4 Steps to Improve User Retention!

For a product, retention rate is the most important criterion for judging product value. Especially for entrepreneurial teams, retention rate is the key to our evaluation of the quality of the product and whether it is worth continuing to invest.

If users find your product valuable, they will use it again in the future. On the other hand, if users find the product less valuable, they will churn. Moreover, as the traffic dividend reaches bottom, the Internet’s penetration into the population is becoming more and more thorough. As traffic becomes increasingly expensive, retaining old users becomes particularly important. So, our topic today is how to improve product retention rate.

How to improve retention rate? We can divide user retention into three stages:

01

Short-term retention stage

Short-term retention can be understood as the retention of users after their initial contact with the product. That is, users download and use the product without deleting it immediately or choosing to delete it within the last two days. After downloading, new users will generally learn about the basic functions of the product. If the product does not have any particularly eye-catching highlights and cannot arouse the user's desire to use it, there is a high possibility of user loss. After all, most users are in a state of trying new things.

In this case, how can we improve retention rate?

1. Intelligent recommendations arouse users’ desire to use

For this type of loss problem, generally intelligent algorithms or selected recommendation content products are more advantageous, such as information, short videos, shopping malls, live broadcasts... They can recommend high-quality hot content and catch the attention of most users. For example, TikTok has a higher short-term retention rate than other similar products. I believe that these three characteristics are the reasons why users can be quickly hooked and immersed in short videos.

2. Non-content products should highlight design highlights

For non-content products, strong visual and interactive forms can be used. That is to say, users should be able to understand the focus of the product and its usage features at a glance. Make sure that users can get started easily, and quickly create an impression that the product is of good quality and has good functions. For example, Baidu’s photo album APP “Yike Photo Album”. The menu classification is clear, the interface is simple, and there is no unnecessary irrelevant content. Coupled with the "smart production" and "card point video" functions, it is simple yet has highlights.

3. Guide new users to quickly experience core functions or content

When users come into contact with a new product, a good onboarding guide is very important. It is a shortcut for users to quickly understand the product. Onboarding may not only include the use of product functions, but also the presentation of the product’s core highlights. Only when we guide users to take the first step and experience the functions of our product will they be likely to open it frequently. For example, we all know that the core content of Fan Deng Reading is listening to books. For the Fan Deng Reading app, the most important thing is to allow users to quickly experience the fun of listening to books. Let's see how Fan Deng reads:

• Quickly match new users' expectations with core content, provide users with free audio books, set small goals, experience them for a limited time, and get rewards for completing the goals, stimulating users to quickly experience
• The homepage has settings to guide user interaction and understand user expectations and goals. When users use the product for the first time, they complete the entire path naturally, know exactly what to do next and how to use the app, and do not feel unhappy.

02

Mid-term retention stage

In the medium term, more suitable content and more comfortable functions are more important. For any product, we will gradually transition from the initial wow period to the calm period. When we have become accustomed to most of the product's functions, we will make the product's functions more delicate and convenient.

What can we do at this stage? For example, we can better understand the current users and make the recommendation algorithm more accurate; for example, the operation can be more convenient by reducing the original three steps to one step; for example, we can provide a more personalized visual solution and change the design style of the app.

1. Create high-frequency/interesting features in the value chain

This requires us to create some higher-frequency functions in the relevant value chain to drive product activity. How to understand it? It means to prolong the user's surprise period and make the user more satisfied with the product. A typical example is the "song reviews" of NetEase Cloud Music. For a music listening app, it is not a very necessary function in itself, but it is a great function to add icing on the cake of music listening. Many top selected comments directly drive users' emotions, guide users to leave messages, and enhance the appeal of the songs themselves.

