The Alumni Magazine at Marriott School at Brigham Young University recently published an excellent article on how to improve adoption of new products based on new research into consumer behavior with new products. You can download the article here.

American overconfidence vanishes once consumers try a new product, and it’s replaced with exaggerated self-doubt.

In a study published in the February 2011 issue of Journal of Consumer Research, Billeter reports something that he suspected all along: American overconfidence vanishes once consumers try a new product, and it’s replaced with exaggerated self-doubt. “The bottom line is that before people try a new product, they think that it will be easier than it is,” Billeter explains. “And after they’ve tried it once, they think they’re going to be worse than they actually will be.”

So how do you keep users from abandoning your new product before they get the benefits?

Four strategies to help companies improve product adoption rates:

Billeter recommended four strategies to help companies improve product adoption rates:
1. Design products to feel familiar,
2. Hire a guide for your demo,
3. Take advantage of technology and timing, and
4. Buy time with bundled pricing incentives.

These might sound a little fluffy but read the details of their points – they have some very good ideas many companies could copy.

I love a good 60 second screencast on a product

Related to their points 2 and 3, I think software products and web tools should all have very well made screencast videos that act like guides to walk consumers through getting past initial setup and usage confusion to the wins.  Even relatively simple products can benefit from one.

Here are some of my favorite product screencasts:

http://culturedcode.com/things/iphone/ and click on the video or http://culturedcode.com/things/screencast.html
http://skitch.com/features and click on the “Skitch in 60 seconds” video
http://www.marketcircle.com/billings/iphone/# and click watch video in the centre right (small icon)

Enjoy!

Thank you for visiting www.strategycube.com, an innovation and strategy consulting firm in Burlington and Oakville.

The Situation:

The client, Traditional Life Sciences Inc., was looking to start an online business in the health and wellness space, targeted to Boomers. They wanted a starting-point e-commerce, content management and marketing system that could be managed by 2-4 people but that could handle sales of $5-10 million a year before it required a major overhaul. We were asked to recommend an overall technology strategy and then to submit a proposal for executing the work.

Our Strategy:

1. Use an inexpensive open source CMS. We contemplated WordPress but eventually went with Joomla.
2. Instead of building out all the desired functionality using custom code, we recommended “renting” the functionality by using SaaS applications (also called hosted or cloud applications).
3. We used our Canadian designers to design the Joomla site but then we had it built by overseas coders to keep the cost down.

The Execution:

We call it a web ecosystem because calling it a website is a bit misleading (at least we think so). The ecosystem consists of:

1. A Joomla front-end which manages all the pages, article and the merchandising of the products.  The products are managed through a powerful Joomla component called Virtue Mart which acts as the product database.
2. Infusionsoft is the real power behind the system. Infusionsoft manages the email marketing and marketing automation, the CRM (user/customer database) and the e-commerce. All the actual transactions are processed through Infusionsoft and then sent electronically for order fulfillment. It also provides all the e-commerce sales and order reporting.
3. Customer Hub is an Infusionsoft add-on that allows customers to do self service on their account like updating their credit card information and seeing their past orders.
4. Get Satisfaction is the ultimate in web 2.0 community based support and it powers the support forum.
5. Google Analytics gathers all the visitor and conversion data and allows the client to do detailed conversion and ROI analysis.

Most people working in e-commerce have figured out that building a nice site is just the beginning and that most of the effort actually needs to go into driving traffic to the site, getting visitors into some kind of marketing automation sequence and then testing different offers until they convert. Then you up-sell and cross-sell them, also using marketing automation sequences. So how do you do this with a staff of 2 or 3? If you try do it using Constant Contact or aWeber or any other stand alone email tool you’ll be importing and exporting data every day and spending your life trying to get it to interact with your shopping cart and your customer database. Infusionsoft is really the only application on the market that allows you to manage this kind of marketing automation engine and it’s built for small companies with limited online marketing resources. It’s CRM + email marketing + marketing automation + an e-commerce cart, all in one, all pre-connected and ready to roll.

Cost Savings:

The client mentioned that they had our functionality quoted by an agency that would have built them a custom solution. The quote was for more than triple what they invested using our approach.

Client Feedback:

Getting to the final product as specified, on time, and on budget should be “price of entry”, but in a fairly sophisticated integration like Zwell, cost overages and time creep is likely more often the rule than the exception. Jonathan and the Strategy Cube team hit the timeline, delivered against the budget (while still indicating where options and upgrades were possible), and delivered a result that exceeds our expectation.  Communication throughout was efficient and solid.  We are delighted with the result, and recommend Strategy Cube without reservation.

Rob Carscadden, President & CEO of Traditional Life Sciences Inc. and zwell.ca. June 29, 2010.

The site went live in June 2010. You can visit the site at www.zwell.ca

Screenshots:

Thank you for visiting www.strategycube.com

One of Jonathan’s passions is the use of technology to solve problems and make organizations more efficient. We have recently researched vendors and implemented solutions including deploying the program without IT resources and training all the staff for the following:

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Because our client had very lean IT resources we only looked at online, hosted CRM solutions. We examined NetSuite, salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics and Entellium over a 2-month period. We ultimately chose salesforce.com based on the client’s unique needs.

Mass email management

Our client needed to send several thousand emails every 2 months and used to have a staff member spend several days preparing the lists in Excel and then sending out the emails using Outlook in batches of 100 email addresses in the BCC field. They didn’t know that most of these email will never reach the intended recipient because they will get stopped by spam filters that look for multiple addresses in the BCC field. We looked at Constant Contact, Campaigner and Vertical Response and ultimately chose and rolled out Vertical Response because of their offer of 10,000 free emails a month for registered non-profits, which our client was. The client recently sent out a far more professional looking mass email and it took the staff member a fraction of the time to send it. They are extremely happy with the solution.

Event management

One of our clients runs several live conferences a year. These events are a huge drain on the staff for the weeks leading up to the event. They used to manage all the registrations manually via phone and email and capture the data in a spreadsheet. Fees were processed through a special online merchant account but the data did not connect to any internal system. All outbound communication to attendees was handled manually.

We researched several online event management solutions and chose RegOnline.com for them. RegOnline is a hosted, pay per use, solution that automates almost every conceivable aspect of running a large event and massively reduces the staff required to pull the event off.

Web conferencing & archiving

The same client as above also wanted to know how much it would cost to have a company come to their live events, capture the audio and video, stream it out via the web to a disparate audience, allow for Q&A with online attendees and then archive it online for later on-demand viewing. We researched several providers and found a Toronto based company that provides this service at the right level of cost and quality for our clients needs.