Writing and Retention : Review

Hi, welcome back to my weekly articles! If you are new here, you are about to read the best article you have ever come across and to my regular readers, thank you for your continued support.

I am sitting here, excited at my writing progress and how far I have come with these articles. I must say that generally, my writing has improved greatly. Growing up, I always had a passion for writing but somehow, I lost touch when I got into University.

If you are in marketing, then you are familiar with the word “Content Writer”. A strategy is a plan to reach a goal and a content strategy is a plan to use content to reach a goal. The reality is that your content writer should be a content strategist. Let me explain. It is not just about writing, but you need to ensure that your writing hits a goal. Each company has a goal, what they are aiming for and this should guide the sort of content you are putting out. You are not just writing to populate a blog or a social media page with words. A great content strategist knows their audience, and this helps select the language that you use to speak to them. Of course, you cannot forget the importance of research while writing to ensure that you are always saying the truth. Sometimes, the content strategist might not do all the writing alone and that is okay. It is fine to have a lot of people as a part of the writing process but not too many writers.

Not all writing is good, there is good writing and bad writing. Bad writing of course does not yield positive results. It might not yield any results at all while good writing yields high performing results. In choosing topics, you might want to find out what your audience wants to hear to ensure that it is relevant, you can also do keyword research; if people are searching for something then they want to know about it. You can also talk to your customer service team to know what your audience are asking about.

Please do not rely on your opinions only and always see what the data is saying.

There are three types of social media channels which are creation, curation, and conversation. I hope we can all agree that twitter is for conversation *winks* and the main promotional channels for content marketing are search, social and email.

If you do not already know, I am taking a Growth Marketing minidegree at CXL institute. I also learnt about retention this week and it turns out retention is better than acquisition. Most companies spend more on customer acquisition because they think it is a quick way to increase revenue, but customer retention is faster and cost's less than what is spent on acquisition. It is easier to retain customers you already have a relationship with than to start converting new customers.

Retention makes sense as a sustainable business model and it is very essential for growth. It is not just about having over a thousand users but ensuring that this is translating to revenue and retention translates to revenue.

There are two ways that products can benchmark retention, and these are against themselves or against other companies.

-         When you measure against your own performance week after week and month after month, this is retention analysis and it reveals certain trends like what has changed, features or behaviors of customers.

-         When you measure retention against other companies, you need competitor’s performance statistics which might not be available to the public. For this, your next best resource is industry benchmark studies like Mixpanel’s Product Benchmark Report and what it does is get you data from thousands of unique users across various industries.

Great retention does not mean that you keep every single customer forever and ever and ever but the customers that stay with you long term are paying more and in return are sustainable for your business model.

Now, I am sure by now we should all know that there is so much power in talking to our customers. Talking to your customers and engaging them allows them to feel as part of the brand resulting in high retention rate.

There is a way for you to calculate or measure your retention rate. A retention rate is the percentage of customers who are still with the company after a specific period. It asks in essence that a user perform any action, leave, and then come back and perform another action. This is what you are looking for. If the answer is yes, the user has been retained. If not, you know what that means. So, retention rates for users are based on action. This action is any event a user takes on your platform. Remember analytics can help you out here.

The WOW moment!

 You might wonder what a wow moment is, but you have probably felt it yourself, and so has a customer. The wow moment is achieved when your customer recognizes either actively or subconsciously, that your product or service is an integral part of their life. It is going to improve their life and they must have it. It is something that makes your customers say, wow, this is awesome or aha, therefore they love your product. Wow moments are important. When your customers have an unpleasant experience with your product or they never really adopt the product to begin with, it is because they never encountered their wow moment. There are occasional side cases but really, if they are having bad experiences and are paying customers or they never fully adopted the product in the first place then is likely because they never encountered that wow moment.

Something you should keep in mind about the wow factor is that they convey much more value than the effort that requires. That means that they are low effort and high value. An example is putting up a post on Instagram and having people that are not your followers engaging with the post, this is probably because the customers that have been wowed by your brand have shared it with friends.

You made it to the end of this article. Yaaayyy!!!

See you next week.