Authordanwolch

Good vs. Bad Retention — The User and Revenue Impact

I just published this piece on Medium, but am also cross posting to my blog. If you want to make sure you receive all of the content I put out, make sure to subscribe to my email list.


There are many things that set Facebook apart from your (or my) products. That said, there’s really one thing that it all boils down to: retention. Facebook has developed a product that people use indefinitely. The rest of us? We have a long way to go. What should you be doing to close the gap? Keep track of your retention numbers.

Most of the people I speak with have no idea how many people they expect to be using their product in a year, even though they are the ones ultimately responsible for the progress. If you do have some sort of goal, did you just pick a big hairy number? Did someone throw out a goal for you? If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be to build a simple model so you know what to expect.

After watching Phil Libin’s talk on retention and cohorts, I thought it would be interesting to model out what different types of retention look like for a SaaS product. What would it look like if you acquire the same number of users over time, but don’t hang onto them? What would it look like if you had really good retention? What are the tipping points for user growth? I built a couple of simple Excel models, and the graphs were quite shocking to me.

Let’s say you launch a new product, and as a good leader you track the people getting value from your product over time. Imagine it looks like this:

Congrats! You launched a new product to 1,000 users in January of 2016, and have grown it to over 8,000 monthly active users by the end of 2016. Your growth is slowing slightly, but you’re not too worried about it. Why should you be? You grew by 700% in 2016! That’s a cause for celebration.

Lets look at this graph in a slightly different way, by the cohorts of people who start using your product each month. In the example above, I assumed that 1,000 new people sign up for your service each month, and that some of them stop using it over time. Those people might find a different tool, unplug from the internet, or get a virus and blame your tool for the havoc it caused. Either way, of the 1,000 people who start each month, some of them quit using your product in the months after they sign up. This is what the active users chart looks like breaking down the cohorts over time:

In the chart above, the blue shape on the bottom represents the 1,000 people who signed up in January, and then how many of them are using it throughout the year. By December 2016, only 450 of them are still around. The cohorts “stack” on top of one another to produce your total active users in a given month.

If you develop a great product like Facebook or Uber, there’s some percentage of cohorts that use your product forever. They’re addicted to it. Even if they stop using it at some point, they come back. Facebook would have a hard time growing to 1.6 billion monthly active users if a lot of people used it once or twice and then never used it again.

Let’s see what happens to your growth if you weren’t like Facebook, and you didn’t hang onto your cohorts for a long time like Facebook. Let’s say you continue to have 1,000 people sign up every month, but over time those people end up quitting your product. This is what the chart looks like past 2016:

By the end of 2018, you’ll only have 13,000 users of your product. You had 11,700 people at the end of 2017! Even though you grew 700% in 2016, you only grew 11% in 2018. The rate at which you’re growing is slowing significantly, even though you continue to add 1,000 users a month. You can see this visually in the bottom right of the chart, where all of the cohorts seem to stack on top of one another, but don’t add up to anything. You can’t even tell the cohorts apart, they just look like a colorful set of stripes. By the end of 2018, the new people you’re adding every month are barely replacing the people who abandon your product from all of your previous cohorts.

What does it look like if you are able to build a product where 50% of your cohorts end up loving you product and sticking around for a long time. What would that look like? Let’s update our graphs:

Wow! Instead of 13,000 users, you will have 20,000 users by the end of 2018. You can see the big difference between the graphs. In the bottom right you have rectangles that build on top of one another. You overall growth rate is still decreasing (as a percentage of your install base), but your total number of active users continues to increase. In the previous example your growth had basically stalled, in this graph you are growing at a constant rate. The best products in the world retain a large percentage of cohorts over time, and the bars are a large percentage of the initial cohort size.

Up until this point, I’ve only been talking about retention of users. If you’re running a business you ultimately need to charge for your service (for example, a monthly subscription). Assume that a percentage of people will end up paying for your service, and that they slowly upgrade over time. If you can forecast how many people will be using your product, you should also be able to project how much money you’ll be making. Lets look at what your revenue looks like (again, broken down by cohort) when you have poor retention:

As your cohort sizes go to nothing, those people won’t keep paying for your product. This graph doesn’t look too bad, but what about if you look further into the future?

