Result: Increase retention by 3x
Calm found that people who set a reminder from the new prompt had an equal boost in retention to the users who had previously found the reminder feature on their own, indicating that the relationship between daily reminders was causative, not just correlative.
In addition, 40% of users who saw the prompt went on to set a daily reminder, so the new prompt provides a big boost to overall new user retention. Based on these results, Calm plans to roll out the new reminder prompt to all users in the next app update.
Prior to Amplitude, Calm was using Mixpanel for analytics. According to Tyler Sheaffer, Calm’s lead iOS Engineer, “We were just not tracking stuff because it would be too expensive. And that’s a bad way to think about what to track.”
Calm was initially drawn to Amplitude based on their scalability and advanced behavioral features – said Alex Tew, CEO of Calm, “There’s really no incentive not to track as many things as possible.” Alex quickly saw that there was much more to be gained from switching to Amplitude, saying, “It’s actually a much better product than Mixpanel.”
“I also think there’s something more that you get,” said Alex. “With the continual improvement of the platform, support from our Success Manager, and even the pricing structure – you feel like Amplitude is on your side. They want you to have success and get results, as opposed to just, ‘Hey, here’s your analytics platform.'”
Udit Sajjanhar: Did this have an effect on Daily Retention, Weekly Retention or Monthly Retention. In My experience I have seen such things to boost retention temporarily for short period and then it falls back. Did Calm see a permanent increase in retention?
Alicia Shiu: Calm was focusing specifically on Daily Retention when they ran the experiment, but it’s had a positive impact on weekly & monthly retention as well. They’re still seeing this significant increase in retention 12+ weeks out, which is really great. It does seem to have a more long-term, potentially even permanent, effect.