The importance of retention and strategies for keeping customers happy and on your platform for life are discussed by Jonathan Kim of Appcues in this presentation from SaaSFest 2017.

1. How to Keep Customers
For Life

2. SaaS Sales Has Evolved
Success with new business models
OLD
Field sales — 36% ARR growth rate
NOW
Inside sales — 38% ARR growth rate
FUTURE
Self-service — 41 % ARR growth rate
http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/2017-saas-survey-part-1/

3. Retention Hasn’t
OLD
Field and channel sales — 8% annual churn
NOW
Inside sales — 13% annual churn
FUTURE
Self-service — 25% annual churn
http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/2017-saas-survey-part-2/

4. Some Winners
You can too
https://www.bvp.com/strategy/cloud-computing/index
155% revenue retention 123% revenue retention 117% revenue retention

5. Jonathan Kim
CEO of Appcues
@hijonathan

6. #hustle #growth
Product Metrics Business Metrics

7. Onboarding Collection

8. Platform for product adoption
Activation and retention
Built for non-technical, non-
designers
AdRoll, Indiegogo, Amplitude, Toast,
Atlassian

9. Our Data
40M people through our system last month
Unique view into hundreds of SaaS businesses and millions of users
Track and report on immediate engagement and downstream activity (goal
tracking)
“Behind the lyrics” with our customers

10. What We’ve Seen

11. 1. Rise of Consumer-Grade
• Big shift to free-trial and consumer
• Not just startups
18 of Fortune 25 offer a free or free trial software product.
• Users expect / demand a “consumer-grade” product

12. 2. Outdated Churn Tactics
• Common methods are still phone calls and emails
• State-of-the art is predicting when churn will happen but still leads to a
phone call
• Core concepts are still relevant, but delivery is not
• Channels are dying (phone) or saturated (email)

13. 3. Product-Led Winners
• Productizing the best concepts from sales, customer success and support
• Broad definition of “product” that includes docs, communication channels, etc.
• Solving problems with product, not people

14. Evolution of Retention
• Reactive
Respond to unhappy customers
• Proactive
Predict when customers will churn
• Preventive
Eliminate causes and make success easy

15. – Gail Goodman
“Turns out the number one way to get them to stay
is to get them successful early.”

16. Churn risk

17. Lifetime customer

18. Retention Framework
Credit to Brian Balfour & Dan Wolchonuk

19. Short-Term Retention
• User onboarding
• Give them a reason to come back a second time
• Metrics: activation rate + week-1 retention

20. Mid-Term Retention
• Adopting core features and habits
• Set them up for long-term value
• Metrics: core feature adoption rate + week-4
retention

21. Long-Term Retention
• Repeatedly surfacing value
• Getting in and out of their way at the right times
• Metrics
• Contract length, retention after months/quarters/years
• Friction: contact ratio (support tickets per customer), customer satisfaction

22. Meet Yotpo
• Platform for collecting customer reviews
• 300 employees, venture-backed startup
Yoav Aziz Omer Linhard

23. Yotpo: Then
• Targeting mid-market B2B
• 3-6 month sales process
• Week-over-week growth was flat
• Good, not great
• Massive opportunity in SMB, but not feasible with current business model

24. Yotpo: Today
• Dominating SMB and enterprise
• Massive increase in customers
• Many buy in the first week
• No significant impact on support
• Raised a new $51M round from great VCs

25. What They Did
1. Created a “learn by doing” user onboarding flow
2. Methodically drove user adoption/action
3. “Productized” services so customers could self-serve

26. Short-term: Learn By Doing
• Onboarding goal: creation
• Ghost — personalization their “wow” moment by 10x
• Key: properly define your activation moment

28. Mid-term: Driving Adoption
• Adoption goal: installation
• HelloFresh’s 1+1 Strategy
• Common secondary actions
• Inviting new users
• Turning on an integration
• Tweaking core settings

30. Long-term: Surfacing Value
• Delivered core value (reviews) to customers via email
• Value goal: friction-free
• Simplified messaging everywhere
• Refreshed help center
• Equipped support with guided tutorials

32. Out-of-Band Tactics
• Re-engagement email campaigns
• Recouped delinquent credit cards

33. Immediate Results
• Short-term retention:
• 50% increase in D7 retention
• 60% increase in D14 retention
• Out-of-band:
• 68% of users immediately pay their overdue bill

34. Success Drivers
• Mid-term retention:
• Installation of Star Ratings: 17% to 42%
• Installation of Reviews: 12% to 36%
• Long-term retention:
• Unique users generating reviews up 40%

35. – Yoav Aziz, Head of Growth @ Yotpo
“Since we made all those changes, our active user
base is in a pace of 92% YoY growth (we were flat
during the last year!)”

36. Lessons Learned
• Still huge opportunities to empower customers without human intervention (see
ReallyGoodUX.io)
• Make your product(s) an extension of your team
• Neither reactive or proactive, but preventive

37. Tactical Ways to be
Preventive

38. Yes, Onboarding
• Single biggest point of leverage for mature SaaS companies
• Best tactics are often the simplest
• Your services team is the MVP

39. Mixpanel Retention Report

40. Ask, Then Deliver
• Ask what success looks like
• Probably the closest thing to a “growth hack” I’ve seen
• CSMs = all the time, products = rarely
• Suggest features and activities based on their goals

43. Feature Adoption Awareness
• Most adoption problems are actually awareness problems
• Robust products like Toast and HubSpot really struggle with this
• Common channels (email, blog) are saturated
• Support and customer success take the brunt

46. A Self-Supported Product
• Inline help
• Explains things that could otherwise be in a doc
• Zendesk contextual support
• Brings relevant documentation into the product
• Uber’s decision tree
• Allows customers to self-correct (future)

50. What’s Next
• “Mainly we are listening to our customers now, understanding their small pain-
points and fixing them.”
• After easy wins, you have to dig long and hard for insights
• Unsolved: how do you make retention sexy?

51. Recap
• SaaS is changing and your retention strategy should too
• Identify your short-, mid- and long-term retention goals
• The product is an extension of your people
• No silver bullets, but many small wins add up