That doesn’t look good, you’re barely making any more money two years later. What about in the case where you have good retention? Assume that 10% of the long term users end up paying for your product, and they pay $50 / month. They don’t immediately upgrade — it happens slowly over time. What would that graph look like?

Holy crap! I like the slope of that line. In the bad retention example, you are making $15,000 / month in recurring revenue. What about in the good retention example? Over $80,000 / month.

Interested in playing with the different scenarios yourself? I uploaded my hypothetical data in an Excel file here, or in a Google Spreadsheet here. Google Spreadsheets is crappy for this kind of stuff, I’d recommend using Excel.

Predicting the future, one week at a time

I used to be the PM for one of HubSpot’s freemium email tools. It was a great experience launching something brand new in front of thousands of people at our annual conference, and then growing it to hundreds of thousands of active users. We watched our metrics extremely closely, and we knew how fast we had to grow to hit our goal for the next year. I would frequently get questions like “are we having a good week?” and I felt the pressure to give a reliable and accurate projection. If things were going poorly, I needed to be able to understand why and sound the alarm so the team could take action. That said, you can’t have many false alarms. You don’t want to come across as the boy who cried wolf.

I ended up building a simple model in Excel (Google Docs link) that helped me visualize the current week against previous weeks, so I’d be able to make a reasonable guess as to whether we would grow, hold steady, or lose ground.

For example, lets say that 100,000 people used an app on a weekly basis (WAUs). Not every person used it every day, so our DAUs (daily active users) was less than 100,000. Lets say it was 65,000 DAUs. I recorded the cumulative number of people that had used our app so far that week. It looked like this:

WAU_Projection

I then added columns going back in time, and kept track of it going forward. This gave me a nice set of data to play around with:

wau_projection

The pattern of usage each week was incredibly consistent. I graphed each daily total against the final count of users active for that week:

cumulative_percentage

This chart shows that our pattern of usage each week is incredibly consistent. Between 60 and 70 percent of our weekly total uses in Monday, and between 75 and 80 percent of our users have used in by the end of the day Tuesday.

The way I read this chart is that we are better able to predict what our total user count will be by the end of the week. As our user base grows larger, it’s harder for our user acquisition to have as much of an impact. New users can definitely increase, but that’s a good problem to have.

Using these numbers, I updated the model to project what the high and low bounds of what I’d expect for our total usage for the week:

growth_model

Interested in doing this kind of analysis or learning how to build world class products through quantitative analysis? We’re hiring for data analysts at HubSpot, read about the position here.

Disclaimer: all of the data in this sample and the screenshots are fake. They were made up and not reflective of any HubSpot product.

Running Retention Experiments

In my time working at HubSpot and on our sales products, I’ve been lucky enough to be exposed to high growth products. In growing these products, I’ve had a chance to run many experiments aimed at retaining users.

I spoke at SaaSFest 2015 sharing these experiments and the ways our team breaks down optimizing for these types of metrics. There were two great blog posts that followed up my talk breaking it down further, one from ProfitWell and AppCues. It was based off a talk Brian Balfour prepared for the Weapons of Mass Distribution 2015 conference.

If you have a chance to head to SaasFest 2016 (Patrick, you better do the conference again), I highly recommend it. The venue and atmosphere was intimate and the conversations I had were top notch. It was great to learn from others in the SaaS industry. The accessibility of people like Hiten Shah, David Cancel,  Patrick Campbell, and many others was phenomenal.

Check out the recaps:

Chrome Extensions with Explosive Growth in 2015

I compiled a list of the most popular Chrome extensions in the chrome web store for November 2015. I also wondered – what are the extensions that have grown the most in 2015? I sorted the list of extensions that have more than 100,000 installs, and ranked them by their growth this past year. It’s interesting to see which extensions have grown the most.

