How to Maximize Retention on Your Platform

In today’s digital world, we are constantly being bombarded with new products and platforms vying for our attention. As a result, the competition for obtaining and retaining users on digital platforms is fierce. With so many options available, it can be challenging to stand out and convince users to choose your platform over others. Once convinced, it can be even more challenging to retain them for extended sessions and encourage them to consume more content.

As a product manager in charge of building and improving a digital platform, it is important to ensure your platform is attractive enough to maximize this user retention. 

Think about it: retaining users means providing them with enough value on your platform that they are likely to continue using it and potentially even recommend it to others. This can lead to increased revenue and customer loyalty, both of which are essential for the long-term growth of your business.

In this article, we explore the objectives and KPIs a product manager should have in mind when prioritizing user retention on their digital platform. We also provide some solutions for meeting these objectives and discuss how the LiveLike engagement suite can help product managers achieve their retention goals. By following the strategies outlined in this article, product managers and business owners alike will be able to turn the challenge of retention into a powerful opportunity for their platforms.

If you are a product manager in charge of your company’s digital platform, retention should be one of your key success factors. Of course, a lot of strategy goes into meeting and maintaining these retention goals, however once executed, these are some of the most effective ways to measure that success:

By combining the use of these metrics, you will enable you to precisely evaluate how effectively you are retaining your users and how engaged they are with your platforms.

Of course, having a valuable and compelling offering within the market, first and foremost, is key for boosting customer retention on a platform. That said, loyal customers and high retention rates are not guaranteed no matter what product or service you provide, especially without an effective strategy for your platform experience. To target the previously mentioned metrics and improve user retention rates on your platform, there are a number of methods and solutions that a product manager can consider:

• Personalizing the User Experience can help to increase retention by making the platform feel more relevant and tailored to its individual users. This might involve using zero or first-party data and other technologies to tailor content recommendations or offer personalized incentives and rewards.

• A Well-Designed Onboarding Process can help increase retention by making it easy for new users to understand how to use your platform and get the most possible value from it. This might involve using tutorials, tooltips, or other guidance methods to help new users navigate the platform and learn about its features.

• Gamifying Your Platform with points, badges or leaderboards can help drive retention by making your platform more rewarding and motivating to use. This might involve offering loyalty programs, discounts, or tangible (real) rewards.

• Introducing Social Features on your platform, such as the ability for users to follow, chat and connect with one another can help increase retention by fostering a sense of community and making the platform more social and interactive.
  

• Pushing Interactivity through mini-game modules such as quizzes, polls, sliders, and predictions can drive retention by making the platform more exciting, motivating, and appealing to your end users.

• Providing Excellent Customer Support can increase retention by addressing user issues and concerns in a timely and helpful manner. In fact, 89% of companies say that excellent customer service plays a huge role in customer retention. This might involve offering multiple channels for support (e.g. email, chat, phone) and providing prompt, helpful responses to user inquiries.

• Continuously Improving a platform can help keep users engaged and motivated to return. This might involve adding new exciting features or functionalities, fixing bugs, or frequently improving the user experience.

At LiveLike, we provide brands and organizations with the tools needed to make their user experience more engaging and interactive, significantly affecting the performance of their platforms. With an extensive suite of interactive tools, informative widgets, live chat capabilities, and loyalty rewards programs, our customizable features empower brands to put their audience first and set their platforms up for success in terms of boosting retention.

Here are just some of the ways LiveLike can help to engage your users and keep them coming back for more:

• • Personalizing the Experience thanks to zero-party data captured using LiveLike’s interactive features (live chat and reaction analysis, polls, sentiment sliders, etc.)

• • Pushing Interactivity with LiveLike widgets (polls, quizzes, cheer meters, emoji sliders, AMAs)
    

• • Gamifying the Experience using the LiveLike loyalty rewards engine (points, badges, leaderboards)

• • Introducing Social Features with LiveLike chats (public, private, influencer) combined with our two upcoming products (activity feeds and social graphs)

• • Onboarding Your Customers with the LiveLike Quests feature
    

When implementing and iterating these features and more with LiveLike, the possibilities for boosting retention on your platform are endless; it’s just a matter of applying the right strategies to meet your objectives.