Retention, Part Ten: Free Stuff

By Sanya Weathers

We’ve reached the tenth installment of our Retention series. Good community work takes a professional to properly execute the details, but when it comes to broad brushstrokes, we’ve already covered quite a bit of ground. So I was staring at the wall and thinking the well was finally dry.

And then a coworker here at Metaverse Mod Squad just handed me an idea wrapped in a bow.

Today’s real article should be about the power of your fellow employees, and how insularity is bad for business. If you can’t solve a problem, asking for help doesn’t make you a chump. It makes you a team player whose first priority is the product. But I digress.

She reminded me that there’s one surefire way to increase retention: Free stuff.

Free experience weekends. Free in-game transportation. Buy twenty dollars of in game currency, get five dollars free. Free rare items in exchange for a particular number of common items. Free shipping. Free t-shirts for promoting the product.

I give free lifetime subscriptions to anyone who tattoos my product’s logo onto their bodies, because holy Hannah, you can’t buy that kind of advertising.

But here’s the thing to remember about free stuff and retention. The gains are short term, and you should only be using freebies when you know you’ve got stuff in the product to hook people long term.

The gains are short term because of the way human beings value their stuff. Something they didn’t have to work for, or something for which they paid no money, gives a temporary rush. There’s a little thrill of having gotten a gift, or possible the rush that comes from feeling like they’ve gotten something for nothing. But it doesn’t lock into long term memory unless the body and mind were involved in a process of acquisition. Within three days of getting a freebie, your customer is ready to wander away again. If you remind them of the gift, you’re going to hear back “But what have you done for me lately?”

So don’t rely on freebies to do anything more but goose the numbers briefly. For a longer lasting effect, tie your freebies in with one of two potential scenarios:

–    Recent improvements. You’ve recently upgraded your combat, your tournament play, your loot tables, your leaderboards, or your content. You know from your in-house focus testing (you DO have in-house focus testing, right?) that it takes about two days to really let a customer experience the depth of your improvements. This is where you offer three free days of play with all of your usual currency sinks temporarily disabled.

–    In-game triggers. If a player’s activity level has decreased by a certain percentage, send him a free gift to remind him why he loves your product. If a long-term player has collected another achievement, it’s possible your existing in game rewards are old hat to him, so surprise him with a free gift he wasn’t expecting. Kill the complacency, and reignite your customer’s passion for the product.