That Product Show

In this episode, we’re going to cover why you as a product manager or product owner should care about retention and we’ll also talk about defining the right retention metric. SHOW NOTES: What is retention? In the most layman terms possible, retention is a measure of what percentage of customer or users return to your product over time. So for example, if you have an app and you acquire 100 users today and after a week you have 30 users still using the product, your week 1 retention is going to be 30%. Why should you care about retention? Most well-funded early-stage startups tend to invest more time and energy to acquire new users and convert them. This means that their marketing budgets are very high and most of the team's bandwidth goes into solving the user acquisition challenges to optimize for cost. However, they neglect the retention numbers, which is generally very low.  You should care because: If you focus only on the acquisition, the moment you run out of marketing budgets the new user acquisition will stop and the existing users will vanish with low retention rates. To the majority of investors, an important metric that signifies good business is CAC/LTV i.e. customer acquisition cost by the lifetime value of the customer. This means that you need to spend your time on not just improving the cost of acquisition but also on retaining these acquired customers to increase their lifetime value. It is more cost-effective to retain existing customers who have already used your product compared to bringing in new users.  Defining A Retention Metric There are three parts to a retention metric: The Frequency: This is the time period over which you should track your users. If could be day-on-day, week-on-week, month-on-month, or maybe even year-on-year. The answer lies in the kind of product you own and how frequently a user would need it. Facebook a user might want to use the product daily, and for a platform helping users do their taxes the usage might be annual. So the first letter on your retention metric could be daily, weekly, yearly, or maybe even something completely else that makes sense for your product. The Action: You need to clearly define what active means to you and this needs to be something that is built around the core value proposition of your product or feature. For the hotel booking app, active could mean making a hotel booking. For Facebook, active could mean browning through the news feed. And for the tax company, active could mean a user filing their taxes. Think this over, what is the core value proposition for your product, doing which would qualify a user as an active user. The Users:  Each company could have multiple kinds of users and each of them if valuable enough to the business should have their own retention metric. The hotel booking app has hotel employees and travelers. Facebook has page owners, content creators, advertisers, and so on. Each of these users will have their own definition of active and their own specific time period over which their retention should be tracked. Examples of the right retention metric: Hotel Booking App: QAT or quarterly active travelers, to see what percentage of travelers who registered in the first quarter came back in the next quarter to make a new hotel booking. Facebook: DAA or daily active advertisers to see what percentage of advertisers come back day-on-day to track/create ads. LET'S CONNECT: https://www.virenbaid.com/connect I'm most responsive on: Instagram LinkedIn

In this episode, we will talk about email as a communications channel. Right from collecting emails, maintaining email lists, creating high conversion campaigns, and tracking them, we’ll talk about it all. They say email is one of the most effective marketing channel/method of communication for your customers, leads, or subscribers. For every one dollar spend you can expect a return on your investment of $44. So if you’re currently not achieving that kind of ROI from your email efforts hopefully this episode will be of value to you. SHOW NOTES: 1. Building Your Email Lists Bribe To Subscribe:  Collecting email in rechange for premium quality content.  Example: SmartBlogger asks the readers to share their email and in return, they share with them a cheat sheet for writing blog posts that go viral. Popups & Fear Buttons: Capitalizes on fear of missing out.  Example: Popups that instead of a close button makes you click on something like, “No I don’t want to improve my business”. This in itself removes the passive nature of clicking on the cross button to close a popup and makes the user re-evaluate if they want this service or not. Harrys & Referrals: Receiving emails from a friend Example: Harry’s, the shaving company used this strategy to make people refer to their friends. They collected 100,000 emails in one week and gave away free samples of their products, which overall cost them much less than advertising via traditional channels. Other common ways to increase subscriptions: Better CTAs: Replace the boring old subscriber, sign up, or submit buttons with a CTA which is a pleasure to click on. Example: “make me a better product manager” Highlight the advantage in a few words. Why should the users share their email ID? Be smart about where you place the subscription forms. Neil Patel uses exit intent forms on his blog. 2. Creating Good Subject Lines Direct Benefit: “Facebook Ads, Get more clicks”. Curiosity Based: “Email hacks for better conversions from 14 different companies” Urgency Based Subject Line: “Last 4 hours of the sale remaining” Credibility Based: Subject line on emails from GrowthHackers is always around a case study and how a particular company has been able to achieve outstanding growth in its business. This stamp of credibility makes users want to read about the company and their journey. 3. Creating Good Email Body Content Use GIFs Use Email Surveys Minimalist Email: Remove all styles and images and make the email look like someone actually types it out. 4. Sending The Email - Segmenting The Email Lists SalesForce starts off by simply asking a user for their name and email to subscribe but then uses longer forms in exchange for good quality content to get to know more about the user.  Eventbrite uses the behavior of its users on the product like search behavior and order history to segment them.  5. Sending The Email - Automation Automate common user journeys with emails to become more efficient. 6. Common Mistakes To Avoid Not optimizing for mobile Flooding the inbox Packing with too much content Forgetting to segment lists Clickbait subject lines LET'S CONNECT: https://www.virenbaid.com/connect I'm most responsive on: Instagram LinkedIn