Name Installs % Change
Free Games Zone 2,737,165 30412844%
Iminent NewTab 201,542 10077000%
Ask App for Free Games Zone 170,515 4262775%
Joygame Homepage 371,018 3091717%
Search 512,479 330532%
Video AdBlock for Chrome 996,291 247119%
Taplika New Tab 201,922 121540%
Bing2Google 202,177 93069%
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim 142,990 32178%
drumbit 105,817 31773%
Buy Happy 103,044 19831%
MySmartPrice 747,892 19712%
Proxy SwitchyOmega 381,814 12138%
Co:Writer Universal (Extension 108,914 9651%
Snapverter 195,322 8620%
Flash Playlist 155,655 7648%
Sticky Notes 161,591 5554%
Bkav SiteAdvisor 154,196 5069%
Translate 141,331 4850%
Imagine Learning 250,611 4423%
LanSchool Student 213,824 3895%
Steam inventory helper 655,091 3556%
Dominoes 155,877 2440%
Discovery Education 248,124 2056%
LoungeDestroyer 509,977 2028%
Vernier Graphical Analysis 216,350 1934%
Kaizena (Voice Comments) 107,760 1818%
EasyBib Bibliography Creator 134,419 1356%
Facebook Video Downloader 123,836 1331%
Download Helper 142,251 1325%
Lexia Reading Core5 112,928 1311%
uBlock Origin 2,309,855 1311%
Insight Web Helper 134,471 1176%
SoundCloud Downloader Free 217,905 1175%
ScanQR 369,356 1120%
Securly for Chromebooks 264,546 1103%
Socrative Student 318,731 1092%
VideoCast (VLC/Chromecast) 108,573 1084%
Google Classroom 3,033,793 1060%
start.me – customize your new 108,670 1053%
Elite Unzip 383,364 1052%
Pear Deck 100,384 1042%
Yahoo Mail Notification Extens 1,174,906 976%
Video Downloader Super 195,026 955%
Nearpod 225,128 939%
anonymoX 295,829 924%
Grammarly Spell Checker & Gram 2,003,376 918%
Empower3000 144,102 902%
Pacman 130,829 899%
Storybird 105,657 874%
gScholar 118,212 848%
Khan Academy 3,063,491 826%
SnapMyScreen 137,659 793%
VocabularySpellingCity 1,042,186 785%
DISH Anywhere Video Player Ext 248,695 759%
twerk 128,146 753%
LanSchool Web Helper 1,179,554 722%
Newsela 411,730 702%
Google Docs Quick Create 118,037 691%
IXL 154,880 682%
Gom VPN – Bypass and unblock 193,257 657%
Polarr Photo Editor 3 386,640 649%
KidBiz3000 125,008 635%
Pearson OpenClass 510,939 629%
EasyBib 1,253,471 613%
AR BookFinder 115,359 602%
React Developer Tools 180,432 602%
Domain Error Assistant 1,919,760 600%
YourTemplateFinder 129,641 594%
PowToon Presentations Edu 332,234 592%
Browsec 1,219,692 578%
Super Auto Refresh 103,416 573%
Glogster 1,004,055 572%
Register 188,349 565%
Lucidpress | Free Design Tool 492,517 560%
Movenote for Education 196,977 548%
DOGOnews 620,343 540%
appear.in screen sharing 157,401 538%
Emoji Input by EmojiStuff.com 332,607 535%
GoToMeeting for Google Calenda 142,438 533%
Hapara Interact Extension 914,571 529%
Screencastify (Screen Video Re 872,671 513%
facemoji – Stickers and emoji 183,451 492%
Racing Games 140,137 490%
The Great Suspender 811,426 490%
Postman 1,229,959 490%
Padlet 201,048 488%
Edmodo 742,908 487%
CK-12 742,583 482%
Visnos Interactive Mathematics 100,146 473%
Flappy Bird Multiplayer 113,222 462%
APK Downloader 311,269 460%
VoiceThread 127,215 443%
Kami (formerly Notable PDF) 312,943 442%
BuzzMath 426,780 428%
