A lightly edited extract from an article by Geoffrey Keating (dated April 19th 2020).
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These are uncertain times for any business.
Maybe you’ve seen your top of the funnel demand decreasing. Or your sales cycles are getting longer. While each company feels the impact differently, one thing is certain – businesses are being forced to adapt to change at a pace we haven’t seen before.
One strategy we’ve found particularly useful in trying times is doubling down on customer retention.
This isn’t a new insight. In the last five years alone, the cost of customer acquisition has increased by over 50%. Businesses have gradually started to switch their focus from “How do we acquire more customers?” to “How do we retain the ones we already have?”
Getting a handle on Customer Retention:
When getting started with retention, the obvious first step might be to look at exit surveys or recently churned customers. It might sound counter-intuitive, but this is actually the wrong place to start.
Instead, look at your best customers.
Why did these customers stay with your product? What actions did they take in your product? Why did they expand their usage of your product? If you can figure out what and why, you can start to reverse-engineer that path for other users.
You’ll often hear these referred to as “activation metrics” or “aha moments”, the high value engagement actions and events. An analysis of these events will help you understand the behaviors that, when performed, best correlate with users continuing to use your product for an extended period of time.
The canonical example is best illustrated by Chamath Palihapitiya and the early Facebook growth team. They understood what actions separate their best customers from those they lost – namely those that added 7 friends in 10 days.
And once you understand these behaviors, you can optimize your product or communication to help even more users take these actions, see value from your product and ultimately become a long-term, happy customer.
Now that you’ve got a handle on some of the data behind your retention, it’s time to come up with creative ideas for predicting churn and improving retention.
One good example: For early stage retention, encourage new signups to take high-value product actions without delay.
Most products see a precipitous drop in engagement in the first few days. Those that don’t – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest – do so by making sure users complete valuable product actions early on…
The other retention strategies, elaborated in the article, include looking for warning signals in terms of ongoing engagement intensity rather than mere clicking activity, communicating ROI whenever possible, avoiding single point failure by going beyond the champion in the company, optimizing the cancellation flow (seen to reduce the churn!)…
Of course the traditional wisdom of gleaning feedback from customers who left cannot be ignored. Churn is a natural byproduct of any business. Customers come and go, as does the demand for your product. Though it may be painful, make sure you have a well-considered exit ramp. Acknowledge the reasons they’re churning, address them, and make sure they leave endeared towards your company. You can use this data to either a) reclaim churned users or b) identify cohorts who are especially prone to churn, so you can get ahead of it. Best case scenario, you’ll open the lines of communication for a winback in the months ahead. But even if that’s off the table, you’ll get valuable insights you can use to help improve your product.
A quick win is tackling involuntary churn. Accidental cancellations or missed payments could account for a significant percentage of churn. The answer here is pretty simple: track the data and then create an automated email to remind users whose payments are overdue, or whose credit card is expiring…
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The article and more may be read here.
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Very good, Raghu. Best reference is always your existing customers,while you try to get back your earlier customers.
You’re right, KPR. Traditionally we have used success stories and references for making a new sale. Here the author goes further in proposing it even for retention purposes, a worth-while goal to pursue. Thanks.
Very true – retention is the best way at any time.To know why they stayed with us and try replicate this elsewhere will be very helpful.
Yes, and importantly ensure they themselves continue to perform those high-valued functions and derive value. Thanks.