You can also understand it as content operation, which is also a module that many products consider adding at this stage. Provide more interesting content, even if it is weakly related to the core function of the product. Because content consumption is a form of consumption that occupies a longer period of user time. Users spend a lot of time online, and for them, meaningful and valuable information is not so averse. Content operation is a good way to improve retention for some professional fields or tool platforms. But there is a premise in the "product value chain". It would be strange if a food delivery function was added to NetEase Cloud Music.

2. Increase the number of usable scenarios

Many products have serious retention issues, and a big reason is that there are too few scenarios in which they can be used, making users forget to use them. Let’s take a familiar example - Wanglaoji’s copywriting changed from “curing internal heat” at the beginning to “fear of internal heat”. The crowd and the scene quickly expanded: I may not be getting angry today, but I feel like I might get angry soon. Because the usage scenario of "prevention" is much more frequent than the usage scenario of "getting sick". As the scenarios expanded, sales also increased a lot. Many products themselves are low-frequency, such as map apps, whose core function is navigation. Normally, we will only open the map when we are not clear about the road conditions. We will not use it without navigation. Even if this kind of product pushes content, few people will read it.

Let's take a look at how Gaode Map does it:

I only open the map when I need navigation, but when do I need it? Amap has added another usage scenario. The entertainment attractions and food provided by "Nearby" can increase users' navigation opportunities. This higher frequency function can help improve APP activity to a great extent. It will also push notifications about weather or road conditions from time to time, reminding you to put on more clothes when it's cold and suggesting you change your route when the road is crowded. Even if you don't turn on these notifications, you can still feel its strong presence and won't feel annoyed.

PS: A special reminder is that at this stage, specific analysis should be done based on specific products. It is important to know whether users have such a demand, and whether adding this demand will be helpful to the product itself, whether it will confuse product positioning, and whether it can really improve retention.

03

Long-term retention stage

Long-term retention refers to the retention of senior users. When users get used to the content and functions of a product, there will actually be a "complaint" stage. No matter how good WeChat is, after using it for a year or two, you will feel that it is just so-so. If you read a lot of funny jokes on the Internet, you can often guess some of the routines.

For products at this stage, three major killer moves are generally offered:

1. Increase social attributes

The reason why we cannot live without WeChat is that we have a large number of social relationships on it. What we care about is not WeChat, but the people on WeChat. However, there is currently no product that can achieve the strong relationship chain characteristics of WeChat. YY Live and Momo for live broadcasts, and Kuaishou and Douyin for short videos, cannot establish strong relationships like WeChat as the freshness of their products decreases, but there is still great potential for tapping into weak relationships. Whether it is live broadcast or short video, as an outlet for loneliness and boredom, we can see interesting strangers through the screen. Since they are human beings, they naturally have personality.

Then the mining of weak relationships can be transformed from liking content to liking personality. Let’s take the entertainment industry as an example. I used to like Jay Chou because of his excellent works, but after becoming a fan, I liked his personality and character. We can understand his works as components of his personality. Maybe later on, a host you follow may not be able to produce eye-catching content anymore, but you will still like him and think he is real. This is the part of weak social relationships that can be deeply explored in content-based products.

2. User incentive system

Once upon a time, a large number of people born in the 1980s and 1990s would leave their computers idle in order to obtain the levels of stars, suns, and crowns on Tencent QQ. This shows that the membership/points system is definitely helpful in motivating users and improving retention.

Sign-in, point ranking and medals are all part of the incentive system. If this part is expanded, there will be a lot of content, and we will talk about it separately later.

3. Continuous operational stimulation

Continuous operational stimulation can generally be divided into two situations. Information and media products generally tend to create controversial topics. The content of the topic is often unexpected. After all, it is not just one person's opinion. If the topic is well chosen, the following replies may be full of explosive points.

Mall products tend to prefer holiday marketing. Double 11, Double 12, and 618 all belong to this category. Of course, with continuous operational stimulation, holiday marketing is regular and predictable. But there are also irregular ones, such as Didi, Mobike, and Luckin Coffee giving out coupons for no reason.

