Increasing product retention

Below is Lenny Rachitsky's framework for increasing a product's retention.

How to measure retention

Measure 1: Percentage of active users that are no-longer active a month later?

Measure 2: Cohort retention: What percentage of new users are still active X months/weeks/days later?

• i.e. how many of your users stick around long-term.

Seven strategies to increase retention

1. Improve your product — deliver more value for users
   • Solve problems 10x better, make what users are trying to do 10x easier
   • Solve more problems
   • Make product cheaper
   • Faster, more reliable
2. Improve your onboarding — connect more users to existing value
   • "The real levers to improve retention dramatically are in the experience for new users" --Andrew Chen
   • manually onboard new users
   • Build onboarding around the features that loyal users frequently use
   • Provide useful defaults to pull your users through the first mile and make them stick with the product
   • Simple shimmer effects can make people click on buttons
3. Make it stickier — make the value hard to give up
   • build habits
   • create a loyalty program
   • sign annual plans
   • integrate more deeply into users' lives
4. Catch users before they leave — give them an excuse to stay

   - let users pause their subscription
   - give user 2 weeks off or something
   - ask why they're leaving offer a solution 
   - remind users of the value they'll use
   - try to predict churn
   

   
5. Remind users of your value — deliver value more often
   • 1:1 outreach to every customer, every month
6. Bring back users after they’ve gone — remind them what they’re missing
7. Change your users — target a more suitable audience
   • be crisp with who your product is for and stop marketing to everyone else

See "How to increase your product's retention" by Lenny Rachitsky for the complete post, all credit for this content goes to author of that post.