3 Key Tips to Retain your New Users
In my previous post I discussed the important and often overlooked role that retention plays in building a long-term sustainable business. Continuing on that topic, in this post I’ll be sharing how important a product’s new user experience is in driving user retention, and three key tips I’ve successfully applied at Pinterest and a handful of startups I’ve advised.
Focus on your New Users
One of my favorite mantras for building retentive products is to deliver core product value to your users as quickly as possible. This may seem intuitive but what might surprise you is how short and important that window really is. Microsoft conducted a study in 2015 that found that people’s average attention span was only 8 seconds and that people were less tolerant of being dissatisfied with products. This means that a poor initial product experience could quickly drive your users away, never to return. I’ve also seen this behavior validated by data, where it’s common for a significant percentage of new users to churn after their first week or even after their first day. You can measure this by plotting a new user retention cohort graph like the one below.
If you find that your new users retain anything like the graph above, focusing on getting your new users to core product value as quickly as possible will be your best bet to improve long-term user retention.
Here are three practical tips to help you with that.
Capture and Deliver Upon User Intent
Every user who downloads your app, lands on your website, or signs up for your product has intent. Maybe a friend referred them or maybe they came through a specific google search. That being the case, I commonly see products deliver cookie-cutter new user experiences which in many cases lead to jarring and disjoint experiences. For example, here’s the new user landing page on LinkedIn after I click through on a colleague’s profile from Google.
As a new user, I’d expect to learn more about my colleague rather than being asked to join a service with no additional context. In this case they’ve failed to capture and leverage my intent.
Figuring out your new users’ intent isn’t always easy, but if you can, tailoring your new user experience accordingly is a highly effective way to deliver core product value immediately. Here are some ways you can do that:
- Track explicit intent. For all inbound channels that you control such as referrals and paid marketing, track any contextual metadata for every user and leverage it in their initial experience. If a user was referred through an invite, track the inviter’s information and contextualize your onboarding experience. If they came through a paid campaign, leverage the details of the campaign and targeting criteria. Here’s how Airbnb’s signup experience looks like when you arrive through an invitation.
They’ve done a great job identifying that you’ve come through a friend’s referral and they provide a streamlined registration experience that communicates a clear incentive to book your first trip. Similarly at Pinterest, we built custom landing experiences and onboarding flows wherever we had any contextual details about a new user. We would also use that context to better communicate our core value and personalize the new user experience on day one.
2. Derive intent. If you can’t explicitly track your new user’s intent, attempt to derive it based on where they first land or what actions they perform before signing up. Take search traffic as an example. Although search engines no longer provide referrer information, the landing page can still say a lot. You can use the type of landing page to make an educated guess as to why they signed up, then use that context through your onboarding experience. For example, if you sign up for Pinterest after landing on a recipe page, they contextualize your onboarding experience by surfacing relevant recipes and recommendations immediately upon install.
3. Ask. Finally, when you have no way to derive user intent, don’t be afraid to ask your users. People worry that too many steps during their onboarding experience will lead to a drop-off in completions and degrade retention. Instead, I’ve found that if you ask the right questions and leverage it to build a personalized new user experience, it will increase retention and even completion rates. It’s also important to be transparent about why you’re asking these questions since most users aren’t willing to share personal details if it’s not clear how it’d be beneficial to them.
A former colleague of mine, Sophia Feng, from the Pinterest growth engineering team wrote an in depth post explaining the importance of explicitly asking the right questions to improve new user retention, I recommend checking it out!
Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
Once you’ve been able to capture and leverage your new user’s intent, next you’ll want your new users to realize core value, as simply as possible. New users are fickle with short attention spans, so expect to only have a few moments to convey why your product is worth their time or you risk losing them.
Products struggle with this because they usually have more than one value proposition and they present all of them to their new users. I’m sure every feature has a purpose in the product, but to new users it can be overwhelming. For example, here’s what a new user’s homefeed used to look like on Pinterest:
Although subtle, there are actually a number of features vying for your attention. You could search, find related Pins, and view more details about each Pin. All valuable features to existing users, but distracting to new users.
To address this, figure out the one core value proposition that you want your new users to experience and then simplify your product around it. At Pinterest we literally tested the impact that each feature had on our new users and through a process of elimination we landed on a greatly simplified experience that prioritized visual discovery above all else.
Lastly, don’t be afraid to build a custom experience for your new users, even though it fragments your core product. Fragmentation does make the product harder to maintain but in reality your user base isn’t homogenous so why deliver a product experience that is? New users really are very different than your existing users, so don’t be afraid to give them a tailored and simplified experience. Your new users will thank you, once they actually retain.
Create a Habit
Finally, once you’ve been able get your new users to realize core value through a streamlined and hopefully simplified new user experience, immediately look to form habits within your product. More specifically, try to get your users to invest in small ways early on so that you can re-engage them later on. It could be in the form of collecting user preference details, getting users to save content, or even something simple like turning on notifications.
Facebook famously focused on getting all new users to connect with 7 friends in 10 days. Not only was this important in showcasing their core product value as a social network, it also doubled as a habit forming tool. It enabled Facebook to recommend more friends and send you emails and notifications showing updates from them, which ultimately brought you back. This habit became even harder to kick as you connected with more friends — creating a habit-forming feedback loop.
For Pinterest, saving relevant Pins is important in creating a habit since it means that you’d need to come back to recall what you saved. More importantly, it allows Pinterest to send personalized recommendations in emails and notifications which brings you back, and ultimately feeds into improving future recommendations — again, creating a habit-forming loop.
If you’d like to learn more about creating habits in your product, Nir Eyal has written and talked at great length on how to build habit-forming products, which I recommend checking out.
Final Thoughts
Healthy long-term user retention starts with your new users which means ensuring that your product delivers value as quickly as possible. To do that:
- Capture and deliver upon user intent. Track and leverage every possible explicit signal or flat out ask your users so that you can deliver a tailored new user experience.
- Make your product experience as simple as possible. Your new users are fickle, so don’t be afraid to create a specially tailored new user experience to help them realize core value.
- Work to create habits early on by having your users invest in small ways into your product so that you can leverage that to further retain them.
Let me know how these tips work out for you by commenting below or connecting with me personally!
Follow me if you liked what you read and would like to learn more about user growth. In the next post I’ll be diving into How to Build a Growth Engine. Stay tuned!
Special thanks to Mo Shahangian, Omar Seyal and Scott Tong for reading early versions of this post.
