With the disappearance of traffic dividends and the cold winter of the Internet, how to refine operations and retain users is a pain point for every operator. We need to do a good job of retention - everyone understands the principle, but no one knows how to do the process systematically. I have searched for many articles on the Internet titled "Teaching you how to retain users", but they are all difficult to implement or have a hasty summary.
I once invited my good friend Miao Si, the former head of user growth at Le Chun , to my former company to share how she did operations in a systematic way. After she finished speaking, the whole audience burst into applause, and it greatly changed everyone's way of thinking about operations.
I hope this article can bring you the core methodology of user retention under refined operations.
01 The significance of user retention
You must have done a particularly ridiculous elementary school data problem: There are two water pipes, A and B, in a swimming pool. Pipe A can fill an empty pool in 20 minutes, and pipe B can drain a full pool of water in 40 minutes. Now, if you open pipes A and B at the same time, how many minutes will it take to fill the swimming pool? I have never been able to understand why there is such a question that wastes a lot of water.Until I started operations. Nowadays, many products are actually doing the stupid thing of injecting water and releasing water at the same time during operation. The swimming pool is a user pool. Filling it with water means attracting new users, and draining it means losing users. How can we avoid the waste of filling and draining water at the same time, making the user pool fuller and fuller, when traffic is becoming more and more expensive? Even primary school students know that the answer is to turn down water pipe B more and more to retain the water.
But how to achieve retention?
Retention is often called a "metaphysics" because it runs through almost the entire life cycle of users, and it is difficult to explain exactly how to keep users.
In fact, the work of retention begins from the moment a new user first enters the product. Every step of his experience determines whether he will stay, how long he will stay, whether he will make contributions, and whether he will recommend the product and become a new node for attracting new customers. Taking the classic user growth analysis model AARRR as an example, the four steps of Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Refer can all be regarded as the category of broad retention.
02 How to achieve retention in a systematic way?
After working in operations for three and a half years, the biggest blame I have to bear is: "Users stay because the product itself is good, and users leave because of inadequate operations." During these three and a half years, I spent one year to start a light meal brand from scratch and created a monthly repurchase rate of over 65%. From the first tweet on the official account to building a seed user group and learning how to do fission, from handing out flyers on the street to becoming a group meal supplier for a Fortune 500 company, I grew wildly step by step relying on my intuitive understanding of operations, and increased the number of users from 0 to tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands (now this brand has more than 10 offline stores). Later, I went to Le Chun, a "weird" fast-moving consumer goods company, to sell yogurt. I was responsible for the growth of a larger scale of online users, built Le Chun's user growth system, and attempted refined and scenario-based operations. I experienced what data-driven and user-driven meant. ▲Lechun yogurt After that, he joined Didi and Beike to work on user growth, learned about the high-frequency, low-threshold travel industry and the low-frequency, high-threshold real estate industry, learned about the operations of these two industries with rigid demand, and studied how to operate users as a platform company serving multilateral markets. Summarizing my experience over the past three years, I feel that user retention is the most difficult but most valuable part of operations. In an interview with nine top growth hackers, Ms. Qu Hui, the author of "Silicon Valley Growth Hacker's Practical Notes", found that four out of nine chose retention as their favorite growth lever. Because retention can bring huge compound interest effects, the cost ratio of maintaining old users and acquiring new users is approximately 1:5. It can be said that if you want growth, you must first retain. So how can we have a systematic approach to retain users? I broke down how I allocated my energy when working on retention and found that 40% of my energy was spent on discovering and optimizing user experience problems ( focusing more on retaining new users in the initial stage of product use) , 40% of my energy was spent on studying user segmentation and refined operations ( focusing more on retaining old users in the middle and late stages of product use) , and 20% of my energy was spent on trying to expand the boundaries of retention strategies. Below I will talk about some of the small experiences summarized in these three parts.
03 40%: Find problems and optimize
Unlike the creative attributes of attracting new customers, a lot of time in retention is spent on discovering user experience problems and optimizing them quickly. To put it bluntly, it is about seeing the gap between reality and plan. What often happens in the initial stage of users using your product is that you have planned a perfect route for the user, but in fact he does not follow that route at all. If you fail to guide users in a timely manner and allow them to rush around in the product, you will miss the precious "AHA Moment" (the moment when users suddenly feel that the product solves their core needs), and finally users will kill the app in a daze. So, how do we discover problems in user experience and optimize them? We need to do user experience path analysis and full touchpoint management.
