How Strengthening Your Product Community Will Help Reduce Your Churn

Customer retention is the bedrock of any successful SaaS business, no matter the size. If your customers are churning out, your acquisition rate has to outpace the churn just to break even.

More often than not, tackling customer retention can feel a lot like damage control. And there are hundreds of retention tactics out there that can make product managers feel overwhelmed and lost on where to start.

Most customer retention tactics focus on improving your users’ relationships with your brand. But, engagement doesn’t always need to be between you and your users. Sometimes, users are hesitant to trust products and brands, as they are used to seeing very self-serving companies. Even if you're truly putting the customer first at every step, many may still be a bit cautious about fully trusting you.

A great way to combat this mistrust is to build an internal community within your product where users can engage with each other. This community could be a forum of private social groups where your customers can interact and learn from each other (and your team when appropriate).

At the end of the day, people want to be part of something. The more your customers feel connected to each other, the more they'll want to stay connected to you.

Two questions come to mind when we say "Build a community around your product or service". The first is - How do you build the feeling of community?, and the second - Where to build the community itself?

Here are some thoughts that address the first question of "How":

Make them feel “in the know”- they should gain something by part of your community. Share news of products, knowledge, and events with the community first. Then spread the word to everyone else.

Let them feel like they have a say- If you ask them about features they want or need before going out and developing your roadmap you'll get lots of market insight from people using your tools on a daily basis. Use the community as a resource and get them involved in the product development process, either during the brain-storming and feature design or as Beta testers. As long as you're careful not to get distracted by the feedback, there is nothing more valuable than knowing how the market will respond to your new jaw-dropping feature before you release it (and having a chance to make fixes and improvements before the general release).

Keep the story going - How can you stay connected with your users all month long?Strengthening a community component like a Facebook group or engaging users on Twitter or Instagram has a few added benefits of giving your users a place to congregate and discuss and letting you see how they're are talking about your product, and what they like most (and least). It's a space for them so let them talk and only jump in there when necessary. You can also engage with them there with news, updates, content they might find interesting and so on.

As for the question of "Where", there is no right answer here. If we're discussing a software product, the options that come to mind are digital. Places like a Facebook group, a form you build or even a sub-Reddit are all good options. That said, here is a Pro Tip: don't force them to congregate and discuss where you find most convenient. Let them pick the place. If they're more active on Facebook, don't push Instagram down there throats because that's where you want to manage your community. It might be trendier than FB, but the channel needs to be a good fit of the audience; not the other way around. You can try to direct the engagement but be careful of stifling the efforts of the community to interact; you don't want to kill it by over-management.

Also, keep in mind that users don't need to engage in one location. while you do want to get a good amount of engagement going, you can offer users multiple places to interact, especially if they are both online and offline. Try pulling the community in to meetups, round-table discussions, happy hours and the like.

Customers who have invested in your product and regularly engage with your platform and brand are often the most sticky customers. These are the users who simply wouldn’t leave, even if a cheaper option showed up on the market. Through engagement and relationship building, you can create an entire user base of sticky customers.