5 methods to teach you how to effectively improve retention rate, TikTok and PUBG are using them!

This article will discuss in detail how to systematically retain users .

Why is retention important?

The cost of acquiring a new user is 7 times higher than the cost of maintaining an old user. When the user retention rate increases by 5%, the company's profit will increase by 25%-95%!

For example, many companies now run GuangDianTong ads on WeChat . If a promotion brings in 100 users, the cost per user is 20 yuan. According to company data, one user can bring in 80 yuan in revenue, and the current retention rate is 20%. So your net profit this time is: 80 100 20%-100 20=-400. If you increase the retention rate by 30%, that is, the retention rate reaches 26%, then the profit will be 80 100 26%-100 20=80, turning losses into profits.

Whether it is a new user who comes in through fission or advertising, there are two outcomes for you: leave or become a loyal user. There is a core key action that affects whether users can reuse the product. That is, when a user uses your product for the first time, can you let this new user experience whether your product is helpful to him and whether he enjoys using it? Only then can he use your product again and become your loyal user.

Here are five ways to improve retention :

• Finding the product’s “Ahaha moment”
• Design hook model
• Draw user path maps and create conversion funnel reports
• Optimizing new user experience
• Three stages of user retention

01 Find the product “aha moment”

A company in the United States conducted a survey on their users to find out why they left.

30% of people did not feel the value of the product

30% of people don’t know how to operate

10% of people have experienced failure when using it

The other 30% of people have poor compatibility or choose other alternative products.

From this we can see how important it is to make users feel when they see your product for the first time. Too many companies exaggerate their products when promoting them, attracting a large number of users to use the products, but in the process of actual use, they find that the products are not as good as they say. This is because the product's value and expectations are not managed well. For example, the product launch events of Smartisan Technology are packed with people, but the products have been criticized all the time.

In Sean's " Growth Hacker : Low-Cost User Acquisition", there is a concept called "Aha Moment", which means the moment when users experience the pleasure of a product when using it. This may not only refer to a certain moment, but may also mean using a certain function, experiencing certain actions, and truly experiencing the value of the product.

Let new users experience the "Aha Moment", which will be a very valuable user behavior . It will determine whether the user will continue to use your product and play a decisive role in user retention. For example, there are many articles analyzing foreign products and how to use growth hacking methods to achieve explosive growth of products. It is analyzed that Dropbox users return to use it the day after registration; new Facebook users follow 10 friends within 7 days. Completing this action will greatly improve user retention rate. Find this "Aha Moment" and then use product optimization strategies to encourage users to complete these core actions, allowing the product to achieve explosive growth.

How to find the “AhaMoment”? This is a more complicated problem. You can try to explore it from these three dimensions:

1. What is the core function of your product?

Because usually the core function of your product is the key operation that the product wants users to use. For example, the beauty camera allows users to beautify photos; the audiobook software hopes that users can listen to their favorite books on it. Based on your own business and understanding the core value to users and the company, determine what the core functions of your product are.

2. What user behaviors prompt them to use your product repeatedly?

Sometimes what you think is the core function may not be the key to keep users. At this time, you need to communicate in depth with the users who have stayed to find out why they stayed and repeatedly used your product, and then amplify this reason to attract more people to stay.

3. Use experiments and data to verify your hypothesis.

After in-depth communication with users in the second point, the reasons you understand may not necessarily be the real reasons. At this time, you need to use data to verify whether your guess is correct after multiple experiments.

I believe everyone has used Tik Tok , which is probably one of the most popular apps this year. After entering the app, you can experience the "Aha Moment" of this product within a few seconds: good-looking boys and girls; various twisted plot stories; countless little life knowledge; nice songs, etc. The various short videos are very attractive, and you can't help but watch the second one after watching one . Many people watch for an hour or two and can't stop at all.

