Most of the digital applications need to get the First month user retention right as they scale the platform. Picture this- The platform might be burning thousands of dollars acquiring users organically. If these users download the application but uninstall it in a week, the platform will not be able to derive any value out of the user acquired. This was the problem that i was solving for a leading social media platform with over 8 million monthly active users.

This platform curated and served user generated content and was monetized though peer to peer selling, promoted posts, in feed ads and influencer campaign management.

The inorganic customers were acquired mostly from paid channels. 50% of these users went inactive after the first session and over 85% of these users either uninstalled the application or went dormant in a month.

Bringing down this number had a direct co-relation with the life time value platform derives for the customer engagement.

Analysing the difference between the retained and the churned out cohorts, two things emerged majorly. The ones who were retained

Had obtained over 30 followers in the first week
They had created a post on the platform in the first five session

The churned users had bounced off after the onboarding activity where they had mostly skipped the critical steps. It also became apparent that users didn’t understand the platform propositions fully when they got onboarded.

The Images above, are those of the older funnel. Key things to notice here are

The User gratification is six steps away from the onboarding process (Reacting and creating post were considered the most gratifying user activities)
Creation of post was left to user’s discretion and happened much later in the engagement. This directly impacted how many followers users received and how longer they stayed on the platform

Eventually, with the new objective in mind, a new platform journey was designed.

This new journey indicated above uses the following funnel

Step 1-Proposition Video- A short video clip that explains what this platform does. The call to action directly leads to users creating their first post, announcing their arrival on the platform
Step 2-Creating and publishing the post that joins the feed
Step 3- Landing on the feed and engaging with the content(Like, comment etc-Options are limited for the first time not signed in user). User can take more control of the feed by shuffling it or selecting a specific content genre
Blocker screens appear on feed that prompt the user to follow more people. This also helps showcase new joinees on the feed and increase content discovery for them
Login / signup also comes in as a blocker screen over the feed. Since users have already created a post at this point and may have received some followers, it makes a compelling case for them to log in

This achieved the following impact

Users created a post in the first session of the user journey, over 70% of those users received 30 followers in a week, increasing the retention by 35%
The video that explained the product proposition ensured that users who aligned with it and were willing to create a post, engaged further. This did create a churn of the users who would have uninstalled the app or stayed dormant, however, a large pool of users that churned out because they did not get gratification from the platform in the first few days got retained.