User experience path analysis
This analysis is divided into three stages: the first stage is earlyprediction : predicting the ideal user experience path, which is also a hypothesis; the second stage is facingreality : using traffic maps to analyze the product's real user experience and access paths; the third stage is comparing gaps : comparing ideals and reality to find differences.
Phase 1: Prediction
Based on the product design, first sort out the entire experience path of the ideal user entering the product. From the page where the user opens the product to the page where the user leaves the product after their needs are satisfied and the experience ends, draw a flowchart of the pages or actions the user will go through.
If your product features are complex, you can set up multiple user experience paths. At least you need to preset two experience paths based on the first visit of new users and the visit of old users .
If it’s a new user’s first visit: you need to consider steps like login, product setup, etc., which may become loss points. When attracting new users, different processes or operational activities are generally designed according to the gameplay of different channels. It is recommended to segment the experience path of new users according to different channels for attracting new users.
If your product involves online + offline services, it is recommended to add the offline user experience part as well, ending with the user completing the complete product experience.
Predicting the ideal user experience path is actually about sorting out what you think the core functions of the entire product are, how the core steps of the experience are operated, and which pages users need to go through.
▲Here is a brief summary of the user experience path of a food delivery website. Since it is only a schematic diagram, only the most important steps are listed. Please be as detailed as possible when actually summarizing it. One more thing, during the sorting process, please think as a user and be sensitive at all times. Sensitivity means not compromising, because where you feel vaguely uncomfortable, the users will also feel uncomfortable. These might be where improvements could be made.
Stage 2: Facing Reality
The analysis of actual user access paths is actually an analysis of user experience behavior preferences.
For this part, you can use professional tools - user behavior data analysis platforms (such as GrowingIO, Sensors, etc.).
These analysis tools can help you see how the traffic entering the product is diverted by different product modules, how it flows between different pages, and ultimately ends the experience. We call this a traffic map, and it is usually presented intuitively using a Sankey diagram.
▲In the Sankey diagram, you can intuitively see which modules on the homepage are more attractive to users and which pages have the most user loss.
The third stage comparison gap
The key is to compare ideals with reality and find the gap. Does the user's behavior trend match the goals of product design and operations? You will find out after comparison.
In actual operation, I often encounter the following differences between ideal and reality :
1. Users (especially new users) jump out of the homepage directly after entering
2. The user skips a step in the core path experience and fails to complete the core function.
3. Users are attracted by non-main paths during the experience and lose without experiencing the core functions
When encountering the first situation (users jump out directly after entering the homepage), I will first segment the user sources. Some new users brought in by channels are not target users, which will definitely directly affect subsequent retention. Segmenting the sources can in turn help optimize the strategy for attracting new users.
Then study whether product value education and user path guidance are not done well. Education about the product’s value starts from the time when new users are attracted to the app. When users open the app for the first time, the Onboarding Pages need to focus on conveying the product’s core functions and usage scenarios, as well as the user’s status after their demands are met (giving users expectations).
To guide the user experience path, you can use the form of [get rewards for completing tasks], using pop-ups or overlays to guide users step by step to complete the experience of the entire core function. Based on product features, you can also collect user preferences in advance: Before users officially experience the product, in order to ensure that users can directly see what they want on the homepage, some products (information platforms, e-commerce platforms, social platforms, etc.) will guide new users to make preference choices, so as to recommend more suitable content to users. Whether it is a startup page, a small task guide or a preference selection, it is recommended to design a progress bar mechanism so that users have expectations in mind and can follow your rhythm to complete the designed path step by step. ▲Picture from Everyone is a Product ManagerThe second situation (users jump out before the core path is completed)may indicate that there is something in your core path design that does not meet user expectations. At this time, we need to study what the user experienced in the step before jumping out, and what kind of psychological changes occurred between the previous step and the next step, because this change causes the user to think that his demands cannot be well met. Taking the food delivery platform as an example, one of the more common situations is that prices do not meet expectations. The prices users see on the meal selection page generally do not include packaging and delivery fees, but after adding these two items on the checkout page, the price may increase by 5%-30%, which will cause users to feel a clear psychological gap. How can we fill this psychological gap and prevent users from leaving? Meituan once designed a "stealing red envelopes" activity on the payment page, and Ele.me also carried out a red envelope redemption activity. By participating in the event, users can quickly get a small red envelope as low as 0.5 yuan, but these small benefits can already alleviate