Lucidchart for Education 1,005,096 425%
Haiku Learning – Solo Teacher 376,799 425%
VideoNot.es 171,064 423%
Postman Interceptor 136,217 418%
Chromebook Recovery Utility 325,489 412%
FB Pixel Helper 140,860 405%
Monster Math Flash Cards 104,306 400%
TechSmith Snagit (Extension) 778,461 382%
Animoto Video Maker 105,589 377%
MeeGenius! Children’s Books 634,122 377%
Piktochart 100,938 370%
eBay Shopping Assistant 1,242,578 368%
Auto Refresh 221,077 368%
Schoology 115,843 362%
Cite This For Me: Web Citer 141,782 362%
UNO 3D HD 121,724 358%
Tab Scissors 151,990 353%
Internet Speed Tracker 345,421 349%
Diigo Web 705,654 345%
Video Player 176,216 328%
Kami (formerly Notable PDF) 200,302 321%
Affixa – Login Handler for Gma 112,566 319%
Universe 326,364 311%
Tab Resize – split screen layo 178,109 308%
TypingClub 1,816,399 307%
Capture Webpage Screenshot Ent 634,738 306%
PDF Viewer 281,535 305%
Merge PDF – Smallpdf.com 120,116 300%
Full Page Screen Capture 737,346 298%
Adguard AdBlocker 1,344,365 295%
Quizlet 739,657 293%
Hooda Math Games 105,039 291%
Google Hangouts 4,947,602 277%
TwistedWave 170,777 269%
Facebook Emoticons 162,983 267%
Keep Awake 187,082 265%
Ask App for iLivid 10,000,000 262%
GIMP on rollApp 133,367 261%
Drive Template Gallery 273,306 258%
Goobric Web App Launcher 112,703 257%
FindMeFreebies 193,760 249%
Slack 107,476 245%
Website Destroyer 158,559 242%
GeoGebra 2,312,574 242%
Hapara Dashboard for Google Ap 155,546 240%
Musixmatch Lyrics for YouTube 119,592 234%
WeVideo – Video Editor and Mak 2,542,105 233%
GoAnimate for Schools 247,275 231%
ClassDojo 194,978 228%
EasyBib Toolbar 282,679 228%
3DTin 886,501 224%
Nitro Type 131,299 224%
Okta Secure Web Authentication 365,386 220%
MailTrack for Gmail 289,246 220%
BrainPOP Featured Movie 194,535 217%
SwagButton 306,190 214%
EagleGet Free Downloader 646,189 210%
PowToon Presentations 110,275 208%
OneNote Clipper 264,581 207%
Lounge Assistant 125,051 207%
Instagram Search 118,702 203%
ImprovedTube – YouTube Extensi 143,746 201%
Desmos Graphing Calculator 1,463,282 197%
Prezi 903,419 195%
SearchLock 475,558 194%
AllCast Receiver 112,075 193%
DotVPN – Free and Secure VPN 199,383 191%
Earth View from Google Earth 352,504 188%
Chrono Download Manager 293,783 188%
Poper Blocker 678,948 186%
Calendar Clock 152,913 183%
NCapture 153,270 182%
Google Drawings 1,781,369 181%
电脑管家上网防护 236,671 178%
MultiLogin 113,792 177%
Ebates Cash Back 417,790 177%
Google Tips 114,447 177%
SmoothScroll 145,034 173%
Free Rider HD 433,771 169%
Page Analytics (by Google) 553,798 169%
Pixsta 152,341 169%
MindMeister 991,495 169%
Search Extension by Ask 977,639 169%
Chrome Connectivity Diagnostic 343,332 169%
Sumo Paint 914,904 168%
Facebook Video Downloader 198,680 168%
Pin It Button 9,307,580 167%
Night Time In New York City 955,697 166%
Mailvelope 162,147 166%
Loupe Collage 711,873 165%
Momentum 1,124,361 164%
VoiceNote II – Speech to text 309,319 163%
SpeakIt! 861,083 161%
MindMup – Free Mind Map web si 253,423 160%
Privacy Badger 255,703 158%
Chrome Speak 265,304 155%
Chrome Dev Editor (developer p 186,709 154%
