists through SMS, emails, push notifications, and in-app messages.

Your product can also display user testimonials to remind people of the usefulness of a feature.

5. Analyze your Feature Adoption Metrics

Developing and launching a feature isn’t enough and doesn’t guarantee its success. Product owners and product managers constantly need to measure feature adoption metrics to check how a particular feature is performing with the users.

Analyzing feature adoption metrics is one of the most widely used feature adoption strategies as it provides great insights into the pulse of the customer. Build solid feature benchmarks and then check the performance of a feature post its release.

Measure metrics like feature adoption rate, breadth of adoption, depth of adoption, time to adopt, and duration of adoption to gauge the audience’s reaction to a newly launched feature.

6. Identify your Improvement Areas

Once you measure your feature adoption metrics, you can identify your best and worst-performing features. It helps the product team in deciding where to put their efforts.

Parsing through metrics and customer feedback narrows down the features that aren’t used and the reasons behind them. Remove these features from subsequent updates, and don't repeat the same mistakes.

Identify key areas of improvement and work on them to give your users a better experience.

7. Provide Excellent Customer Support

Using new features can oftentimes be confusing. Providing good customer support comes in handy here, as it shows users that you care about their needs and are ready to help them whenever they want. It goes a long way in building user trust, which eventually translates into loyalty.

8. Take Feedback and Improve

As a product owner or manager, you might not quickly narrow down what is wrong with a feature and why it has low adoption rates. But your users have an outside view and are the best people to take feedback on what is not working and why a feature failed.

Your product’s new feature might be too hard to find. It might have a buggy UI or might not deliver enough value to users in the long run. Or it might be simply too advanced to use.

Ask your users what the problem is. Take their first-hand qualitative feedback through in-app surveys. But taking user feedback is wasted if you don’t act upon it.

Understand what makes users happy with a particular feature and try to replicate that in the other new features developed.

Reiterate and develop new versions of a feature. Act on the feedback received to show your users that you actually care about them. Constant improvements in the product through feedback and a data-driven approach are bound to boost feature adoption.

Conclusion

Having the latest feature on your website or your mobile app isn’t going to work and won’t keep your users engaged with the product. It is paramount for brands to measure feature adoption and devise feature adoption strategies to increase the success rate of existing and newly launched features.

Feature adoption is critical to boosting user engagement, retention, and loyalty. So develop a feature adoption strategy to help your target users discover relevant features, improve the quality of existing features, and remove unnecessary and unwanted features.

Want to track feature adoption metrics and need help coming up with actionable feature adoption strategies?

How can Upshot.ai help you drive Feature Adoption?

Upshot.ai helps you develop seamless feature onboarding experiences, create interactive walkthroughs, and do targeted messaging to specific user segments. You can use in-app features like opinion polls, in-app messages, in-app surveys, and push notifications to spread feature awareness and gather user feedback.

Upshot.ai is a comprehensive tool for all your feature adoption needs. Upshot.ai provides an insights platform that helps you track your feature adoption metrics. You can then set goals for a newly launched feature and monitor its progress using the Upshot.ai dashboard. You can use the analytics to further track user behavior, which will aid in devising feature adoption strategies in the future.

If you’re ready to increase your product and feature adoption, get a free Upshot.ai demo to see how its in-app guidance capabilities can help with feature awareness and motivate users to adopt features sooner!

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