02 Design hook model

Regarding retention, in the book "Addicted: Four Product Logics to Make Users Develop Usage Habits", the author shared a hook model

The first step is to trigger

Let new users know that the product has such and such features that can help you solve certain problems and attract users to learn more details

Step 2: Action

After users learn about product or service information, they become interested in your information and complete certain specified actions.

Step 3: Diversity Feedback

Provide diverse feedback after completing certain specified actions to encourage users to continue using the product.

Step 4: Invest

Only after users have successfully completed the first three steps will they be likely to continue to invest in your products or services.

For example, I’ve been obsessed with the game “PUBG Mobile” lately. I was so addicted to it that I almost had a fight with my girlfriend. Try using the hook model to explore how it got me addicted step by step.

At first, in a WeChat group of friends, some friends were shouting "Let's form a team" and "Let's eat chicken tonight" all day long, and they also discussed the battle situation from time to time. This prompted me to download the game , register an account, and then secretly play a few rounds. I actually won every time and was very happy. I even boasted about winning in the group chat. From downloading, registering, to starting to play, it guided me very smoothly to the next step until I actually started playing. Then, because the first few games were all filled with robots, they basically just stood there and let me hit them, which allowed me to successfully "win the chicken", and they gave me feedback, which made me show off and excited. Then I invested more and more time into playing the game and eventually became addicted!

Through these four steps: trigger, action, reward, and contribution, let users discover the true value of your product, help users complete the "first experience" and "repeated use" to reach an addictive state, and let users truly retain.

03 Draw a user path map and create a conversion funnel report

After designing the hook model, draw each path diagram in the model and create the entire conversion funnel. In the book "Lean Data Analysis ", there is a chapter where the author draws a user path map for each business model . The author then simply compiles statistics for each link in the path map, records the conversion rate of each link, and finds the part with the lowest conversion rate in the current link and focuses on optimizing it.

As shown in the user path diagram of an e-commerce app above, after counting the trigger volume of each page and calculating the conversion rate of each link, it can be clearly seen that this APP promotional page needs to be optimized, with a focus on improving the conversion rate of downloads.

Image source: growingio

In the case of a shortage of company development resources, it is recommended to use the funnel function of other third-party tools on the market, configure the link of each page, and then create a funnel event to count the data of each page and see the conversion size of the data.

An excellent operator needs to learn to constantly use tools to improve his or her operational efficiency.

04 Optimize new user experience

Many people say that the first impression is very important when looking for a partner; some people also say that when looking for a job, the interviewer’s first impression of you is also very important; the first impression of your products and services is equally important, which will affect whether he/she will use your products.

In the early stages of the product, it is necessary to operate the "new user experience" as an independent activity and plan a unique encounter experience for the "new user experience" . Brian Eisenberg, the godfather of conversion rate, has a conversion trinity concept, which states that the first landing page of a new user experience must allow users to complete three tasks:

1. Communicate product/service relevance

2. Demonstrate product value

3. Provide a clear call to action

To put it simply, when I see you for the first time, I have to let you know who I am, what my value is to you, and what you need to do after our first meeting.

You can take a look at the homepages of various official websites. Almost all of them follow this principle. If not, it means that this is not an excellent homepage.

For example, the homepage of the three courses above. Maybe I just saw the articles of the three courses on WeChat Moments and only knew that they had courses for product managers and operations. So I was curious and wanted to learn more about them, so I searched their official website on Baidu . As soon as I entered the official website, the most obvious thing was that they were giving away product growth manuals, and I could get one by signing up for a course now.

In addition, there are various courses below that are extremely popular. Some courses only have a few spots left, and other courses are about to increase in price. You can’t stop reading! I guess the three lessons buried the "aha moment" in the free courses below, because as a new user, when I experienced the high-quality free courses here for the first time, I couldn't help but exclaim "Wow", the free courses are so well done!

If you continue to explore their official website, you can see all kinds of small details that make you want to place an order, such as telling you the course process, professional teaching assistants, and a portfolio that you can bring to the interview after the course, etc.