MEGA 1,124,943 149%
Voice Recorder 264,355 148%
Java API Search 223,583 148%
BrowserStack Local 242,855 147%
Sidekick by HubSpot 638,101 147%
ZIP Extractor 136,044 145%
Google Analytics Opt-out Add-o 724,331 145%
Audio EQ 127,218 141%
Nordic Forest 174,313 141%
StudyStack 159,964 140%
Offline Games 127,427 139%
Responsive Web Design Tester 132,616 138%
Earth 642,966 135%
Cats and Catapults 205,471 135%
Advanced start page 282,536 134%
Star Se7en 196,252 134%
WGT Baseball: MLB 192,384 133%
ThinkVantage Password Manager 303,162 132%
Google Cast (Beta) 426,497 132%
Anti-Porn Pro – The best Anti- 609,811 131%
Black & white theme 165,717 130%
TypingWeb Typing Tutor 500,739 129%
BetterTTV 781,324 127%
Readability 618,980 124%
Calculator 403,149 124%
Voice Recognition 316,945 123%
Black carbon + silver metal 300,213 122%
draw.io Diagrams 109,581 121%
Easy Auto Refresh 449,150 120%
Video downloader pro 273,059 118%
Flash Player 130,433 117%
Tab for a Cause 115,507 115%
OneNote Online 340,075 115%
MyTransitGuide 338,510 114%
BuyHatke 222,702 114%
Download Master 236,657 114%
PDF Compressor – Smallpdf.com 167,123 114%
PowerPoint Online 736,343 113%
Streamus 297,558 113%
Talk and Comment – Voice notes 110,571 112%
Lumin – Best Document Viewer 112,862 112%
Pop Block Pro – The Ultimate P 231,832 112%
Pixlr Editor 2,319,812 111%
Tampermonkey 5,438,164 111%
Advanced REST client 952,205 109%
Lightshot (screenshot tool) 356,228 108%
WeVideo Next 241,035 108%
Live HTTP Headers 122,760 106%
Visual Bookmarks 3,508,515 105%
KingsRoad 118,884 105%
Block site 773,902 104%
Stupeflix Video Maker 787,249 104%
Facebook Customizer (by Adbloc 327,359 100%
Facebook Invite All 471,382 100%
Happy Wheels 261,037 99%
SimilarWeb – Site Traffic Sour 136,232 99%
Google Forms 1,531,879 99%
myHomework Student Planner 136,863 99%
Lamborghini Cherry 108,085 98%
Excel Online 755,448 98%
Nike 4.0 115,066 98%
Instapaper 156,108 98%
Mobialia Chess 3D 117,168 97%
Facebook Secret Emoticons 526,484 96%
Koding 189,014 96%
Motitags 1,388,577 96%
All4Search 243,880 95%
Facebook – Delete All Messages 173,262 95%
FlashCards 269,073 95%
Dictanote – Speech Recognizer 233,867 94%
Pushbullet 1,398,041 94%
Webcam 137,208 94%
TLDR 106,113 94%
Kickoff 124,998 94%
SafePCRepair 574,627 94%
Chrome Web Store Launcher (by 290,673 93%
ModHeader 140,784 92%
PerfectPixel by WellDoneCode 129,434 92%
Undeaddies 477,172 92%
Wappalyzer 274,565 91%
vGet Cast (DLNA Controller) 114,960 91%
PttChrome 186,199 91%
Tag Assistant (by Google) 430,452 91%
OneTab 799,322 90%
Google Calendar (by Google) 1,503,089 90%
User-Agent Switcher 238,089 90%
Advanced Font Settings 457,981 89%
Instagram 686,445 89%
AVG PrivacyFix 289,011 89%
Happy Friday! 194,679 88%
Audiotool 1,210,352 88%
Todoist for Gmail 185,121 87%
Design Something 142,507 87%
Word Online 1,388,837 87%
CloudConvert 276,766 87%
World Data Atlas 140,500 86%
Diigo Web Collector – Capture 544,516 86%
Todoist: To-Do list and Task M 339,604 84%
Todoist: To-Do list and Task M 203,578 84%
Wikiwand: Wikipedia Modernized 162,682 83%
Hide My AdBlocker 119,757 83%
