Top 5 User Retention Tactics for Business Technology

User retention is the ultimate reward for a disciplined team and a well-built product. Too many products are the result of competing and or conflicting goals, unclear customer bases, company priorities, and non-user based decision making leading to lower user retention.

Products should not be comprised of solutions. Wait, what? Correct. Rather, product should solve problems and eliminate pain points. An idea or feature alone is not successful criteria and not worthy of allocating development resources. Below are the top five tactics for increasing user retention.

#1 Streamline Onboarding

This is the most important aspect of retaining users and the majority of products get it wrong. Why is that? Competing business goals and or unclear focus are a few factors.

For example, a product has a feature that is only valuable if the user enters their phone number. A key stakeholder wants to use the phone number for secondary reasons for their team efforts and goals. A consensus is reached that the phone number must be required for account creation. The requirement filters out users unwilling to provide their contact information. To streamline onboarding it would be best to only ask for the phone number when the user opens or uses that part of the product – not during onboarding.

#2 Increase Ease-of-Use

Have you ever tried to use a product but found it confusing, convoluted, and ultimately frustrating? We all have. It is easy to focus on the solution while focusing on solving pain points requires more discipline.

It is important to decrease the complexity within the app before development. You can achieve this by conducting in-depth and thoughtful customer interviews. Create mockups and ask end-users to engage with it. Build a prototype and demo it to power users and key customers.

#3 Analyze User Flow

There are also tactics post development. Analyzing user flows and monitoring key performance indicators is a . If users are reaching a certain path in the product then the session ends – this could be an indicator that they are not able to obtain value, become confused, and or do not know how to proceed.

#4 Prioritize Value-Add

Prioritizing what is built of fixed during the next development phase tends to be easier. Budgets are limited and development resources are precious. Agile development combined with the scrum framework ensure the most valuable features are released next.

Items that requires a larger amount of resources but add little value are great examples of features to add to the product backlog, parking lot, and or abandon all together.

#5 Iterate

Customers’ demands and preferences constantly change while merging technologies generate new capabilities. In short, end-user expectations are high. It is highly uncommon for a product to launch and not be improved overtime. Iterative development is the gold standard in today’s hyper competitive environment.

This does not mean you have to adopt the latest technology or develop a robust feature; rather, continue interviewing customers, analyzing the user flow of power users, and delivering constant value is the successful approach to increasing user retention.