Imagine being able to acquire users for just a few cents. Sounds like a dream come true to any growth marketer, doesn’t it? Now, imagine the same scenario with the worst retention rate possible, and it quickly sounds like a nightmare.
Whether you’re a construction company, software startup, or Fortune 500 company, retention is a key metric across customers, employees and partners.
Growth marketing isn’t the silver bullet to solving retention, but there are definitely some tactics that can be implemented to help improve it.
Let’s dive in.
Growth and product
Within a company the growth and product teams should fit like a glove. While at Postmates, I saw first-hand how a well-oiled machine could work together to tackle customer conversion and retention. We used to hold weekly meetings between teams to address conversion rate trends and customer stickiness between growth media.
I believe the three key foci for growth and product should be:
- Enhancing measurement capabilities
- Channel-specific landing pages and/or flows
- Testing new products and initiatives
A consistent issue and theme that I’ve seen cause countless headaches across startups is the lack of measurement capability. Measuring conversion volume accurately is paramount for all companies. Otherwise, efforts become inefficient.
It would also be naive to think that measurement is a set-it-and-forget type of task. Measurement should be approached as a constant work-in-progress, as channels and the privacy landscape are constantly evolving.
It’s imperative to constantly analyze the sources driving growth at a detailed and bottom-of-funnel level.
Working in step with the product team on specific growth campaigns will help you personalize initiatives, measure them accurately, and increases the chances of success. Imagine having a specific funnel for visitors who are net-new versus re-targeted. Or, how about having different landing pages just for influencers? These are just some of the examples of the tests that the growth and product teams should be performing.
Whenever a new product, feature or promotion is launched by the product team, the growth team should be the first ones to get their hands on it. All campaigns from the lifecycle and the paid acquisition teams will be the first touchpoint for customers, so ensuring there’s understanding between these two teams is crucial.
If the growth and product teams work in lockstep and prioritize the key foci mentioned above, you’ll see huge leaps in retention.
Channel effectiveness
When I was working on fleet (or driver) acquisition at Postmates, we went from budgeting using simple methodology to measuring channel effectiveness on an LTV and retention basis. How long did our drivers stay on the platform, if they were acquired from Google as opposed to Facebook?
