7 ways to effectively achieve user retention!

User retention is the lifeline for most products and a matter of life and death.

• “No survival equals death”
• "He who survives wins the world"
• “Money can buy users, but it can’t buy retention”
• ….

These are some of the industry’s evaluations of retention value, and their importance is evident.

But if you don’t understand the essence of retention, you will rush blindly in the pursuit of retention techniques, fail to solve practical problems, and make yourself physically and mentally exhausted.

User retention may seem like numbers on a data dashboard, but it actually reflects real people's votes on their satisfaction with product services. No matter whether you use hacking techniques or magic, you must return to the value of the product itself.

If your product solves problems for users better than your competitors, they will choose to stay; otherwise, they will choose to leave.

This is a very natural thing, but it is also the most difficult thing to do, so when some company business problems arise, bosses will not do this.

When they learned about the ancient concept of user growth, the word "growth" took on infinite magic, as if this black box could provide answers to all the problems that were bothering them.

Some people saw a life-saving straw, while others saw a sword that could slay the dragon.

The situations of some companies I have learned about are as follows:

• The product has entered a period of weakness and has experienced sluggish growth;
• The product is outdated, and the stock price has even fallen by more than half since the company went public;
• The product positioning is unclear, the strategy is unclear, and there is no competitiveness;
• Although the product has a good ARPPU value, it has the problem of low usage frequency and high threshold;
• The new product that was incubated, the MVP did not run smoothly, and the data was relatively poor...

Although the situation is difficult, they have an almost fanatical desire for retention. They have no patience to do things that are valuable in the long run, and they have psychedelic delusions about the magic of short-term growth. They hope to form a growth team to increase retention in a few months.

When you talk to them, they will tell you that the business is good, but the previous team was not capable enough, and they hope to find some great people to quickly achieve big growth results. I don’t know how many people like Ina and Shengfu who can change their destiny are there, otherwise you will soon become the previous team in their mouths.

I also learned how some companies achieved growth under KPI, which was at the expense of releasing the vitality of the product in the short term, just like Ye Kai who opened eight doors - frantically sending push notifications to users, doing big promotions, popping up bubbles on various pages, and increasing the density of advertising space. In the end, the team became restless and didn't know what to do anymore.

After working for many years, I have a deep fear of working with such unrealistic bosses who are only interested in winning. They will not teach you what is a healthy perspective on work, products, or business. They will only make you exhausted physically and mentally.

Okay, having said all this, we shouldn’t have unrealistic expectations for retention techniques. However, this doesn’t mean we can just leave retention alone. It’s just that there is an upper limit to the effect of improvement, and there are still systematic things we can do.

There are two main ideas for user retention: the creation of product value and the penetration of product value.

The creation of product value is to go back to the business itself and answer two questions: how the strategy is generated and how the strategy is implemented. Then the creation of product value will revolve around this main line. I will not do a detailed breakdown here, but will mainly focus on user growth in the industry and the systematic method of retention growth brought about by product value penetration.

The essence of product value penetration is to increase the user ratio and frequency of new users using the service.

For example, let's say you opened a restaurant with a unique selling point and used various means to attract 1,000 guests to dine there. However, 200 of them left for various reasons without ever eating there and without feeling the unique selling point, rather than leaving because they were dissatisfied with the service. So you have to do everything you can to let them dine there and experience the restaurant's service and characteristics.

Why is the emphasis here on the use of services? Because there are many terms in the industry for this purpose, such as key actions, Aha moments, main user paths, magic numbers, etc. If you only hear the forms but not understand the meaning, you will miss the core and a lot of strategies will not be effective.

For example, many content-based products, after learning about the story of how following 30 friends on Twitter improved retention, began to use following behavior as a key action to improve it, and then adopted strategies such as one-click following and novice tasks to stimulate users to follow content producers. The results showed that the attention rate increased, but the retention rate decreased instead. Because users do not pay attention to the product naturally after experiencing the product service and feeling satisfied, they do not feel the value of the product. They also always receive messages from users who they have no memory of at all, and they leave because they are annoyed.

Some products like to have a sign-in feature, but the sign-in design is completely separated from the product service. Even if users come, they don’t feel the value of the service, so the effect is likely to be minimal.

If check-in and products can be naturally combined, the effect will be very good. For example, the polishing function on Xianyu, the spin function on Zhuanzhuan, the word memorization function and the check-in function for fitness products are all variations of sign-in. Because they are well integrated with the products, they will add greater value to the products.

There are also products that continuously send push notifications to new users, but the content of the push notifications has nothing to do with the product or service. At best, it serves to wake them up. But after too many times, in the long run, you will find that user retention is actually worse.

Therefore, the emphasis here is on increasing the user ratio and frequency of new users using the service.

In this way, you will weaken the vanity data generated by skipping product services, and the strategies implemented on the products will also implement this thinking. The products will become more and more convergent, and the results will get better and better.

So how do we increase the rate and frequency of new users using our services?

