User growth step 1: How to achieve user retention?

Against the backdrop of declining traffic dividends, user growth is a difficult problem that everyone wants to solve. However, before achieving growth, retention must be done first, and maintaining the stability of the product traffic pool can make growth meaningful. And doing a good job of user retention is the core point of user retention.

When it comes to user growth, I think most people have a word in their minds - "fission".

In this era of expensive traffic, growth has become a problem for all companies. Otherwise, "fission" wouldn't be so popular. After all, most bosses' understanding of fission is still stuck at "bringing in 100,000 fans at low cost." But we are not here to complain about the bosses today, let's get back to the topic.

1. Why do we need to focus on retention before growth?

Growth cannot be limited to attracting new customers. Attracting new customers is only one part of growth.

Just like the water in a pool, water keeps coming in and going out at the same time. If the water flowing out is more and faster than the water flowing in, then the water in the pool will dry up sooner or later.

Nowadays, most companies get their new users from advertising. If your average customer acquisition cost is 50 yuan, a new user must place an order with you more than three times for you to break even. If users leave without placing an order, the advertising fees will be wasted.

As shown in the figure above, this is the relationship between user retention time and profit. Only when the user retention time is longer and consumption continues to be generated, can we continue to make profits.

Therefore, in order to expand the company's profits, the best way is to extend the user lifetime value and improve user retention.

Therefore, compared to attracting new customers, it is more important to retain them first. Only when retention is done well, the company's growth will be meaningful. Stable retention means that the great value of the company's products is recognized by users and the market.

2. How to find behaviors that affect user retention?

I believe everyone has seen many retention cases, and has also heard of the concept of magic numbers, such as the Facebook example of adding 7 friends within a week, which has basically become a standard case in growth.

When you see this case, have you ever thought about why adding friends is the behavior? Why within a week? Why 7 friends?

The essence of user retention is actually that users feel the value of the product. Only when users have a reason to stay will they stay.

So back to the example of Facebook, since it is a social platform, how can you socialize without friends? Without the act of adding friends, users would certainly not be able to feel the value of Facebook.

Why is it added within 10 days? You can take a look at the retention curve below.

The trend chart above has two very obvious intervals. I divide the two intervals in the chart into: selection period and stable period.

You can find that the curve is in a stable stage after the selection period, so Facebook’s logic within 10 days is also because after 10 days, it is the stable period of their product, but after the stable period it also means that most users have been lost.

Therefore, we need to make users feel the value of the product within the 10-day selection period, that is, complete the action of adding friends within 10 days, in order to stop the loss.

Why is 7 the magic number? This is also what I will focus on next.

When we are working on user retention, we should focus on what those who stay do, rather than on those who leave. There are many factors that influence user churn, but there is only one reason for user retention: they feel the value of the product.

Facebook discovered that the users who stayed had one thing in common: they all added more than 7 friends.

When a user adds 7 friends, the churn rate fluctuates greatly; when the number reaches 7, the churn is very stable; and when the number exceeds 7, the churn trend is not much different from that when the number is 7, so 7 is a watershed.

So, how to retain users can be summarized in four sentences:

1. According to your own product retention trend chart, find the selection period that suits you

There is no need to explain this further. Just look at the retention curve of your own product and see how many days it stabilizes. Then, before this deadline, you need to make users feel the value of your product.

1. Determine the core operational behaviors of the product based on the product business model

For example, WeChat is a social product, and its core behaviors include adding friends, chatting, and posting to Moments; Zhihu is a knowledge community, and its core behaviors include browsing, following, liking, and posting.

1. Analyze the retained user behaviors and extract the magic numbers of the core behaviors of these users

For example, Facebook is to add 7 friends, Twitter is to follow 30 people, NetEase Cloud Music is to collect 10 songs, etc.

Combining the above three points, that is, (at what node the user was, what actions he took, and to what extent), propose multiple retention hypotheses, then begin to verify the proposed hypotheses, then analyze the results, and finally optimize the product.

3. After finding the behaviors that affect user retention, how to improve user retention?

Finding the behaviors that influence user retention is half the battle.

But we know that users will definitely not follow the path we plan for them, and they will not do what we want them to do. So what should we do?

Let’s take a look at what other Internet companies are doing!

Take Weibo as an example: Weibo is the domestic version of Twitter, I think everyone has no objection to this!

Since Twitter requires following 30 people, the same goes for Weibo. If you don’t follow them, where will the content come from? Right!

So how does Weibo do it? See the figure below:

When a new user registers on Weibo, Weibo will guide the user to follow bloggers of content that they are interested in. Bloggers will provide some interesting and useful content every day to help Weibo retain new users.

But what if the user clicks [Skip] and doesn’t pay attention?

Don’t be afraid, Weibo has another killer trick: the user growth system.

Weibo arranges all the key behaviors that affect user retention into daily tasks. By creating a task system, it uses points/money to drive users to complete the actions that the product wants them to complete.

Imagine that when users complete all the tasks in the picture above, they will be able to feel the value of Weibo as a product!

Therefore, once you find the key factors that affect user retention, if you can create a new user growth system suitable for your own products, you can achieve twice the result with half the effort.

Currently, the new employee growth system has also been adopted by most domestic Internet products. I will give examples one by one soon. I believe that if you pay attention in your life, you will definitely notice it!

That’s all we have to say about retention today. If you have any opinions, please feel free to discuss and learn together!

Related reading:

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2. APP promotion planning: 60,000 paying users increased within 7 days of beta testing!

3. APP promotion activities: How to plan a screen-sweeping event?

4. A complete list of APP promotion methods in 2019, take it and don’t thank me!

5. How to carry out APP promotion and marketing? What are the common methods?

6. APP promotion case: How to go from 0 to millions of users?

Author: Zhong Yewei

Source: Zhong Yewei