04

Anti-churn strategy

Another very important point is that no matter at any stage, for users who are at risk of churn, we need to communicate with them about churn warnings to prevent user churn, because once users churn, it will be extremely difficult to recall them.

1. Communication to prevent loss

The core idea of ​​preventing churn is to meet user needs, find new needs that users may have, and tell them that you can meet their needs. The first two often depend mainly on the product form, and what operators mainly need to do is to "inform users that your product can meet their needs." There are many channels to reach users. SMS, EDM, APP push and social media are all communication channels that can reach users.

To ensure effectiveness as much as possible, we recommend using multiple channels to reach users when resources are sufficient. However, to avoid excessive harassment of users, we need to pay attention to channel deduplication when sending communications to the same user. Generally, a safer approach is to first use social media push (such as WeChat text and picture information and customer service information), and then use APP push to reach users who cannot be reached. If all users cannot be reached, we will use SMS push. Since emails are PC content, they can be operated independently.

Specific content strategy

Regarding the wake-up copy for churn warning users, there are mainly the following points to note:

（1）Consider the user’s reading context

Generally speaking, when a text message is received, users will spend less than a second to scan it. Our goal is to allow users to get the main information we give them in this glance. Therefore, considering the user's reading scenario, when writing push copy, try to be concise and easy to understand, do not use uncommon words, and avoid long sentences and complex rules, because users will close the text message before they get your message. Discount/offer information can be marked with [ ] and "" symbols; when pushing, you can also add emoji expressions to attract user attention and increase intimacy.

At the same time, remind the copy to be combined with the scenario to avoid offending users. For example, when it is raining heavily, you receive a Didi notification saying that it is raining heavily and offering you a 50% discount coupon. This is very heartwarming. Another thing is to have refined operations for different users. Different users have different preferences, and under different attributes, they may want to receive different messages. For example, if you are in Shanghai, you don’t want to receive notifications from Beijing.

(2) Benefit bait

Interests are bait that drives people to take actions that go against their own thoughts. If you are using coupons as bait to lure users back, be sure to tell them. Excellent copywriting has clear interest points + short sentences + a sense of urgency + proper nouns enclosed in <>.

(3) Recalling users through a sense of belonging

For social platforms, you can tell users how many friends have updated their status during the time you were away. For recruitment platforms, you can tell users that there are people submitting resumes for your positions, so that users will want to come back to your platform to take a look.

2. Increase the cost of user leaving

I believe everyone is familiar with the concept of "sunk cost". When people decide whether to do something, they not only have to evaluate whether this thing is good for them, but also whether they have invested in this thing in the past. For example, the money spent on watching a movie is a sunk cost, so the attendance rate for paid events will be much higher than that for free events. We call the time, money, energy and other expenses that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered as sunk costs. We define users who are willing to invest time, energy and emotion as core loyal users. Maintaining them well is very helpful to the entire platform. The activeness of an opinion leader will continue to attract many fans and users.

Therefore, allowing users to invest time, energy, money, and emotions on the platform will promote more retention on the platform. Payment is a good way to retain users. If a user buys a data package, he will want to use it up. If you buy a membership on iQiyi, you will give priority to iQiyi when searching for movies... Once users pay a price, the cost of leaving will be higher.

When people invest the cost of silence, they will subconsciously make themselves more accepting of this thing because they don't want others to think they are stupid. I choose this product, and if it is not good, I will explain it to others. Maybe I have my reasons, maybe there are shortcomings, and I will try my best to understand. Typical examples are Apple fans and Xiaomi fans.

Another trick is to recharge in advance. Especially in many offline scenarios, such as getting a haircut, the clerk will ask you to apply for a membership card, which is also to bind your future consumption in advance.

The investment of time. Users invest time in it and are less likely to leave, like forum moderators, post bar owners, and Zhihu experts.

Author: Operation Xiaokaxiu

Source: Operation Xiaokaxiu