I often get asked how I learned about user retention and what resources are available to learn more about retaining customers.
I’ve put together the following reading list to help expand your understanding of how to retain customers. This list is not exhaustive, I’ve limited the recommendations to the most useful ones I’ve found so far.
Amplitude’s playbook on mastering retention
This is the first resource on how to retain customers that I discovered and completely fell in love with. It’s an excellent introduction to the topic. The book is practical. As a result, it shows you how to define your core action and set up your analytics instrumentation so that you can build a retention curve. Moreover, it’s completely free.
Reforge’s retention + engagement deep dive 💰
This one’s not free. However, it is the single most comprehensive resources on how to retain customers I have ever come across. It’s a phenomenal 6-week program and it costs $3500. The program is fairly hard to get into. You must have a few years of experience in the industry to apply. Above all, you must also be working on a product team when you apply. If you don’t meet these criteria, the course will be an expensive waste of time. If you meet the criteria, there’s nothing else quite like it. I am grateful to have been part of this program.
Udacity’s course on activation and retention strategy 💰
This program is jam-packed with useful information. It’s an excellent next step if you’ve read the Amplitude playbook and want more.
The elements of user onboarding💰
This one is not specifically about how to retain customers. However, a large part of retention comes down to improving your onboarding experience. I have the utmost respect for Samuel’s work and perspective, and his book comes highly recommended. If you want to improve how you think about your onboarding experience look no further. Sign up for my free workshop and you’ll also get a link that gives you 20% off the book.
What is good retention by Lenny Rachitsky
As soon as you start working on retention, you will begin to ask yourself what good retention mean. I will point you to Lenny’s Benchmarks here. I continuously go back to this reference when I want to know what good retention means for products in different industries.
Customer retention is the new conversion
Des Traynor, the Co-founder of Intercom, with an excellent walkthrough of what retention is, why it matters and how to improve it. A useful reminder to relentlessly focus on stuff that matters.
Brian Balfour on how to retain customers
I will leave you with Balfour’s talk on retention at CXL from 2016. I’m sure he has done even better presentations on the topic since. This video is where I first discovered his work and it remains my favorite.
There you have it, my top resources on how to retain customers 👍
Please let me know if you know any other resources you think should be on the list.