(2 min read)
The engagement lifecycle is one of the key customer models on which to base your retention and customer engagement strategy. Two of the most important insights to focus on are (1) engagement stickiness and (2) engagement cliffs and peaks. This article will explain those insights.
Measurement: The average number of days in which your subscribers engaged with your content for each month since they started their subscription.
Engagement stickiness
Engagement stickiness is the length of time for which strong engagement continues. The simplest way to understand it is as the decline or growth in days engaged over a given time period (eg. 3 months).
Growing product stickiness is fundamental to growing retention. As it is a measure of how relevant your product is to your customers’ lives. If your product ‘sticks’ with a customer, then it assumes a role in their life that can be sustained without further effort from you.
High stickiness means less resources spent on re-engagement, lower churn, and higher returns on your acquisition efforts.
Engagement cliffs and peaks
Cliffs and peaks in engagement help you to identify your primary retention and upgrade lifecycle opportunities. Cliffs represent a clear drop off in engagement frequency, and should be targeted for retention messaging about upcoming content or features (for example).
In this example, there is a significant drop-off in product engagement 4 months into the lifecycle. This serves as a clear signal for action, as invariably engagement cliffs align with churn spikes.
Peaks represent two different phenomena. Either they show you lifecycle points of intense engagement, or they show you points at which only mature, high value users remain in the lifecycle. In both cases customers who especially value your content can be pin-pointed, and offered premium packages.
In this example we can see a prominent peak in Month 2 of the lifecycle. This is a strong signal that the product assumes peak relevance for the customer in their second month since subscribing. This is a clear opportunity for promoting upgrade offers with customers between 30 and 60 days after sign-up.
