How can I get useful data from my early adopter customers?

When looking for product-market fit, one of the best sources of data are early adopters. These early adopters can help identify popular features, point out faults with the product, and provide feedback on usage.

Early adopters are customers that have made a commitment – in the form of purchase, usage or referral – to your brand and product at an early stage of development or production. They are typically not as sensitive to price, and are much more willing to provide feedback. Working with these users can accelerate a brand’s journey in getting the product ready for launch or for publicity and marketing.

Contrary to a conventional product launch, brands should not be building products for a “big reveal” and hoping for customers to show up at the door. A more efficient process is to be constantly “showing” their product to different groups or customer segments and soliciting feedback to improve the product. When the product has achieved a good level of acceptance by various groups, the marketing team can start publicity to a larger target audience.

Here are three methods of gathering data from early adopters.

The assumption is that the brand has identified a realistic number of early adopters. They can be found through website traffic, early (“first”) purchases, frequent commentators on social media channels or at offline events.

As a guideline, we typically recommend that the brand incentivises or gifts a token to the early adopter for their participation or for providing a response.

A realistic number is proportional to the data you are looking to gather. For example, product feedback requires a larger number of responses when compared to customer journey maps.

Surveys and polls

This is a quick and simple method in getting information about specific areas of the product. It can be set up through a form tool, for example, Google Forms or JotForm. The survey link can be sent to the early adopter through email, chat programmes or SMS.

The survey should not be too long, as length can be a barrier to completion. Consider whether you prefer the responses to be anonymous and therefore ask for more honest feedback; or for users to be identified in order to do follow-up post-survey.

Focus groups

For detailed comments and feedback, it is better to engage the early adopter through a focus group. The group can be segmented by variables such as age, income level, gender, life stage, and others. The session is usually done through recorded video, or face-to-face. Questions asked tend to be open-ended and long-form responses are encouraged in order to obtain more data per response.

The responses obtained needs to be analysed through multiple lenses in relation to the customer journey and value perception. The latter includes ROI to the customer and also whether they would make a repeat purchase or recommend the product to their network and community.

Free trials

A less guided (or more “free style”) approach to data collection involves providing a free product trial to early adopters. This can be done in detail with a small number of users or a mass data gathering exercise with a larger group.

The objective is to observe the user behaviour as they use the product, map their movements within or when using the product and to understand any specific or recurring usage patterns. The initial usage data can be provided to product (or UI/UX, marketing, etc) teams to help them refine the customer journey or the user journey.

Post-trial, the participants can also be requested to complete a survey in order to capture sentiments such as intent, preference as well as open-ended feedback.

Data can improve the iterative process

By having a recurring feedback loop from a range of adopters and target customers, the iterative process can be more effective.

The brand also gets to work on other areas such as pricing and promotions in tandem with the feedback. This is a far more effective approach instead of relying on only publicity to source for customers.

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We are Brand Utility is a business consultancy. We work with brands in the corporate, professional services, retail, travel and technology spaces.

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