Do you have a post or thoughts on continued Value inside Retention? (Or is there a more appropriate term for this which I don't know about?)
In my previous role, customers often had long gaps between logins because they didn't need to continually access the platform. They came in, found what they wanted, then left for a few weeks or months to do their work. I felt that it was important to remind customers when they returned of previously discovered value to support subscription renewals but found it hard to get support for this idea.
I'd have to know a bit more about your specific circumstance, but a few thoughts that may help:
1. Retention is pretty much everything. If you have lousy retention it doesn't matter how strong the top of the funnel is, the "bucket is too leaky" and you can't build a strong business.
Proving you can create value (usually quickly) often correlates to positive retention, so knowing (a) how you create value; and (b) how quickly, are both important for determining if you can turn a sign-up / user into an "active user" into a "retained user".
2. If your product is supposed to be used infrequently (say monthly or even quarterly / yearly) figuring out retention is tough; because the cycle times are long. It's tough to experiment on improving retention when someone only comes back once a month -- you can't find out quickly if changes you're making are having an impact.
3. It seems logical to me, if you have something that's infrequently used, that you do need to (a) keep people aware of your solution (ping them with email / SMS / etc.); and (b) try to provide value in-between normal use (i.e. if people only come back once per month, what can you do in the interim to create value, and therefore increase the odds of retention?)
It sounds like you were trying to remind users when they came back about how valuable the tool was before -- that makes sense to me as well; at least it's a reasonable hypothesis, "If we remind people about the value they got before, it should increase retention, and by extension renewals." Seems like something you could test fairly easily (even A/B test if you have enough users).
Maybe services do this sort of thing via email -- i.e. they send monthly digests ("You completed X tasks last month!" or "You saved $Y last month") as a way of reminding you of past value.
A multi-channel approach using email is what we were doing to inform customers of new content and drive return to platform.
We used a "new content since your last login digest" email to deliver new notifications and it worked quite well at first. Initially it provided a list of new reports ONLY within the customers' active subscription categories; (title + part number) + link directly into report. It was easy to validate since the user access was the link and bypassed the front pages. All the links opened full reports so you could say it was very high "signal" to customers. The digest went out weekly which matched the publication tempo. Very few customers unsubscribed.
This digest value began to suffer when it was decided to market upsell categories by including new content from all subscription categories, which meant customers could not easily tell what was part of their subscription and what was not. It was not easy to tell if a link would open a FULL report that you were entitled to or a partial summary of content intended to drive upsell. It diluted the signal and then we started to see more "unsubscribes" even though the customer could tailor the digest to what channels the wanted.
The digest email needed to be split up into multiple newsletters with opt-in and controls to help the customer get the signals they wanted. And because the return frequency was low, I think the importance of this email was not recognized.
It's a good example of needing to understand and maintain the value to an omni-channel approach to engagement.
Ben,
Do you have a post or thoughts on continued Value inside Retention? (Or is there a more appropriate term for this which I don't know about?)
In my previous role, customers often had long gaps between logins because they didn't need to continually access the platform. They came in, found what they wanted, then left for a few weeks or months to do their work. I felt that it was important to remind customers when they returned of previously discovered value to support subscription renewals but found it hard to get support for this idea.
Mike
Mike - thanks for the comment.
I'd have to know a bit more about your specific circumstance, but a few thoughts that may help:
1. Retention is pretty much everything. If you have lousy retention it doesn't matter how strong the top of the funnel is, the "bucket is too leaky" and you can't build a strong business.
Proving you can create value (usually quickly) often correlates to positive retention, so knowing (a) how you create value; and (b) how quickly, are both important for determining if you can turn a sign-up / user into an "active user" into a "retained user".
2. If your product is supposed to be used infrequently (say monthly or even quarterly / yearly) figuring out retention is tough; because the cycle times are long. It's tough to experiment on improving retention when someone only comes back once a month -- you can't find out quickly if changes you're making are having an impact.
3. It seems logical to me, if you have something that's infrequently used, that you do need to (a) keep people aware of your solution (ping them with email / SMS / etc.); and (b) try to provide value in-between normal use (i.e. if people only come back once per month, what can you do in the interim to create value, and therefore increase the odds of retention?)
It sounds like you were trying to remind users when they came back about how valuable the tool was before -- that makes sense to me as well; at least it's a reasonable hypothesis, "If we remind people about the value they got before, it should increase retention, and by extension renewals." Seems like something you could test fairly easily (even A/B test if you have enough users).
Maybe services do this sort of thing via email -- i.e. they send monthly digests ("You completed X tasks last month!" or "You saved $Y last month") as a way of reminding you of past value.
B,
A multi-channel approach using email is what we were doing to inform customers of new content and drive return to platform.
We used a "new content since your last login digest" email to deliver new notifications and it worked quite well at first. Initially it provided a list of new reports ONLY within the customers' active subscription categories; (title + part number) + link directly into report. It was easy to validate since the user access was the link and bypassed the front pages. All the links opened full reports so you could say it was very high "signal" to customers. The digest went out weekly which matched the publication tempo. Very few customers unsubscribed.
This digest value began to suffer when it was decided to market upsell categories by including new content from all subscription categories, which meant customers could not easily tell what was part of their subscription and what was not. It was not easy to tell if a link would open a FULL report that you were entitled to or a partial summary of content intended to drive upsell. It diluted the signal and then we started to see more "unsubscribes" even though the customer could tailor the digest to what channels the wanted.
The digest email needed to be split up into multiple newsletters with opt-in and controls to help the customer get the signals they wanted. And because the return frequency was low, I think the importance of this email was not recognized.
It's a good example of needing to understand and maintain the value to an omni-channel approach to engagement.
Thanks for your above insights.
M.