Hello everyone and welcome to that product show. This is your host Viren. I’m excited about this one. I’m nervous. But before we get started with the regular podcast episodes I thought I’ll make a trailer/teaser of sorts for everyone listening. This will help you understand what this podcast is about. So at the heart of it, That Product Show is about product management, technology, design, marketing, and growth.  Each episode title is tagged in a way that will tell you exactly what your takeaway is going to be: [PM Skill] - These episodes will help you improve one or more product management skills [Case Study] - As the name suggests, these episodes would take you through some thought-provoking product, design or growth case studies [User Behaviour] - These episodes will help you better understand common user behavior, biases, etc. that a product manager or UI/UX designer should keep in mind while creating user experiences What I can promise you from day 1 is that we will deliver some key learnings/takeaways for you in each episode. To begin with each episode with be small and bite-sized packed with learnings. In the future we might look at changing formats i.e. long-form, interviews, etc, however, at the heart of it will always remain the fact that our listeners need to get something valuable out of each episode. To an extent that we almost wanted to call ourselves the No BS Product Management Podcast Lastly, I am Viren Baid, your host on this show. I’ve worked across product, marketing, and growth teams, have consulted for companies all across the globe over the last 4 years but I’m just getting started, and my honest to god agenda from this show is to learn as much as possible and humbly share what little I do know. Very very open to feedback. Reach out to me on virenbaid.com/connect and let’s meet over a zoom/hangout call.

In this episode, we'll do a deep dive into cognitive load and techniques that you can use to reduce cognitive load on your product. SHOW NOTES: What is Cognitive Load? The mental effort taken by a user to take in information, process it, and complete the task at hand. Types of Cognitive Load Intrinsic Load: Information present on the screen from your product that the user needs to take in and process Extraneous Load: Anything outside the product, that is distracting your user. Germane Load: This is the amount of effort put in by the short term memory in saving new information in the long term memory. Benefits of Working on Reducing Cognitive Load on your Product Metrics that improve include bounce rate, conversions, returning users, and time taken to convert. Techniques Used to Reduce Cognitive Load Leverage Familiarity: Use elements in design that a user can already relate to. Reduce the amount of information a user needs to remember. Keep all content and instructions short and simple. Progressively disclose features. Don't overwhelm them with everything together. Create a consistent design system. Avoid/Reduce Clutter. Invest time in the information hierarchy of your pages. Remove unnecessary steps for users. Minimize choices that a user needs to make.  Handhold users at every point. Breadcrumbs, progress bars, tables, etc can help. LET'S CONNECT: https://www.virenbaid.com/connect I'm most responsive on: Instagram LinkedIn