the psychological gap of users and allow users to smoothly enter the payment process to complete the order. ▲User expectation management in food delivery platformsThe third situation (users are attracted by non-main paths during the experience and fail to experience the core functions)is generally because some operational activities dominate the main path of the experience and the activity design itself does not form a closed loop, resulting in users being attracted by the activities and leaving the main path, and leaving the product directly after experiencing the activities. For example, some e-commerce apps organize activities to attract old users to new ones (share with friends and receive large rewards after friends make purchases), and design the entrance to the activity as a banner on the app homepage. Users are attracted to the invitation activity by the benefits and jump from the app to WeChat to share with friends. However, some activities are designed to end at the step of sharing with friends and do not guide users back to the main path of purchase, resulting in loss. To solve this problem, first of all, the activities need to distinguish user identities for display. Only old users who have completed the entire product experience can see the old new user activities. Secondly, when users share, they will jump out of the app and come to WeChat. As a follow-up to the subsequent core path, it is necessary to have its own mini-program or h5 mall under the WeChat ecosystem , so that users can directly return to the main purchase path in WeChat. At the same time, after the user shares, a small sharing reward can be given to the user on the sharing landing page , and the user can be guided back to the purchase process, thus forming a closed loop. In order to explore the reasons for the difference between ideal and reality, in addition to relying on the user insights we accumulate daily, we also need to conduct some qualitative user surveys or focus groups. Then formulate a strategy based on the conclusions and use AB testing to verify whether the optimized strategy is feasible. (▲AB testing: This is a magic weapon that you need to use when you have many solutions to a problem and cannot predict which one will be the best. Simply put, it is to take an appropriate amount of user samples and randomly group them. Under the premise of keeping other variables the same as much as possible, give different groups of users different solutions, and compare the effectiveness and efficiency of solutions in different groups within a suitable period.) After analyzing the reasons for the differences, you will have a clearer understanding of user behavior and demands, know the parts of the product that need improvement and how to guide users in operational actions. In addition to product and strategy optimization, for those users who leave without experiencing the key functions of the product, we can also use active contact methods (push/SMS/email/WeChat public account messages, etc.) to tell users how awesome the core functions of the product they have not experienced are, give them quick access and coupons, lower the threshold and guide them to experience it again. This may become a very critical link in getting users back to the product.
Full touch point management
When we sort out the user experience path, there is one thing we can do at the same time: sort out the touch points on the user experience path. The definition of touchpoint is: the key point where users come into contact and interact with products/services. Visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and psychological contact points can all be counted as touchpoints. The most common ones are text, pictures, videos, buttons, etc. on the page. If the touch points are used well and make users feel good about the product, it will become the key point of retention. If it is not used properly, it will result in negative reviews and cause user loss.
Why do we need to do full touchpoint management?
First, it is to monitor in all aspects, avoid making low-level mistakes, and not ignore any details that may affect user experience and lead to loss;
Second, it is to maximize the effect of operational actions without missing any opportunities to influence the user's mind and wasting resources;
The third is to make all touch points speak with one voice . Based on the brand positioning of the product, unify the style of the touch points so that users’ awareness of the brand and product selling points can be continuously strengthened through the experience.
How to do full touchpoint management?
The first step is to break down the user experience into touch points. We need to break down the pages on the user experience path that we organized previously into individual touchpoints, such as pictures, icons, buttons, floating windows, etc., to form a touchpoint list.
The second step is to use 3W1H to perform contact inspection. From the user's perspective, follow the user experience process, and use 3W1H to examine the rationality of the existence and design of each key touchpoint, and think about how to optimize it. Answering these four questions, 3W1H, will help us think about whether the design of this contact can achieve the desired goal.
WHO: Who are the people reached by the contacts?
WHEN: In what scenario is this touchpoint encountered?
WHAT: What effect do you hope to achieve when you reach the contact point?
HOW: What strategies are used to achieve this effect?
The answers to these four questions can be formed into a sentence: XXX (user), in XXX (scenario), sees/comes into contact with XXX (touchpoint), and because of XXX (strategy), the user achieves XXX (desired effect). This sentence describes the "user story" at this touchpoint. When it is found that the user stories of some touchpoints cannot achieve the expected goals, this touchpoint needs to be optimized.
For example,when we analyzed the experience paths of price-sensitive users on e-commerce platforms, we found that they like to check their coupons before shopping, and are very likely to jump out when they find that there are no available coupons.
Before optimization: When there is no coupon, entering the "My Offers" page will display "No coupons available".
