How to conduct retention research

Understand why people are staying and what might make them leave

👋🏻Hi, this is Nikki with a 🔒subscriber-only 🔒 article from User Research Academy. In every article, I cover in-depth topics on how to conduct user research, grow in your career, and fall in love with the craft of user research again.

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Have you ever received this question from stakeholders:

“Why are people leaving/churning?”

The first time I heard this question, I was immediately invested. I wanted to find out all the reasons people had left our app. I wanted to unlock this magical realm of information for our teams that would solve all of our churn problems.

And then, I tried to recruit churned users.

I tried to recruit people who were annoyed with us, didn’t want to hear from us, were pissed about something we did, removed themselves from our product universe, and, quite frankly, disliked us.

Spoiler: it didn’t work well.

I spent months trying to find people to talk to. Most of my recruitment efforts were rebuffed. No one wanted to talk to me about why they left. No one wanted to take my churn survey, even for a pretty solid incentive.

I repeated this process a few times with little success and, when I was finally accepting defeat, I decided to go about it in a slightly different way. What if we focused on retention instead of churn?

What’s retention?

Retention is all about keeping your customer base. It’s great to acquire new customers, but it is often (for most companies) really expensive. And, if you are acquiring new customers, but they are leaving, then you are burning through quite a lot of money.

Retaining customers not only ensures a stable revenue stream but can also lead to brand advocacy and long-term growth. You can measure retention using metrics like:

• Customer lifetime value

• Churn rate

• Returning to your website

• Opening emails repeatedly

• Checking your product repeatedly in a given timeframe

For this particular article, we’re going to focus on calculating and tracking retention rate:

Retention rate: (Number of active users over a period of time / Total Number of active users in the previous period) x 100

Since I hate numbers and math, let’s give a concrete example of calculating a retention rate:

Assume that 2,000 people downloaded your app. After one day, 400 people used the app. After a week, only 200 people used it. After one month, there were just 100 people who continued to use your app. In this case, the retention rates are as follows:

• (400/2000)*100 = 20% retention after one day

• (200/2000)*100 = 10% retention after a week

• (100/2000)*100 = 5% retention after one month

So, when it comes down to it, retention looks at how many people continue to use your product over a period of time.

Where does user research come into this?

Retention research can have a huge impact on an organization. By understanding why your customers stay and the flip side of why they leave, you can positively influence important metrics like revenue, customer lifetime value, and customer acquisition cost.

However, one of the key factors when it comes to user research and retention is the fact that user research allows us to think about outcomes rather than just the metric.

If we go into the project only thinking, “We want to retain more users” or “We want our retention rate to be 70% over three months,” we are missing a key component here. With this approach, we are hugely focused on the business outcome but are missing the user outcome. Unfortunately, users won’t stay if we tell them we aim to retain 50% more of them.

Users stay with products because of the positive experience the product has had in their lives. This positive influence can come in the form of:

• Helping them achieve a goal

• Making a task more efficient

• Alleviating a recurring pain point

• Making their day-to-day life easier

• Enabling them to do a difficult task more effectively

• Meeting an unmet need that they can’t get met elsewhere

A product serves a purpose for people. By getting a clear understand of the purpose, goals, needs, and pain points, we can start to. understand how we might help people and encourage them to stay. User research is the key to developing that understanding.