How to Define and Drive Retention correctly for your business?

Retention is the output of your efforts. In order to improve retention, we need to focus on Activation, Engagement and Resurrection. These are the inputs to the equation. Retention is the output here.

Activation + Engagement + Resurrection = Retention

The output should be defined and analysed properly in order to understand which input levers should be moved. In order to correctly understand how to improve these inputs we have to start working from inside out rather than outside of our user pipelines.

If we work from the outside in, we might run into various issues such as going after the wrong interval of tracking the metrics, choosing the wrong core action and chasing the wrong audience.

To identify retention by working inside out, let’s understand the layers.

1. The innermost layer consists of the core behaviour of the user (Qualitative). Read more details here and here.
2. The second layer from inside is when we define retention and analyse it (Quantitative)
3. Once we have our retention defined we should define our engagement Strategies to build the user habit
4. The fourth layer is about activation. We want to activate our users and move them to step 3 above as quickly as possible.
5. The last layer is about resurrection. At this layer we want to activate dormant users and move them to step 4.