Retention, Part 26: In It To Win It

By Sanya Weathers

One of the principles of community management is that marketing rakes ‘em in, but the community manager keeps ‘em. (Or, more cynically, marketing makes promises, community has to keep ‘em.) This is why marketing and community often end up experiencing conflict at some point – they do have different goals and priorities.

In order to build a community that is both profitable and fun to join, you need to be thinking long term. Here are some of the things that can get in the way of a solid long term relationship with a customer:

–    Too much too soon. To maintain interest over a six month (or longer) period of time, news and information should come out at a slow and even pace. That sounds easier than it is, because releasing information often raises questions from the early adopters, and the answers to those questions may have been on your schedule to discuss in future weeks. See also:

–    Inflexibility. Your information release plan has no value once you start talking to users. If your plan called to release information in groups A, B, and C, but in discussing A you realized that C would answer the questions, don’t insist on discussing B on schedule. Move up C to sustain interest. And by all means, tell the early birds that you’re changing the schedule for them. Every community/marketing team says they’re responsive, but you can be different and prove it.

Don’t let the tail wag the dog. Building and sustaining relationships with customers will result in more long term relationships (and more word of mouth) than a single article in all but a very few media outlets.

–    Incentives only for new people. If you’re trying to rejuvenate an existing product after months of flat growth, you may be tempted to offer new users an incentive. Retroactively granting that incentive to your existing userbase is tedious and prone to errors requiring lots of downtime. But don’t skip it. Unless you know for a fact that you’ll be able to retain all of the new people attracted to the incentive, you don’t dare disturb the bird in hand.

–    Treating existing customers as a done deal. Everyone likes the courtship phase, so why stop courting the customers? Relationships don’t last long when one side is taking the other side for granted, and a long term customer has a relationship with a company.

–    Disconnection. Selling a product with images that are not from the product. Snarky advertising for an optimistic product. Outreach campaigns that focus on an aspect of the product that is secondary for the existing users. All of these things create a sense of cognitive dissonance for the people in a relationship with your company

Your company and your products are here for the long term. Make sure your product support teams are strategizing with that in mind.