The users of your product, platform, or app will always be your best brand advocates. Therefore, increasing user retention is an important part of a holistic community-based marketing strategy. Whether you’re driving more sales, building a more human brand, or anything in between.
How can you harness the power of community to increase user engagement? In this article, we’ll show you how!
What Is User Retention?
User retention is the percentage of users who continue to use a product or service after their initial experience. This is an important metric to measure how well your product is performing. Likewise, higher user retention usually means a better user experience.
With increasingly globalized and competitive markets, it’s important for companies to know how to increase customer retention rates to stay competitive. And thus improve their bottom line.
Why Is User Retention Important?
The first step to improving user engagement is to understand why it matters. The short answer: user retention is a leading indicator of financial growth and a validation of your product’s marketability.
If you can retain more users over time, you can increase the lifetime value of each user. Therefore, this lowers the cost per acquisition (CPA) required to acquire new users. This means you can spend less money on marketing and acquire more customers with less effort. This makes founders and investors happy!
How Do You Increase User Retention?
- Have a clear value proposition
- Build a great first impression
- Provide an incentive for users to come back (e.g., rewards, discounts)
- Offer free trials
- Make sure it’s easy for users to find support
#1: Have a Clear Value Proposition
The first step towards increasing user retention is having a clear value proposition for your product. If people don’t know why they should use your product or service, then they won’t come back.
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So make sure that you clearly communicate what makes it unique and valuable to potential users by highlighting its benefits and features prominently
#2: Build a Great First Impression
If you want new users to stay with you and increase user retention, you need to make sure they have a great experience from the start. That means your onboarding process needs to be geared toward getting them started quickly and with minimal friction.
It can also mean giving them clear instructions so they know exactly what to do next after they sign in or install your app for the first time. If there are certain features or tools that new users need to familiarize themselves with before they can get started, you should show them those options as soon as possible. So they are not confused when they go looking for them on their own later.
#3: Provide an Incentive for Users to Come Back
To improve user retention and engagement, you could offer valuable deals to your users, including coupons, discounts, and exclusive offers. These allow you to incentivize people by offering something valuable to them, that’s more expensive or unavailable for non-users.
#4: Offer Free Trials
Offering a free trial is an easy way to get people interested in your product. By allowing them to use your product before they pay for it, you give them the opportunity to experience everything it has to offer. This way, they can find out if it’s worth spending their money on. If they do not like what they see, they can simply cancel their subscription without spending any money.
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#5: Make Sure It’s Easy for Users to Find Support
If your users ever have any questions about using your product, the last thing you want is for them to have trouble finding support information online. That’s why it’s so important that there are clear instructions on how to contact customer service included in every part of your website. From the welcome email after someone makes a purchase to the Contact Us page in your footer.
Leveraging the Power of Community
Community-based marketing is about building a two-way conversation between your brand and your audience. When you build a community around your product or brand, you want to engage your audience in an unobtrusive and transparent way.
These days, users can access almost unlimited information to make their buying decisions. They can also provide reviews and feedback on products and services. In addition, they can explore the social media profiles of brands they’re considering before making a decision.
Copy.ai is an AI-powered copywriting tool that helps writers save time and improve the quality of their writing. As the app is constantly updating and adding new features, the users can stay connected in a community to stay up to date.
Because of all these factors, traditional marketing is losing its original power. And companies are being forced to shift their strategies to a community-based model. This model allows users to provide feedback and have a say in the development of products and services.
While traditional advertising focuses solely on attracting new paying customers, community marketing is different. Instead, community marketing is about building meaningful long-term relationships and connecting with people to develop and grow the brand together.
KPIs: How Is User Retention Measured?
Retention is the percentage of users who use your product and return within a certain period of time.
💡 But why is measuring retention so important? If your users download your app or use your platform and then stay there, that’s a good sign. High retention means users see value in your product.
While you can calculate user retention manually, that can quickly become too tedious because you need to constantly monitor your metrics.
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Of course, there are many analytics tools that measure retention for you, which makes this process much easier. With these tools (e.g. Google Analytics), you can measure user retention and other useful metrics automatically.
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Some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you can use to calculate user retention are the number of users who return after the first visit, the percentage of returning visitors in total visits (which include active and passive visitors), users who log in within a given time period, and those who have been inactive for a certain amount of time (e.g., 30 days).
You can also measure this by cohort –users who have been active within a certain timeframe relative to each other–. As well as by geography or platform (Android vs. iOS).
Choose the tool and metrics that make the most sense for your app or platform if you have not already. And stick with it. Measure, analyze, improve, and iterate. Keep reading 👉 6 Strategies to Improve Member Retention & Engagement