Nimbus Screenshot and Screenca 340,843 82%
Imagus 220,483 82%
TuneIn Radio 172,388 82%
Page Ruler 369,473 82%
VideoDownloadConverter 1,004,764 82%
TrafficLight 119,517 80%
PacMan Advanced 208,080 80%
Lamborghini Newport 145,259 80%
OkTools 230,590 79%
DHC – REST/HTTP API Client 207,460 79%
Video Downloader professional 2,557,897 79%
Facebook Unseen 300,343 78%
JSON Formatter 304,245 77%
Save to Google Drive 1,736,286 77%
Twitch Now 139,312 76%
Keepa – Amazon Price Tracker 128,744 75%
Apple Shooter 160,009 75%
Scrum for Trello 101,876 74%
Honey 470,863 73%
BeFrugal.com Add-On 379,218 72%
WeatherBlink 352,036 72%
Video Converter 285,046 72%
Telegram 258,807 71%
Chrome Apps & Extensions Devel 825,781 71%
Lego Builder 203,884 71%
High Contrast 438,278 70%
Bloxorz Block Puzzle 197,129 70%
Robot Boom 359,771 70%
SWOOOP 212,830 70%
Start – A Better New Tab 125,994 69%
Awesome Screenshot App 352,567 69%
iLivid 10,000,000 69%
Yahoo! JAPANに簡単アクセ 230,842 69%
Empty New Tab Page 149,280 69%
InspirARTion – Sketch & Draw! 141,861 69%
Popular on Netflix 207,035 69%
Marine Aquarium Lite 283,558 68%
Spotify – Music for every mome 1,797,159 68%
Sketchpad 3.5 324,301 68%
SoundCloud 718,252 68%
Disconnect Search 109,218 68%
F.B Purity-Clean Up Facebook 187,201 68%
MusicSig vkontakte 969,730 68%
Facebook Color Changer 116,642 67%
Select and Speak – Text to Spe 198,077 67%
Netflix 1,530,123 66%
JSON Editor 163,476 66%
MozBar 297,483 66%
2048 286,049 66%
3D Solar System Simulator 133,846 66%
Music Player for Google Drive 289,343 65%
Add Email Signature – WiseStam 101,040 65%
Download FB Album mod 227,378 65%
SafeBrowse 101,228 65%
Read&Write for Google‚Ñ¢ 208,264 64%
AdBlock Pro 3,175,430 64%
Do Not Disturb! 120,261 63%
Text 224,927 63%
Messenger (Unofficial) 334,968 63%
Caret 147,613 63%
goo.gl URL Shortener 619,023 62%
Enhanced Steam 380,253 62%
Duolingo on the Web 1,819,678 62%
ColorZilla 800,229 61%
nCage 156,137 61%
1Password: Password Manager an 879,536 60%
WebFilter Pro – The best filte 196,897 60%
Search All 496,611 60%
LocalChromecast Player 128,178 60%
ixigo.com plugin 154,168 59%
ColorPick Eyedropper 308,171 59%
Google Input Tools 629,850 59%
Quick Javascript Switcher 120,542 59%
Zotero Connector 668,201 58%
Xdebug helper 126,723 57%
Fotor Photo Editor 403,360 57%
Vimium 197,892 57%
India Rail Info 277,774 57%
JetBrains IDE Support 267,486 56%
RingtoneFanatic 124,760 56%
Fruits Slice 254,848 56%
CouchPotato 102,621 55%
Pocket 1,208,587 55%
Ghostery 2,251,244 55%
¬øQuieres agregar mas calidad 204,900 54%
Image Downloader 321,794 54%
NEnhancer 131,617 54%
NicoNico Audio Extractor 103,608 54%
Tabs Outliner 110,676 54%
Unlimited Free VPN – Hola 7,230,822 53%
Blogger 341,628 53%
EditThisCookie 792,394 53%
Audio Converter 119,436 53%
My Study Life 190,377 53%
Boomerang for Gmail 1,021,290 52%
Allin1Convert 685,142 52%
Cube Slam 180,604 52%
Weebly – Website Builder 248,603 52%
Theme Creator 640,948 52%
The Camelizer 328,052 51%
Yandex homepage 824,799 50%
Video downloader 100,851 50%
TechSmith Snagit 327,443 50%
Avast SafePrice 10,000,000 50%