1. Product Newbie Mode
2. Lower the threshold for using services
3. User incentives
4. User stratification
5. Triggering the service
6. User Filtering
7. Troubleshooting of usage issues

Any product solution should be centered around solving problems. So what problems do the above strategies solve for users?

1. Product Newbie Mode

The characteristic of new users is that they have strong motivation to use the product, but their ability to use it is weak because they have never been exposed to the product. If the product provides too many services, users will be confused and have no idea where to start. They will also give up because of information overload and difficulty in using the product.

Therefore, it is necessary to use the novice mode of the product at this time, simplifying it into an extremely fast and streamlined version, so that users can experience the core services of the product before experiencing more other functions.

For example, many games are designed with a novice period mode to reduce the frustration of new users caused by the difficulty of using the service. This approach can also be tried by other complex business products.

2. Lower the threshold for using services

Some users who come to experience the service may have average motivation, and if the threshold for using the service exceeds their expectations, they are more likely to give up.

At this time, lowering the threshold for using the service is an idea that can be tried.

The average customer price of some psychological counseling products is around 300 yuan, and the threshold for users to use them is relatively high. They will use a 15-yuan quick answer method to lower the threshold for users to use the services, and then guide them to purchase services with high average customer prices.

The course prices of many educational companies are as high as thousands of yuan, and the threshold for users is very high. Low-priced or even free trial classes are a common way to convert new users.

3. User Incentives

The same solution can be used to solve the problem that users who come to experience the service are not motivated enough and are prone to give up.

Incentives such as novice tasks, new user benefits, and discounted coupons will increase the motivation of new users to use the service and will also guide users to use the service.

For example, Taobao and e-commerce products will provide incentives such as 0 yuan purchases or new user coupons to increase the user ratio of new users using the service.

The top users of this are undoubtedly Qutoutiao. The incentive system not only exists in the new user stage, but also directly forms a companion relationship with product services, and ultimately exists as a differentiated selling point for the product.

4. User stratification

If the product covers too many users, users with different characteristics will have segmented and differentiated demands for the same needs, which cannot be met by a single service.

At this time, finding user characteristics with obvious differences in needs and providing matching services will increase the rate of new users using the service and their satisfaction after use.

For example, Xiaohongshu discovered that the retention rate among new and young users was relatively poor. After studying their usage behavior, it was discovered that their needs for searching for content related to anime avatars and celebrities were not met, nor were their needs met by the recommended content in the feed. Therefore, the operation team was arranged to complete the content in this area, or to hide the tags of missing content.

Large companies have an advantage in this regard, because small companies can obtain too little information about users and cannot do more dimensional analysis. Large companies like BAT can collect user data from all of their products for use in each product.

• For example, Tencent's Kugou uses the music listening data of QQ Music users to solve the problem of what new users should sing.
• For example, WeChat Reading uses WeChat’s relationship chain to know what my friends are reading and solve the problem of what new users should read.
• …

5. Triggering the service

New users may not develop a habit when using the product and may leave too early and forget about the service. Continuous triggering of usage is necessary.

• For example, when you don’t use takeout or fresh food e-commerce products frequently, they will often push coupons to you to cultivate your usage habits.
• Social products will often be pushed to girls near you to stimulate you to use them.
• …

6. User screening

From the perspective of channels, there will be significant differences in the willingness to use services for products from different channels.

The users of some channels are of low quality, the user demands of some channels do not match the product services, and the advertisements and product selling points of some channels are not consistent. When averaged over all users, this will lower the retention rate.

At this time, it is necessary to continuously monitor the user quality of different channels, exclude users from low-quality channels, increase the delivery of high-quality user channels, and correct the delivered advertising materials.

7. Troubleshooting of usage problems

This problem is generally more common in new products. The products often have unstable service issues, and users cannot use them normally and smoothly, so there is no question of staying.

For some companies that make products related to mobile phone systems, adapting to various types of mobile phones and resolving conflicts with mobile phone systems are big issues in retention.

Okay, these are some of my thoughts on user retention.

If you use the above ideas to increase the rate of new users using your service to a high enough level, but most users are still unwilling to stay, then you really need to think about adjusting your product, because people will never want to come back after eating at your restaurant.

Having gone through a period of confusion and demonization, I hope to have healthy concepts that are in line with logic and common sense. When doing business, I should return to the business itself, solve real problems for users, provide real value, and resist some demonized things.

Related reading:

1. User operation: new funnel model for conversion analysis!

2. User operation: How to use B-side operation thinking to increase user growth?

3. Product operation: How to use data analysis to drive product user growth?

4. APP user growth: One model solves 90% of growth problems!

5.How to increase users? Take Pinduoduo and Xiaohongshu as examples

6. Triggering user growth: Is user operation just about attracting new users?

7. User operation: What else can you do to attract new users without fission users?

8. User operation: how can financial products awaken dormant users?

9. User operation: How to make use of private domain traffic?

Author: Whitefish

Source: A cigarette at night