7 Best Product Adoption Tools for 2022

Product adoption is one of the most important indicators of a SaaS company’s health. Users go through several stages before reaching adoption, which is the last stage in the adoption funnel. So if they make it that far, it indicates that your product is valuable enough to help them achieve their goals.

In this article, you’ll find out why product adoption is so important for SaaS businesses and the top tools you should consider to improve your product adoption.

In a rush? Skip to the first tool!

Why is Product Adoption Important?

Product adoption is about getting visitors to know about your product and turning them into regular users. It begins when the user discovers the existence of your product. After this awareness stage, the user moves through a couple more stages to finally start using your product, which is when adoption happens.

Product adoption is one of the best ways to measure the success of your product. Higher adoption means greater customer lifetime value since customers who find value in your product are more likely to stick with it.

Adoption also directly affects other crucial metrics. For example, high adoption is linked with greater MRR and less churn. When more of your visitors reach product adoption, this also pushes down the customer acquisition cost. This is vital since it costs a lot to acquire new customers.

To find out if your product adoption is working, track these adoption metrics.

HockeyStack

HockeyStack is an analytics & attribution platform for SaaS companies.

HockeyStack is an end-to-end analytics tool for SaaS companies. HockeyStack unifies marketing, revenue, sales, and product data into one dashboard with no code so that you can understand what really drives revenue at your SaaS. It’s completely no code, and it doesn’t require any setup.

With HockeyStack, you can answer inter-departmental questions that you cannot answer with any other tool on the market, such as:

• How much revenue did a certain blog series bring us?
• What is the activation rate of users from Facebook Ads?
• What is the average contract value of sales that our whitepaper generated?
• Do users that affiliates bring churn faster than users that marketing brings?

and more.

By providing answers to these questions, HockeyStack allows SaaS businesses to get rid of fragmented data and start understanding what really affects their revenue.

HockeyStack’s Features

HockeyStack offers these features with no code:

• Step-by-step user journey
• Custom dashboards
• Funnels and goals
• Insights
• Surveys
• Revenue analytics
• Segments

and more

HockeyStack Pricing

HockeyStack has a free forever plan and 3 paid plans. Paid plans have a 14-day trial with a 30-day refund guarantee.

You can check out the pricing page here.

Pendo

Pendo is a product adoption software founded in 2013 that helps users offer better product experiences. It provides advanced analytics and KPIs to reveal every bit of information about users and their activities. Besides product analytics, Pendo also offers onboarding features that help you guide your users along with your product.

The complete set of solutions offered by Pendo covers user onboarding, product engagement, in-app support, feedback collection, and revenue growth.

To get access to these solutions, you can integrate into your software these tools offered by Pendo:

• analytics to better understand users
• in-app guides such as tooltips for personalized communication
• feedback collection tools to optimize your product, and
• mobile solution for a seamless product journey

Pendo Features

Here’s a more detailed look into Pendo’s features:

1. Analytics

Pendo’s retroactive analysis tracks all user behavior automatically across the web and mobile. There’s no coding required.

With analytics, you can know which features users love the most and how long it takes for them to find the valuable aspect of your product. This data is helpful for product and marketing teams to make better, data-informed product decisions.

2. In-app guides

Communication throughout onboarding is essential for product adoption. With Pendo, you can create product walkthroughs and in-app support to offer users a better experience. These guides don’t require any code, and they can be tailored to the user. In-app support along the onboarding process can reduce the number of customer support calls and increase the efficiency of product adoption.

3. Feedback

The feedback collection tools help eliminate the need for guesswork when it comes to an understanding of what users think and feel about your product. You can segment users by requests, user cohort, or features and better understand how to optimize your product. You can also share the feedback reports with teams and inform users if you take action on their feedback.

Pricing

Pendo offers four plans. There’s no information about prices, but it gets expensive quickly based on some user reviews.

WalkMe

WalkMe is a cloud-based platform for digital adoption founded in 2011. It helps businesses identify gaps in their digital assets and improve product adoption. WalkMe offers a wide range of enterprise, employee, customer, and product solutions. These solutions help businesses improve IT and digital transformation, increase employee efficiency, boost customer satisfaction, and drive product adoption.

Like Pendo, WalkMe helps you analyze real-time customer journeys to understand users better and make decisions driven by data. However, the strong suite of WalkMe lies in onboarding and digital adoption, compared to Pendo, which is a more powerful tool for product analytics.

WalkMe Features

Here are WalkMe’s main product solutions:

1. Product Adoption

The advanced analytics of WalkMe gives insight into the entire user journey. You can see where users are having friction and make changes based on data. The insights on user behavior can help you deliver personalized experiences to make adoption faster. These can be tasks and guides that you can employ codeless on both mobile and web. By offering these experiences, you can increase customer loyalty and opportunities for upselling and cross-sell.

2. Revenue Growth

The Digital Adoption Platform of WalkMe allows you to analyze, measure, and optimize the user journey. With this visibility, you provide training and guidance to simplify processes and prevent drop-off.

