Use this 4-Part Framework to Increase the Chances of Retaining Your *First* Customers
Plus the GPT prompt to help you do the same
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Amazon didn’t grow by chasing new customers.
They grew by making sure people kept coming back.
With Prime, 1-Click, and seamless service, they turned retention into a machine—driving over $500 billion in annual revenue and 200M+ Prime members in under 30 years.
Today, I’ll show you how to think about retention, so you sell more without constantly chasing new customers.
Let’s dive in. 👇
Step 1: The story of Exploding Kittens
On a train to London last week, headphones in, I was listening to a podcast with the founder of Exploding Kittens.
Amongst all the cool ideas, the publicity stunts and the marketing plays that made them hugely successful (and they’ve sold A LOT of product).
If you don’t know who Exploding Kittens are, they launched in 2015 with the goal of raising $10,000 on Kickstarter. The result? $8.78 million from 219,382 backers. They became the most backed Kickstarter project of all time (potentially a write-up for another time).
Since then, they’ve gone on to sell over 18 million games, to put it in perspective— they sell a game every 6.4 seconds.
There was one thing that stuck out about their story:
When it came to making new games, they had a group of people who ‘tested’ them before the launch. Think of it like a focus group of game lovers that they wanted to test with before they spent money and time on launching a game with major flaws.
Every time they had a new game prototype, they sent out the new game along with a survey asking everything about the game. What they got back was half-filled-in survey responses and a load of unusable information.
So then they decided to scrap that and instead asked one question, just one:
“Would you play this game again?”
And that became their *north-star* metric to help them decide whether or not they would invest in taking their game to market. And they didn’t take any game to market that didn’t get a 100% ‘yes’ rate to that question.
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The Medium Blueprint — used by over 600+ writers, the exact strategy I used to go from 0 to 90,000 followers on Medium.
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Step 2: The lesson
Recently, I learned this lesson as a customer.
I’d been a long-time customer of a service and I found out the company was running an offer that (a considerable chunk off what I had been paying). So I emailed the company and said I’d like to redeem the offer.
What I got back was plain and simple: This is an offer for new customers, in the future, they’d be an offer will be available for existing customers (plus no details of said offer).
So here’s me, having paid a year’s worth of considerable fees, not able to redeem an offer because I wasn’t a new customer, aka, somebody had never given the company a penny.
What that says to me: as a company, we value new over existing.
It’s a real missed opportunity. Needless to say, I left.
Here’s the thing: if you treat your customers right and focus on making their lives easier and better, you’ve got a marketing engine right there. You won’t need to worry so much about acquiring new customers because your current customers will tell everybody how well you treat them, and they’ll come running.
Can you imagine if Amazon launched and focused solely on new customers? That they weren’t bothered about delivering quickly, offering free delivery, or 1-click purchasing because they were so busy acquiring new customers.
Instead, they ran ads with discounts for new customers only and continued a standard service for their current customers. It’s hard to say, but we can make an educated guess that the growth wouldn’t have been so exponential.
The mantra: focus on delivering for the people who have paid you their money.
Step 3: Retention-building prompt
The step-by-step retention prompt helps you pinpoint areas of your business that you can improve to specifically enhance retention. Of course, this isn’t a complete guide, but it is a start to help you think through where and how you can improve your customer retention: