3 tips for user retention!

When we were doing research on user retention, we often found that customers who had paid for two years suddenly did not renew their subscription. The cute little guy who often discussed business functions with us has also disappeared. At this time, we will mostly send some promotional activities to customers or call users to inquire about the reasons.

Unfortunately, these strategies often fail. Why is that? Is there a better solution?

User perspective:

In fact, whether it is a company or an individual, you will receive various messages almost every day.

• Big sale with 10% off
• Congratulations on your company getting the beta version of the system. Click the link now to get a 50 coupon.
• Design membership recharge for one month and get three months free
• Full 5000-200

The overwhelming news seems to show that the event is going well, but in fact, users are not interested at all at the moment. On the contrary, it will produce a feeling of disgust.

Imagine that you paid for a project management software a few months ago. Today, when you were having breakfast, you suddenly received an email on your phone saying: You haven’t been back for three months, we miss you very much.

In fact, this kind of news will make people feel uncomfortable because it is late and insincere. Deep down in our hearts we know that the company doesn’t really miss us, that the company doesn’t understand our real needs, and certainly won’t improve its products for our benefit - the company just misses the money in our pockets.

Companies often portray business relationships as beautiful personal relationships to give us an excuse to tell us it's time to pay. Here are three ways I propose to make it feel real and actually work for user retention.

1. Focus on how to help users provide greater value

The core error of the “you haven’t been back for three months, we missed you” approach is that it represents the user’s relationship with the business as personal rather than business, whereas personal relationships are defined by who we are and we expect them to survive all weather conditions, but business is different.

The most important thing about a business relationship is the exchange of benefits between the enterprise and the user, where the enterprise provides products or services and the user pays for them. Good business relationships also bring benefits to personal relationships.

Let’s take the no-code platform we developed as an example: we help companies build their own enterprise systems without code. The groups we serve can be companies, individuals, and of course some studios.

We solve the problem of users who want to build their own systems but are unable to develop or afford the high labor costs. At this time, users can experience our products, build on the system, and then purchase our services.

This also extends to some profit-driven entities during this period. Users who can easily build can buy our products and then help users who cannot use code-free development, and they can also get good profits during this period.

If users stop buying your product, it’s either because they no longer have the same problem they had before, or their needs are not being solved by your product. Therefore, you need to rebuild the foundations of your business relationships.

For every email you send, every person initially learned about your product for some reason. Even if they are “just watching”

Your company's promises are also very attractive in some aspects. In order to effectively re-attract users, the company must first remind users why they left the company. Never make users feel guilty because they purchased a service from your platform. Instead, remind them of the benefits that our company can provide. In order for the company to achieve better user retention, it must first pay attention to user needs.

2. Identify and solve the key issues that lead to customer churn

SAAS products lose an average of 2% to 20 users per month. Each of these users must have a key reason, and solving their needs can increase their own profits. You need to help them resolve the reasons that led them to leave.

Once a user churns, the appropriate tone should be one of contrition rather than empathy.

Many issues can lead to churn: inability to find the right product, difficulty setting up complex business processes, poor user experience, or changing business requirements. Retention campaigns that specifically address the issues that lead to churn and offer simple next steps are likely to succeed because they are the root cause of churn.

For churned users, design an activity specifically to address the reasons for user churn.

The first step is to analyze user behavior to identify common reasons for customer churn. For example, new customers often have trouble completing a specific step in your product and churn as a result. To retain these customers, design a campaign to specifically address the cause of churn.

In this case, we want to provide a simple and specific next step that clearly helps them achieve their goal, or provide FAQs to help resolve common issues.

We realized that many of our new customers were having difficulty trying to add their existing user lists to our product. After running an effective campaign showing new customers how to add users, we identified a product gap and built a bulk user importer.

This importer remains the most impactful onboarding feature we have ever released.

These types of personalized features or campaigns require more work to set up but deliver exceptional results time and time again.

3. Active Monitoring and Management Value

When users cancel their subscription or stop using your product, it’s always an uphill battle to get them back. The ideal churn preservation campaign intervenes before your customers make the decision to churn.

Customers often stop using (or stop repurchasing) your product when they don’t get enough value from your product to justify the price, not because of forgetfulness or disloyalty. To identify customers who may not be getting enough value (and who are candidates for churn), look for customers who aren’t using the features they paid for.

Create a scorecard of different metrics to assess whether a user is valuable or not based on your product.

For example, when a user purchases a service, he or she obtains recognition from leadership and reduces corporate costs. Or in other words, users earn money by helping others build systems.

With B2B products, customers often pay very different prices, so the value they expect to receive from your product is also very different. Therefore, one indicator alone is usually not sufficient.

When we measure a customer’s value profile, we consider three key types of usage:

• How widely our products are used by customers, with an emphasis on the use of key features that differentiate us from other products in the market.
• The depth of customer use of our products depends on how many people actively use them in the company.
• How many of their customers our clients talk to through their products is another key metric we use to measure value.

Our customer value metric measures these numbers against what customers pay to create a proxy for value: how much customers get in return for every dollar they pay us. While we understand that not all customers will use all of the features available to them, we value improvements in any of these three dimensions.

Understanding why each customer buys your product, then measuring whether they are taking actions that enable them to achieve that outcome, allows products to provide specific and personalized interventions. If your product has an account management team, this scorecard can be the basis for a high-impact business review with your customers.

Author: Xiuqin

Source: Xiuqin