The Retention Specialist, S1Ep2 — The Return of the Demographic
You might want to read the pilot episode later. It’s right here —
The mathematics involved in competing as an online gambling agency was bollocks. Everyone knew you paid for people to register, and that was the first microconversion. A worthless one, but it was the first step. You put the new entries into a drip campaign and attempted them to make their first deposit into their betting accounts. A good basket size would be somewhere around $4,000 to $5,000. After that you tried to keep them in the loop as to the available pots, opportunities for game play, give them updates on odds for the week and hope they spent the money as quickly as they got it.
You only earned a commission off this, so it is primarily a numbers game. And the cost of acquisition was as high as $100 on competitive clientele. The cost of programmatic advertising was only destined to go higher.
Which is why a retention strategy was of the utmost importance. It was way simpler than many of the suggested inbound strategies on HubSpot’s academy, which is why the guys at WeTrix (a remote betting firm operating from Nigeria) happily embraced every single retention hack in the world. The mission objective: “acquire them once, and never let them go.”
Unfortunately, since the beginning of last week, the metrics guy at WeTrix realized that, indeed, people were leaving.
The head of the department was alerted, and he said, quietly, into his phone: “I see it too. It shouldn’t be possible, but I see it too. 24% of our userbase. CHURNED.”
It was unspoken yet unanimous. Someone had to get TRS in the room, and quick.
He was waging a war against two pairs of buttocks in Ikeja, and politely losing.
A greasy buttock came around for the seventeenth time and smeared his lip with what he was certain was herpes. The gyrations were admittedly soothing and hypnotic, and he suspected that his companions had slipped something insipid yet very malicious in his drink. There was a huge spider with massive breasts leering at him from a position where he was sure a chandelier used to be. Also the strippers had turned to giant earthworms wearing hats but still in possession of their buttocks.
‘Hello, Poindexter!”
“How do you do?”
Those were the earthworms saluting each other with cultured hat-tips, but he was still “present” enough to know the conversations were happening entirely in his head. One gyrating hat-head-earthworm-buttock-swinger was discussing the impact of a small startup’s going public two days ago.
Two bespectacled men were beside him, huddled in the dark. They were bravely advertising to all who cared to notice that they were unscrupulous elements, the kind you’d find playing Whot in uncompleted buildings with bandannas tied around their heads and a stick of marijuana wedged between their smoked mouths.
‘I think he is properly soaked,” one of the bespectacled lips said.
“Yeah, he’s high as hell and horny as a kite.”
“I never saw a horny kite before.”
“Roll with it yeah?”
Together they hefted The Retention Specialist and took him outside the club. His head was lolling (not to be confused with ‘laughing out loud’ for, while his head was perfectly capable of raucous mouthbursts, it was presently not engaged in mirth).
“The Mobolaji Files,” one of the lips asked. “Where did you save them?”
The Retention Specialist giggled and said “jugssss….”
Slap.
“Focus.”
“Wheresyamama? wheresyamamayoubadgirllll….?”
“This is hopeless,” the other lip said. He fumbled in his pocket and found a bent cigarette to smoke.
“Should we kill him?”
“Yes.”
“I would plead for a reconsideration,” said The Retention Specialist, suddenly sober and alert.
“Huh.”
‘The Mobolaji files, yes? That is what you want? Know this now: Mobolaji has churned. Permanently.”
“The bosses wouldn’t be pleased to hear that.”
The gun emerged miraculously and pointed at TRS’ temple. He started talking faster.
“On the 15th of this month, Mobolaji will receive an email, the contents of which are confidential and one of the secrets of my craft. Mobolaji will then take a cab to his bank and empty his fixed deposit account. A few hours later, he will sign in to your secure portal and make a lifetime subscription to the tune of N140million. After that, it would no longer matter what becomes of Mobolaji.”
The safety control was disengaged.
“KILL ME NOW,” yelled the Specialist, desperate for longevity, “and you will never have Mobolaji. I guarantee it. I have a private record in your employers’ IM telling him I can fix the Mobolaji case — misplaced files regardless — and I assure you they will be terribly upset if I am found dead.”
Tense silence. A fly whizzed past. The Retention Specialist’s phone started ringing.
The gun was withdrawn begrudgingly.
One of the lips said: “you didn’t feel the effect of the drug at all the entire time?”
“Not one bit. It wouldn’t do to befuddle my greatest asset at any time.”
“What’s that, the asset?”
“My mind.”
“Oh.”
His phone started ringing again.
“Sorry gentlemen, I really do have to take this.” Click. “Absolute Badass of Badagry Here. The Retention Specialist, Enemy of Churn, you understand — I see. Of course, of course. Right…you can, although my comrades might not be too thrilled at the unexpected company-”
Suddenly there was a burst of light and the whir of helicopters.
“WHAT IS GOING ON?” cried one lip.
“I SUGGEST WE RESCHEDULE THIS MEETING,” The Retention Specialist yelled back.
Both lips melted into the darkness as the helicopter retrieved TRS from the club.
‘Hm,’ he said, after looking at the site analytics for WeTrix.
‘Bad, huh?’
‘What? Oh, yeah. It’s probably bad. I dunno. Who’s the boss here?’
A small oily man with a moustache coughed his office. It was CEO, the cough announced.
‘How do you segment your customer base?’
‘Three tiers of gamblers: first, the one-time high stakes people. They pay a lot of money, either win or lose and never return. We have a plan that services them. They are good for business, but we know they will never return so no hard feelings.
‘Two is our core customer base: the regulars. They make moderate bets and always return. Almost clockwork. With a return rate of almost 75% and an LTV of, well, I won’t reveal that, they are literally the backbone of the operation. These are the, er, addicts, you understand.
‘Then we have the one-time low stakes people. I suspect they are all teenagers, but I don’t care anyway.’
‘And the churn was from your core base?’
‘Yeah. And we are entering another funding round and these numbers look bad. We went so high, and now we are headed to the bottom just as fast. It is so disturbing — ‘
‘Wait. Did you say you ‘went so high’ really quickly’?’
‘Er, yes, but — ‘
‘Let me look at the data again.’
Five minutes later the Retention Specialist was smoking in the lobby with everyone hanging by his word.
‘I have seen it before. You are all under attack. Someone was paid money to inflate your growth numbers, then drop it rapidly within weeks. The entire idea is to make you look bad — ‘
‘That is impossible! How can you even do that?’
‘Only one person can do this. I have met him once or twice. His name is…The Target Demographic. Or Target as he prefers to be called.’
Nobody understood what the fuck he was saying.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said tapping the tip of his cigar and tipping the top of his hat, ‘I have work to do.’
His Uber ride dropped him off at the lip of the Oshodi market. The smell of crayfish clutched pleadingly at the air, as people yelled in Yoruba for stuff.
The Retention Specialist leaned by a lamp post and smoked. It was his fourth cigar that day. If he got to the sixth before the close of the day, it would mean he was stressed out as hell.
A random groundnut seller was walking past, singing ‘e wa ra granut yi o.’
The Retention Specialist called him. ‘Give me hundred naira own.’
Then he added, ‘I see you’ve been busy, Target.’
The groundnut boy raised his head and the entire market folk started to dissolve rapidly, shrinking into little pebbles that zoomed at alarming speed and pelted the groundnut boy. Each pelt rippled off him, and he absorbed them until he was a 15-foot fat blob giant and there was nobody in the market anymore.
‘Hello, Squirrel,’ the Target Demographic said. ‘Long time, no see.’
[The Retention Specialist continues in episode 3. Read the first episode here.]