WalkMe Pricing

WalkMe has two plans: a basic plan for small and medium companies and a custom plan for enterprises. It doesn’t provide pricing information, but we know it’s based on monthly active users. According to Nickelled, pricing ranges from $9000 to $50,000 per year.

Userlane

Userlane is a digital adoption platform founded in 2015. Besides onboarding and product adoption, Userlane also provides solutions that help companies train their employees. The main features offered by Userlane are interactive guides, a virtual assistant, in-app communication, and user analytics. Userlane is most suitable for small and medium-sized businesses.

Although Userlane provides analytics, it’s not the strongest analytics tool, and it’s better known for its employee training capability.

What users like about Userlane is that the software is easy to set up and use, even without any coding knowledge or technical skills.

Userlane Features

These are the main features of Userlane:

1. Interactive guides

The interactive guides take the user or employee through the product with step-by-step instructions on where to click. It also provides live assistance on demand.

2. In-app communication

You can send various messages to users for different purposes. For example, you can ask for feedback or promote a new feature. You can also provide links to users for interactive guides and external sources.

3. Analytics

Userlane provides user behavior analytics to track engagement and identify areas of confusion. These insights can help you discover where users need additional guidance and adapt the interactive guides to help them better.

Userlane Pricing

Userlane offers custom pricing for each user since they believe this is the most effective solution to serve different users. The pricing is based on the number of users and the feature set. Userlane also offers a free trial.

Whatfix

Whatfix is a SaaS-based digital adoption platform founded in 2014. It helps companies with product adoption, customer engagement and loyalty, user and employee onboarding, and employee productivity. Users can improve the in-app experience through guidance flows and walkthroughs that guide the user along with the platform. The platform is preferred mainly by enterprise-level companies.

With Whatfix, you get access to the following capabilities:

• Personalization to help users and employees make the most out of the software and increase adoption
• Omnichannel adoption to help users the moment they need it
• Automation of tasks and guidance to increase speed and productivity
• Integrations with enterprise, HCM, and HR tools, including Salesforce, Zapier, and SuccessFactors

Whatfix Features

Whatfix offers analytics, content, and delivery features.

1. Analytics

These features cover behavior analytics, guidance analytics, and feedback. Behavior analytics features give insights into users and help you find opportunities to improve product adoption. Guidance analytics show you the most used flows and other important KPIs. Lastly, you can obtain user feedback to guide new content and optimize the in-app experience.

2. Content

For better content, Whatfix offers an intuitive and easy-to-use editor. It also provides advanced customization and works with all major browsers. The content aggregation feature enables you to curate and deliver up-to-date content within your applications. Content management helps reduce the effort that goes into the management and authoring of your content.

3. Delivery

In this category, you can find features like product walkthroughs and a task list to facilitate guidance and training of users. To help users throughout the application, Whatfix offers personalized self-help features and in-app conversational support. Finally, you can collect feedback, nudge users, and inform users about updates with messaging features.

Whatfix Pricing

Whatfix has custom pricing that differs based on what you want to achieve with the tool.

Gainsight PX

Gainsight helps B2B companies drive onboarding and product adoption. Founded in 2009, it’s relatively older than the other tools listed. Gainsight offers various solutions for different business challenges, industries, and teams.

The products offered by Gainsight include customer success, which helps you retain and increase customers, and product experience that allows you to track the behavior of users and communicate with them. A recent feature of Gainsight PX is inSided, which combines several customer success resources in an all-in-one engagement platform.

Gainsight integrates with many CRM, productivity, BI, and other platforms. Some integrations are Salesforce, Zoho, Google Analytics, Tableau, and Zendesk.

Based on user reviews, Gainsight is a great tool for customer success, but the UI can be clunky and slow at times.

Gainsight PX Features

Here are Gainsight’s key features:

1. User Analytics and Segmentation

These features help you understand how users interact with your product. You can gain insight into the challenges users face in the user path, features and engagements that are effective, and the stickiness of your product. There is also funnel and cohort analysis to compare users by different segments and optimize the user path.

2. Personalized Onboarding and Walkthroughs

These features let you offer a highly personalized experience to each user. For example, to a user that purchased a specific feature or product, you can highlight that feature or product in your engagements with the user. Other advanced use cases include differentiating features based on the volume of engagement, role, or user behavior. Gainsight’s integrations with Salesforce and other CRM platforms make these use cases easy.

3. Cross-channel Engagement

With Gainsight PX’s integration with Gainsight Customer Cloud, you can drive adoption through a multi-channel approach.

Gainsight PX Pricing

Gainsight has pricing for customer success, product experience, and InSided. For each plan, prices are customizable.

Conclusion

Product adoption is a key indicator of customer retention and growth. The tools in this list offer valuable features to help you improve product adoption. Each tool specializes in different functions, so it’s important to go for the one that best suits the needs of your SaaS.

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