Postman – REST Client 1,023,764 50%
TimeMaps: World History Atlas 119,554 50%
Readium 510,423 49%
BringMeSports 346,691 49%
Kingdom Rush Frontiers 118,034 49%
Useful Periodic Table 146,177 49%
Google Translate 5,329,233 49%
Connected Mind 166,065 49%
Instant Translate 326,482 48%
Wolf and the Ice Planet 173,879 48%
Thesaurus.com – Synonyms and A 209,649 48%
NetBeans Connector 344,340 47%
GMX MailCheck 114,310 47%
HTTPS Everywhere 965,271 46%
Video Download Helper 166,011 46%
JSONView 918,756 45%
Looper for YouTube 236,046 45%
Add to Wunderlist 253,622 45%
Page Monitor 245,036 44%
Ancient History Encyclopedia 309,326 44%
FilmFanatic 1,625,883 44%
LiveReload 187,879 44%
PicMonkey Extension 166,640 43%
FLV Player 184,594 43%
Office Apps 125,170 42%
Dictionary by Dictionary.com 558,236 42%
Solitaire 493,813 42%
Session Buddy 421,634 42%
Linkclump 165,477 41%
TelevisionFanatic 2,607,989 41%
imo free video calls and text 353,511 41%
HowToSimplified 175,097 41%
BuiltWith Technology Profiler 136,785 40%
Window Resizer 489,489 40%
Buffer 406,498 40%
Check My Links 113,262 40%
Bitly | Unleash the power of t 409,756 39%
Sketchpad 327,450 39%
Trello 262,989 39%
Logitech Smooth Scrolling 1,348,859 39%
Lazarus: Form Recovery 138,646 39%
DailyBibleGuide 171,660 39%
IE Tab 3,111,077 38%
Audio Cutter 177,677 38%
AngularJS Batarang 291,131 38%
Przelewy24 118,113 38%
OneClick Cleaner for Chrome 170,531 38%
Google Analytics Debugger 273,688 38%
GamingWonderland 2,621,247 38%
Google Dictionary (by Google) 2,559,127 37%
Cookies 124,212 37%
Axure RP Extension for Chrome 317,733 37%
tinyFilter – Reliable Content 146,036 37%
LinguaLeo English Translator 230,744 37%
Google –≤ –∫–∞—á–µ—Å—Ç–≤–µ –ø– 1,093,613 36%
Retrogamer 396,381 36%
RadioRage 794,345 36%
Print Friendly & PDF 326,740 36%
Timer 376,934 36%
iGraal 115,382 36%
Scientific Calculator 326,277 36%
Gmail Offline 4,941,993 36%
Weather 104,193 36%
SocialLife for Google Chrome‚Ñ 605,624 36%
SEOquake 292,649 35%
Offline Solitaire 302,905 35%
Lucidchart Diagrams – Online 777,998 35%
Streak for Gmail 381,770 35%
CrazyForCrafts 195,755 35%
Beach in the Maldives 108,366 35%
Kindle Cloud Reader 2,482,829 35%
EXIF Viewer 135,681 34%
History Eraser 537,853 34%
ReadingFanatic 266,684 34%
GeoProxy 108,355 34%
rikaikun 157,061 34%
Click&Clean 1,418,411 34%
Daum Equation Editor 441,452 33%
Cloud Internet Explorer by Eri 180,750 32%
Hacker Vision 100,554 32%
InboxAce 495,085 32%
Slinky Elegant 349,248 31%
HomeworkSimplified 468,080 31%
ProxFlow 446,511 31%
Fusion Tables (experimental) 284,806 31%
My Scrap Nook 1,148,163 31%
Tanki Online 164,839 31%
better Browser – for Chrome 100,400 31%
Flashcontrol 587,157 31%
MyFunCards 808,298 30%
Secure Shell 607,751 30%
WiseStamp – Email Signatures f 197,779 29%
ScriptSafe 207,299 29%
VkOpt 566,535 29%
Missing Plug-in Fix 104,536 29%
Vector Paint 143,131 29%
Save as PDF 277,297 29%
IP Address and Domain Informat 119,152 28%
LastPass: Free Password Manage 3,583,680 28%
iMacros for Chrome 220,339 28%
Despicable Me Minions Partying 262,081 28%
Morpheon Dark 147,526 28%
Utility Chest 146,836 28%

