Measuring the Retention Value of Community - CMX Summit West 2016
Transcript of Measuring the Retention Value of Community - CMX Summit West 2016
Retention is the most powerful thing a community can do for a business.
@evanhamilton
(And one of the hardest to measure.)
What you hear: “Build the best product and they will come”
@evanhamilton
What you see: “I’m going with the cheaper option”“Build this feature or I will leave”“They offered me a deal”
Functionality
Gamification
Community,transformation
Changing the world
Relatively Easy
Difficult
Very Difficult
Easy
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Most companies spend way too much time
here. Because this stuff is easy, it’s a constant
battle.
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But you get that. But upper management may not, and they may (rightly) be wary of doing
something others aren’t doing which seems hard to measure.
@evanhamilton
(And you should do it BEFORE they ask)
You need to show them.
STEP 2: START WITH CORRELATION•Causation is hard•Spending 6 months trying to get your first measurement is bad•You need to start building the faith•If you see no results, you can quickly refocus
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STEP 2: START WITH CORRELATION•Take your community members and look at their metrics before they joined the community•Take that same group and look at their metrics after they joined the community
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CASE STUDY
“People who were active in the Salesforce community in the last 3 months spent 2x more than people who were not active.”
Erica KuhlVP of Community
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STEP 3: ANALYZE AND SHARE•Share with team•Caveat that it is not causation and you’d love to measure that
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STEP 3: PUSH FOR CAUSATION•Get your finance team to help, buy your devs/analytics team beer and ask them during a lull•A/B test - invite Group A into the community, don’t invite Group B. Look at metrics before and after.
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STEP 5: REVEL IN YOUR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
•Community takes time and expertise; most communities fail•You are building an emotional connection•You are making the customer more successful•It’s much harder to leave a group of people you’re connected to than a faceless company
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SUMMARY•Choose your metric•Start with correlation•Analyze and share•Use correlation metrics to get support to measure causation•Revel in your competitive advantage
@evanhamilton