Planning a Pathway from Acquisition to Adoption gives you the structure to quickly build trust and increase customer conversion. This is also a process that can also be optimised and refined over time as learnings are gathered.
Exercise 4.1 - Pathways | Acquisition to Adoption
The purpose of this Pathway is to find a repeatable, methodical way of attracting customers to your product or service through your community. While you can wait for customers to naturally come to you, that won’t guarantee that you can increase, or even maintain, profits over time. Giving potential customers timely and relevant content increases conversion by 72%.
Your community provides an opportunity to quickly build trust at the start of every new customer relationship by engaging them with community activities. The stickier you make this experience, the more you’ll be able to educate potential customers and keep your brand front of mind.
You can create different Pathways for different member groups if they need to be guided through a different process.
→ Create an editable copy of the worksheets
Starting action
First specify what will trigger someone to begin this Pathway. This will be informed by how you defined acquisition and what member groups related to that stage in exercise 4.
Ending action
Pathways are all about guiding someone from A to B, so now you have A defined, B should be the action someone has to take before starting an adoption process.
Key actions
It’s important when planning the key actions to guide someone from your starting action to your ending action to not constrain your ideas by tools or initiatives you’re already using. The most effective key actions are engagements which help the member solve their needs mapped in exercise 1. The best way to define your key actions is with a measurable outcome, for example - joined a webinar or downloaded an ebook.
For acquisition to adoption it’s useful to think about how your community will be discovered. The end goal is for community growth to scale through advocacy but to start you may have to acquire new members through marketing channels.
Once potential members are aware of your community, how will you capture their membership? Handing over personal details such as first name, last name and email is a big trade off so make sure the value of registering is clear and the signup process frictionless.
Potential catalysts of key actions
Content & Courses
Consider what stage of the decision-making process your prospective customers are at when they reach your community. If they’re registering to join your community, they’ve passed through the awareness hoop. Longer-form content to educate and inspire can be shared via the community to showcase your thought leadership, products and services. Free courses are a great top-of-funnel resource to pull prospects closer to purchase through genuine value.
Resources & Events
What resources and events should prospective customers be given access to? The more connections they build with the community (and existing customers), the harder it will be for them to leave the community. It’s also worth considering if resources and events should be gated, giving non-customers an incentive to register to join the community and opt in to emails and notifications.
Discussions
Discussions between members who aren’t customers and members who are, is fertile ground for acquisition. How can your brand and community team create a digital or physical space for these discussions to occur organically? At the acquisition to adoption stage, encouraging all new members to introduce themselves is a great way to break down the barriers to becoming a participant of the community.
Contacts
The more contacts a prospective customer builds within the community, the more value they’ll be extracting. If your community is skills based, those contacts could be helping them unlock new business of their own. In turn this network will make it easier for you to pitch a product or service. Consider how community members can build contacts and where in the Pathway that should happen.
Target impact
Your target impact should reflect acquisition related business outcomes documented in previous exercises. To make your Pathway effective and impactful, your target impact should be a direct outcome of your Pathway’s ending action.
Indicators of impact
Unless you have no other adoption processes other than community onboarding, there may be other factors impacting your target impact. Depending on the key actions you set out, it may take some time before enough members have been guided through your Pathway and you have hard evidence of ROI. Indicators of impact should be desired outcomes of your key actions which you feel confident you can measure to track progress.
What’s next?
Next up, mapping your retention to advocacy Pathway.
To access please sign in or register for free
If you are a registered user on Zapnito Knowledge Hub, please sign in
@Jack Bartrop what is the overlap between product (or service adoption) and the community adoption?
Thanks for the question @Charles Thiede. I think this ultimately comes down to the business objectives of your community. If your objective is to improve product onboarding and education to reduce churn, then you will most likely be creating a community of product to realise this.
If you’re building solely a community of practice, separate from your product/service, or if your community is the product (e.g. memberships or associations), then Adoption could be onboarding members to the community itself.
For a customer example of this Pathway, please find our brand-new Lunch ‘n Learn interview with@Victoria Hart who manages four communities for Mark Allen Group: http://community.zapnito.com/videos/lunch-and-learn-feb-23
@Jonathan Sumner and @John DeLeonardis : would the above example and this part of the course also be of value to your community at this point in time? Looking forward to connecting soon.