Facebook and Twitter Onboarding Emails November 2015

As part of my work on Sidekick and HubSpot’s sales platform, I focus a lot on the new user experience of our products. As Brian Balfour likes to say “user onboarding is the one element of your application that all users will use”. Can you think of better metrics to invest than getting your users activated and set up for success?

As part of thinking through what will help explain the value of our products to users, I like to evaluate what other successful companies are doing on a regular basis. Recently, I took a look at the emails they send to users as part of the signup process as they move them towards an activation event. I thought it was interesting to see how the emails for Facebook and Twitter stacked up against one another. They have a ton of signups and a lot of opportunity to tune these emails to get the best results. What are they doing that might be applicable for your personas / use case?

First Email:

  • Facebook subject: “Just one more step to get started on Facebook”
  • Twitter subject: “Confirm your account, FirstName LastName”
  • Facebook goes with an aggressive headline with “Action Required”. Grabs people’s attention!  Twitter uses your name in the subject, I’m surprised that Facebook doesn’t do the same.
  • Both Twitter and Facebook want you to “complete” your account in the paragraph above, but both say “confirm” in the CTA. The two sentences in the Facebook feel so robotic.
  • Facebook looks to reinforce its value by describing why it’s useful: “helps you communicate and stay in touch with all of your friends. Once you join Facebook, you’ll be able to share photos, plan events, and more”. Twitter doesn’t do anything like this. I guess it’s hard to describe what twitter is to everyone in one sentence.

Second Email:

  • Facebook subject: “Welcome to Facebook”
  • Twitter subject: “Follow Vogue Magazine, Jimmy Kimmel and Rihanna on Twitter!”
  • Twitter is focused on getting you to follow users, rather than build out your profile. I’d guess that twitter is less about making it so your friends can find you, and more about finding content you’re interested in.
  • Facebook is obsessed about getting you to enter your profile information. They try to hook you with content first, but I assume that profile information is the key to showing you friend suggestions and other information you might like.

Third Email:

  • Facebook subject: “You have more friends on Facebook than you think”
  • Twitter subject: “Eric Shawn tweeted: “Should we accept more #Syrianrefugees? A look at one man’s journey @Foxnews, @CWS_global, @John_Kass, Watch:
  • Twitter is all about information and news (granted, I picked some accounts to follow in their onboarding process), while Facebook is pushing you to connect your inbox so they can prompt you to add your friends. This is one long email with a lot of tweets embedded in it.
  • It’s weird that Facebook shows so many different email clients, when I signed up with a gmail.com test address. Feels like they haven’t optimized this email, but what do I know?

Fourth Email:

  • Facebook subject: “Robinson Cano and Tom Brady are Trending on Facebook”
  • No twitter email (other than more content to view / follow). Interesting that they don’t prompt you to connect your address book, everybody else does this.
  • I’m surprised that the content of the email isn’t more engaging. I’m surprised they aren’t using images more prominently as twitter is, or showing information as it would appear in your news feed.

Here’s the side by side comparison for Twitter and Facebook’s emails. Did I miss something? Are you impressed with their emails, or underwhelmed?

 

FBvsTwitter

 

 

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