How to Use Online Communities for Retention in Consumer Apps?
Building a strong online community can significantly enhance user retention in consumer apps. However, the effectiveness of a community depends on clear goals, continuous experimentation, and strategic scaling.
This concept will explore how to use online communities to improve retention, focusing on clear goals, discovering core levers, and scaling effectively.
Clarity on Goal: Acquisition or Retention?
Understanding whether the primary goal of your online community is to drive acquisition or retention is crucial. Once the objective of retention is established, the volume and cost efficiency of community as a growth driver should not be compared with acquisition channels, but with the retention uplift it is driving.
Next, for the retention uplift, it is essential to prove causation rather than mere correlation. That is to say: it is the act of joining community that is improving retention, rather than users that are more likely to be retained joining the community. This can be established through carefully designed experiments, such as creating control groups where the community features are not visible.
Example: A fitness app might create a community feature for sharing workout progress and tips. To test its impact on retention, the app could compare user engagement and retention rates between users with access to the community and those without.
Discovering Core Levers Through Experimentation:
Identifying the core elements that make a community engaging requires continuous experimentation. This includes planning a calendar of weekly and monthly events, daily rituals, and a mix of active and passive participation ideas.
Example: A language learning app could experiment with weekly language challenges, daily practice reminders, and user-generated content sharing to see which activities drive the most engagement and retention.
By analyzing user participation and feedback, the app can refine these activities to enhance the overall community experience.
Scaling Through Power Users and Community Moderators:
While the initial seeding of the community might be driven by the app itself, long-term scalability relies on empowering power users and community moderators. These individuals can help sustain and grow the community, leading to higher retention rates.
Example: A hobbyist app might start by encouraging enthusiastic users to become moderators, organizing both online and in-person events. This approach not only helps scale the community but also fosters a sense of ownership among users, further enhancing retention.
Takeaway:
Using online communities for retention involves clear goal setting, continuous experimentation to identify core engagement levers, and strategic scaling through power users and moderators.
By focusing on these aspects, consumer apps can create vibrant, engaging communities that significantly boost user retention.