Techniques to Improve User Retention Rate on Your Website / Applications
We are living in a very fast-paced business and technology society, hence competition for user and customer loyalty has become more intense.
We need to get users to stay on our applications for various reasons. We might need them to perform more actions that would generate revenue for our organization or we would need them to perform actions that would give us some sort of business value.
Having worked in the tech industry for about 4 years now, I have identified some patterns that would make users stay with your application just a little longer. I would be sharing some of these helpful techniques that would enable you to retain users as well as give insights into some well-known brands that I think have incorporated these techniques into their product pretty well.
The aim of this article is to learn some of this technique and use them to improve your business and apps.
1. Give users a sense of completion
There was a time I was using an application, the signup process was so tedious and I closed my browser page in no time. Now that I think of it, I felt quickly discouraged because I got no sense of completion.
I do understand that when using some products, we have to create multiple forms because we need to get important data from the users. Give the users a sense of completion, that would encourage them to go further.
Facebook does this really well. From the screenshot below, the user knows they just need to go through 2 more step process to reach completion, hence they are encouraged instead of putting them in the dark.
Another good example of giving users a sense of completion can be when you show them their level of completion using percentages.
Udemy does this really well, this technique has a way of encouraging someone taking a course with Udemy to keep moving forward.
From the screenshot above, we see how users can gauge their level of completeness and encouraged to move on.
When thinking about giving users a sense of completion, think of it as though you’re playing a video game. You can also encourage them by giving them level badges as they progress.
Code academy does this really well by giving badges to users taking a course. Users are motivated to stay with a course so that they can earn a new badge.
2. Use social proof to influence user decisions
Let us first start by defining social proof.
Social proof, a term coined by Robert Cialdini in his 1984 book, Influence, is also known as informational social influence. It describes a psychological and social phenomenon wherein people copy the actions of others in an attempt to undertake behavior in a given situation. Wikipedia
Robert Cialdini discovered that people tend to take actions when they know other people have taken the same or similar actions. This phenomena is psychological and can be used when developing technology products.
If rightly done, you can increase sales on your application/website.
If you want to get coffee and you walk past two coffee shop, one is filled up and the other has barely 3 people inside. Which one would you choose?
If you’re like most people, you would choose the one with more people as it gives some form of credibility.
Let us assume that we’re building an e-commerce store for clothing and a user is searches for a shoe. It would be wise to display the highest rated shoes and shoes with more positive reviews as the top results of that search.
Amazon does this very well when you search for products on their website. They display sponsored products followed by highly ranked products, this influences people to purchase products that have been approved by other people.
Another way you can use social proof is by suggesting similar products just before checkout.
When you add an item to the cart on Udemy, they would immediately suggest very similar items as Frequently Bought Together.
I have discovered that Udemy would almost always suggest an item with a very great review for users just before they checkout.
Another observation here is that the Add all to cart button is more visible than the Go to Cart button.
If you can get the friends and acquaintances of people to make them perform actions online, you’d see the true power of social proof.
Friends inviting friends to play games on Facebook and other social network helped Zynga grow from 3 million to 41 million average daily users in just one year (2008 -2009).
3. Provide value as quickly as possible
I once worked as a team lead on a product where we were told to reserve all of the features of the application for only authenticated users.
Our retention rate/user interactivity was pretty low, however, we did something that jacked up the numbers.
We soon released some features for non-authenticated users and instructed users to sign-up if they wanted to see more features, this action made us retain more first time users.
I do understand that for some products users need to signup before they can get any value. However, after users have signed up, make sure you offer value as quickly as possible, give them a reason to stay on your application as soon as you can.
4. Put your best figures / best brands forward
When users visit your app or website for the first time, one of the things that can really catch their attention is when they see the logo of a very popular brand.
The logo of a popular brand they’ve seen before would capture their eyes and it gives them some sense of confidence knowing that you are connected to some well-known brand.
If you check the website of Andela, they did this well by letting users see the popular brands they are connected to.
If you also have a large following on any social media platform, you can carefully and neatly slip this into your website. It would further boost the confidence of certain users when they know a lot of people trusts your brand. This technique is just another form of social proof as earlier discussed.
Feel free to brag about the numbers you are proud of asides just putting brands you are connected to. If you have sold to one million happy customers in the last 3 months, you should brag about it.
5. Let users know what the press is saying about you
If popular news brands like the New York Times, Tech Crunch, Forbes and the likes have positive articles about your organization, you should also consider putting this up on your site for some extra form of validation.
C Labs did this on their website. They put the link to articles of popular news blogs about their brand
I know there are other techniques that can be used to retain users in your application, I would love to learn from you, feel free to share any technique that has worked for you in the comment section.
Thanks for reading 😉
