Retention on Retainer

It’s not a secret that customer retention is the king of product growth strategy. Improve your retention, and other metrics such as virality, LTV and payback period will follow suit. Despite knowing that, retention is often neglected by businesses that are busy building new features or getting new users.

This service offers you a team of one, me, whose only goal is to improve your user retention metrics. In the period of 3 months, I will analyze every phase of your user retention: signup, activation, engagement, and churn. I will give you a breakdown of your user journey pitfalls so you know exactly where you should focus. I will offer my recommendations and work with your design and development team to test solutions.

• Improve activation
  First, I will examine every step in your current onboarding and highlight any friction that could cause user drop-off. Afterwhich, I will identify three activation moments your customers experienced on their journey. The initial moment that got customers ready to start. The second moment that showed them your product value. And the third moment when using your product turned into a habit. These moments are keys to converting your new users into revenue-generating customers. Finally, I will redesign your onboarding flow to reduce drop-off and guide more users to repeat the activation steps of your successful customers.
• Increase engagement
  I will help you to determine how long your users retain, when they churn, and for what reason. Cohort analysis will also be conducted to show you how your users retain over time and what segments remain active longer. Do you know who your power users are? I will map out the different states of user engagement so you will see the types of users you have and how they use your product. Data tells only half of the story. To better understand your ideal customers, I will conduct 1-on-1 interviews with those customers who use your product.
• Reduce churn
  Noone just churns, first your customers will stop being active. I’ll identify when and why users disengage with your product so you can prevent them from leaving. 

What do you get

You will receive a full audit as follows: a signup and activation funnels review examining the current state of onboarding, a cohort analysis indicating how long users stay active, and a life cycle chart breaking down users by engagement level. Followed, by a set of A/B experiments that will allow us to test my in-depth recommendations before committing to them. I will provide you with wireframes and page-flow diagrams for your design and development team to set the tests up with ease. To help clarify any questions or go through any revisions and iterations, I will be available via video calls. I will also provide an additional month of email support so you and your team can feel confident running the experiments.

Who is this service for

This service is for self-serve SaaS that has at least 1000 new users a month. If you have less than that, I suggest focusing on user acquisition instead. You will also need product analytics and user behaviour tracking already in place. To make the recommended changes you also need dedicated designers and developers.