Let’s describe the user story of a price-sensitive user at this touchpoint, who wants to use a coupon to purchase an item, but when he views his coupon page, he sees “No coupons available.” This directly informs users that there are no discounts available. For price-sensitive users, it is unlikely that they will purchase the product at the original price, so they choose to exit. Therefore, we decided to optimize this touchpoint.
After optimization: When there is no coupon, a pop-up window with the activity "30 seconds, answer 3 small questions and receive a red envelope" will be displayed on the "My Discounts" page to guide users to answer questions to win coupons.
▲E-commerce operation optimization for price-sensitive users After optimization, the user story on the touchpoint becomes: price-sensitive users want to use coupons to buy goods. When checking their coupons, they see a pop-up window with the activity "30 seconds, answer 3 small questions, and receive a red envelope". So the user clicks on the pop-up window to answer 3 questions and get a small coupon. Although the threshold for the activity is not high, users need to spend time to win the discount, so users will cherish the discount and have a higher probability of completing the shopping behavior. This user story sounds much more perfect. Step 3: Contact optimization. The core of touchpoint optimization is single-variable testing + rapid iteration until the expected conversion goal is achieved. It is recommended to optimize the touchpoints on the user's main access path first, and optimize only one touchpoint at a time. Use AB testing to compare the conversion rates of the experimental group and the control group to determine whether the optimization is effective. It is important to remember that what we ultimately need to improve is the total conversion rate of users throughout the entire experience path, so while paying attention to the conversion rate of each step, we also need to pay attention to the total conversion rate.
Regarding touchpoint management, the last thing I want to emphasize is not to give up any opportunity to influence the user's mind. Users’ favorable impression of products and brands is built through one touchpoint after another. Users should always be reminded of the product’s selling points, professionalism, richness, etc.
An Easter egg that I don’t want to hide
After sorting out the user experience paths and touchpoints, we can use the listed main user behaviors to do another fun thing: find the magic number for product retention.
( ▲Definition of magic number: After a user completes a certain behavior, uses a certain function, or performs certain behaviors a certain number of times, the value of the product has a qualitative leap in the eyes of the user, making the user more willing to stay and use the product. This is generally reflected in the retention or conversion of the user group that has reached the magic number being significantly better than the user group that has not reached it.)
The magic number is a concept that has become very popular in user growth theory in recent years, referring to the quantitative results of empirical summaries. Everyone hopes to find that magic number so that they can see their retention rate increase without any effort, but they are all confused about how to find this number. Let me talk about my exploration of the magic number.
First of all, we need to understand that the deeper meaning of the magic number is that users do this because they have a deeper understanding of the value of the product, so they stay. So the first step to finding the magic number is insight into user behaviors and product features that influence retention.
After you have sorted out the user experience path, you can split the users into groups, for example, group X is those who have only completed step 1, group Y is those who have completed step 1+2, group Z is those who have completed step 1+3, etc.
If your product has many features, you need to add your insights into the value that different product features bring to users, and list the top x features that may promote user retention.
After presetting the factors that affect retention, you need to compare the subsequent retention of these user groups with different behaviors, find the behaviors and functions that are positively correlated with retention, and pay attention to the relationship between indicators such as the number of behavior occurrences/number of product uses/duration of use and retention, and find the key threshold that affects retention in that key behavior. This is the magic number.
▲Find the characteristic behaviors of segmented users Once you’ve determined your magic number, you can reflect on why it impacts retention. Let’s take a classic example of a magic number - Facebook found that users who added 7 friends within 10 days had a higher retention rate. As a social platform, the relationship chain that has been established is the important reason for users to stay, and 7 friends are the minimum value that users cannot give up on this platform. In the process of connecting with 7 friends, users discovered that Facebook can indeed connect them with more friends. Next, you can design a good mechanism to drive users to reach this magic number by guiding and operating activities in the product. For example, you can set key behaviors so that users can get some incentives when they complete the task. But remember to find a balance and never give incentives just to reach a numerical value. The key is to let users experience the value of the product.
04 User Retention Tips Part 2
After we have checked and filled the gaps in the existing user retention system, we will need to spend 40% of our energy on user segmentation to further refine operations , and 20% of our energy on expanding the boundaries of operational strategies . If you want to know more:
How to scientifically stratify users and target them one by one
How to carry out refined operations based on user segmentation
How to scientifically innovate and establish your own operating methodology
How to actually implement the above retention strategies
…
Author: doriskeke, authorized to publish by Qinggua Media .
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