With increasing user acquisition costs and rising churn rates, Brian Balfour’s famous words “retention is king” are now more relevant than ever. The right game plan for growth tackles retention from all different angles. On that note, last week, we teamed up with Appcues and Customer.io to show you a 360° view of user retention, during a webinar about analytics, product, and email strategies that’ll keep your users coming back. But first, we wanted to find out a bit more about how our webinar attendees were thinking about user retention already. We polled over 150 attendees live during the webinar and asked them three key questions:
- What analytics tools are you using?
- What methods are you using to drive retention?
- What is your biggest retention challenge?
Here’s what we found.
** Most people are using Google Analytics**
We asked people to choose out of three of the most popular choices for third-party analytics solutions: Google Analytics, Amplitude, and Mixpanel. At 34%, Google Analytics was the favorite, though not by an overwhelming majority. Between Amplitude and Mixpanel, more attendees were using Amplitude. These findings were on par with the trends described in the State of Analytics 2016 report: Google Analytics is still the most commonly used tool of choice, while Amplitude is gaining momentum against Mixpanel.
Email marketing is still the most popular retention strategy
One key way to make sure users don’t slip through the cracks is through communication: make sure new users don’t get lost by designing informative onboarding flows, re-engage periodically with these users to encourage habit-forming, and provide external triggers like emails to resurrect users who have churned. 69% of our webinar attendees use email marketing as their main retention strategy. [Tweet “Key way to make sure users don’t slip through the cracks: communication”]
The biggest retention challenge: understanding user behavior
Growth-oriented companies know the importance of holding on to existing users just as well as they know the cost of acquiring them. So what is their biggest hurdle when it comes to diagnosing and improving user retention? 80% said understanding user behavior was their biggest retention challenge. The State of Analytics 2016 Report_ _included a complementary finding: 73% of survey respondents said the number one thing they wanted to understand with analytics was how to increase retention and engagement. [Tweet “The biggest #retention challenge: understanding user behavior”] One thing is clear: People want a painless way to explore which user behaviors drive retention. For more information on strategies for increasing user retention, be sure to watch the 360° View of User Retention Webinar. To learn more about different analytics solutions for understanding user behaviors around retention, the State of Analytics 2016 Report is a great place to start.