It’s not just the homepages of various official websites, but almost any product and even the official account ’s automatic reply for the first follow-up.

For example, on my own public account, I start by expressing my gratitude, then introducing myself, telling the audience what content will be shared on this account, and finally guiding them to click to receive the growth hacker e-book.

For example, I was previously responsible for the operation of the official account and micro mall of a snack e-commerce company. The core was to get users to follow the official account and place an order once. After many experiments, we found that as long as new users receive the promotional coupons pushed when they first follow the official account and the new user coupons with no threshold, they will use the new user coupons with no threshold to place orders. So we immediately increased the coupon amount for new followers (using more high-threshold coupon combinations). After two weeks of continuous testing, the order rate of new followers increased significantly. At the same time, we continuously optimized the activity message copy pushed when new followers came in, which tripled the sales of the entire mall within 2 months.

05 Three stages of user retention

In the previous article "How to do refined user retention work after fission", we shared how to use tags to segment users, achieve refined operations, and improve user retention rate. The specific method of user segmentation has been discussed in previous articles. Here is another addition: user retention will be divided into three stages:

• Early stage of retention: Find the "Aha Moment" to better activate users
• Mid-term retention: Let users use your product or service repeatedly and develop a habit
• Late retention: Expand or improve product features or services to create greater value

Let’s take the example of new media . The official account of Li Jing ( Li Jiaoshou ), former vice president of Baidu, began to explode in the circle of friends through several articles that constantly refreshed marketing cognition. The content of his articles could make people have the "Aha Moment" feeling, attracting a large number of fans. Then, on his official account, every Thursday, he would preview the content to be shared on the following Tuesday, so that all those interested in marketing would look forward to new content. Finally, a single article could no longer satisfy marketers . They hoped to learn marketing from Li Jiaoshou in a systematic way, so he started courses in Sanjieke, Chaos Business School and other places to create greater value, enabling Li Jiaoshou to gain a large number of fans in a short period of time.

This is the public account I previously operated. Every time I posted something on WeChat Moments, there would be hundreds of comments and likes.

When operating your personal WeChat account, you may often encounter the situation that your Moments are blocked because you posted too many advertising messages. Try this little trick to make users reluctant to block you.

First, build yourself into a corporate employee role related to the company's business, and then shape yourself into an image that fans like: good-looking, fun-loving, and gift-giving. If you disagree with something, you can like the post on your Moments and win a gift.

In the early stage, an activity bait is used to let users log in to their personal WeChat account, and then the friends circle is told to share their respective benefits from time to time. Just move your fingers and click "like" to have a chance to get it, and guide them to participate in the first "like" activity. At this time, you will usually see various interesting content and activities in your circle of friends. (Some advertising information will be deleted in time, only a small part will be retained)

In the medium term, I will carry out some special activities, publicize the content of the activities at regular times and locations (for example, store promotions will tell you how to buy at the best price, which products are the most delicious, etc.) and give out some benefits to remind users to keep an eye on my circle of friends at any time.

Later, fans are invited to develop products together; provide optimization suggestions for free tasting of new products; design packaging together, etc., so that users can participate together. Greatly improve the stickiness of the entire account.

Summarize

User retention is a relatively broad concept. Different products and industries have different definitions and logical indicators for retention. Specifically, you need to conduct a multi-dimensional analysis based on your company's current status, business situation, and team situation. While paying attention to yourself, it is recommended that you pay more attention to other products inside and outside the industry, and often think about what their retention indicators are?

When the retention rate is improved, we can generate as much monetization and recommendation as possible, which is the real user growth !

This article discusses how to activate new users and encourage repeated use from 5 aspects. User activation and retention is a very big topic. I hope that everyone will study and think more about how to improve the retention rate during the operation process, rather than just considering how to do fission and pursue "vanity indicators" and wild growth.

The purpose of business is to create and retain customers.

—Peter Drucker