Yeah, you know, also excited to have you because suddenly you described a very unconventional and interesting playbook the last time we spoke. Certainly you described strategies and tactics that I don't think a lot of people have tried and I would encourage folks to go check out your past episode to find out more. And of course today we are tackling a very different topic and team and you shared notes for today's call and I'm very impressed and certainly also based on our pre-recording call as well. I'm certainly very impressed and I'm excited to dive in today. So welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks. Let's talk some retention.

Yeah, let's make it happen. You know, and certainly there is a lot of generic advice about retention.

I think that's just like this is finally the year of retention.

Retention is the new acquisition and send emails on x days, 10 p.m. So there's a lot of advice that would appear to be somewhat relevant but when you look closely it's just generic and you shared the last time we spoke that you know some of the more powerful opportunities are those that are specific to our product rather than something that can be generalized. So talk to me about this and perhaps give me an example from your own work so it's so life clearer.

Yeah, so I get why people want you know generic advice. You want to be able to implement it across a bunch of different businesses and like if I say it needs to be specific to your product then you got to go out and do the work so I get it. But the way I think the way I think about it is if you're trying to get people to start using their product your product again after they've stopped for whatever reason hopefully you've uncovered why. I think the most awful thing you can do is remind yourself of what the context they used you in the first place. Because I think it's easier and it's more relevant also to remind people of the value that they got the first time around or previously when they were using you as opposed to try and like cross sell them or upsell them to a new feature or a different feature right. So don't, there are definitely retention strategies that are around broadening the use case because they've tapped out one but I would say don't forget you know what's the first time that they used you and remind them to use you that way again because assuming hopefully you delivered value on that the first time. So for example like at Klarna where I work we have a team working on retention and sharn and what they did is they ran a test it was targeting people who hadn't purchased in five months and rather just being like hey remember we exist or hey come back to Klarna they actually ran an A.B. test that was testing so shop again at Klarna's a payment. It's harder to pay when you're checking out right. So the test was here's the place that you bought from Klarna the last time five months ago 15% off if you go shop there again right so it's like we know they're used to purchasing with this merchant if we give them a little incentive while they remember to do it again or hey stop at the same place remember you bought from with H&M last time wasn't that great did you know you can also use Klarna at these other different merchants right so both of those it was testing like is it incentivizing them at the same place or is it letting them know they can use the same habit in a different out of different merchant actually the second one performed better which is also a good reminder that you don't always need to use incentives to get people to come back which I think is another tactic a lot of people use like throw money at the problem if you got the money you can earn it back great but it's not always the solution

yeah yeah yeah and that's a very good point about incentives because it seems to be a very easy and convenient fix to a lot of retention problems get 50 coins or get 10% off or so that that seems to be an easy fix but you're right that isn't always a lasting distribution so that's a great call out as well in order to understand even what product specific experiments to run you have to have a very nuanced level of insight about the users even just to formulate the two hypothesis of the sort that you talked about you would have to understand very clearly which of the kinds of hypothesis you could actually guess so what are some of the ways that you and your team get these insights that folks could potentially look at and learn from so

yeah there's a couple different ways one is that we do we run an ongoing survey to people so if you haven't purchased in a certain amount of time like I said it's around five months and it's like long enough to say okay this does seem like this person is lapsing you know we ask them why and we aggregate those insights so those are on automatically I also think you know qualitative customer conversations are amazing at every single point of the funnel and it uses all the time you know it can be challenging to contact the people who stopped using you that's like that's where I would use my incentive money more is like hey I appreciate your time you know here's 20 bucks at Amazon can I talk to you so I can understand why you churned or why you've you know you used to be a drawn customer and why aren't you anymore yeah

definitely