Community Retention Challenges: How to Achieve Healthy Growth in Communities

A successful community relies on the efforts of the community manager at every stage:

In the difficult startup phase, the community manager overcame the challenge of customer acquisition, establishing a stable customer base for the community;

In the growth phase, the community manager addressed the issue of member activation, converting community members into product users and increasing the conversion rate;

With stable customer acquisition and high conversion rates, the community began to enter the maturity phase, but three challenges lay ahead for the community manager: RRR.

3R Challenges

3R comes from the AARRR model. In the startup and growth phases, the community manager completed the 2A tasks (Acquisition, Activation), and the next step is the 3R challenges.

• Retention: Ensuring users continue to use the product or service and maintain their loyalty.

• Revenue: Generating income through user behavior.

• Referral: Encouraging existing users to recommend the product or service to others, thereby achieving secondary dissemination.

As the community matures, some users may lose interest in the community or product, leading to decreased engagement; the scale and complexity of the community increase, potentially causing conflicts between new and old members. These factors can all affect the retention rate of community users.

This article will focus on the first key issue among these three challenges: community retention rate, hoping to provide some insights for community managers.

Quantity and Duration of Consensus

The quantity of consensus affects how many high-retention users the community can have, while the duration of consensus influences how long users stay in the community. The formation of consensus requires user expectations, which can be expectations about the product or expectations about the price.

For projects that have already issued tokens, the reasons and results of user expectations are often reflected in asset prices. When users anticipate that the project's development will enhance asset value, they are more confident in holding or trading these assets, thereby increasing the circulation and holding of the project, creating a positive cycle.

For projects that have not issued tokens, user expectations are usually maintained through TGE. Users look forward to future airdrops or token distributions, thus choosing to stay in the community to await future gains.

How to Spark User Expectations?

Any dynamic can become an influencing factor. Cooperation information, product updates, and the status of proposals, etc. When user expectations are continuously met, consensus gradually forms, further strengthening user retention and participation.

Many community managers frequently post tweets within the community to encourage users to share and like, which is also for this reason. It is necessary to increase the weight of information as much as possible and expand the dissemination of information, subtly creating new expectations for users regarding the project.

This is a mechanical operational behavior. Many community managers use Bots to reduce repetitive workloads: Bots can automatically forward project information to the community. However, Bots have a drawback; they cannot promote user dissemination behavior. Why not turn this information into individualized tasks? This can expand the reach of information and promote community interaction.

TaskOn's Smart Task feature can automatically capture updates from the project's official account, creating various tasks to expand information dissemination and generate expectations among more users.

Continuous Interaction: Frequency Forms Habit

Habits are formed based on frequency rather than duration.

A very common saying: It takes 21 days to form a habit. But what really works is the repeated behavior over those 21 days that forms the habit.

To improve user retention, the question for community managers becomes: How many interactions do users need to develop a habit?

Looking at historically successful projects, they have all focused on ensuring that users use their products daily:

Centralized exchanges hold continuous trading competitions; L1/L2 projects consistently support their ecosystem projects, integrating more dApps and encouraging users to experience their ecosystem; dApps continuously expand the project's reach.

The community solution platform TaskOn recognizes the importance of frequency. In the community task template, there is an important task setting option: Recurrence. When setting community tasks, community managers can set the frequency at which community members complete tasks.

Currently available options include: Once/Daily/Weekly/Monthly. Once set, tasks refresh automatically, and community managers do not need to repeat operations.

To improve retention rates, community managers need to connect enough user behavior attempts until this behavior is firmly embedded in users' minds.

Improving the Incentive System

The disconnection between immediate rewards and delayed rewards is an issue that needs attention. For projects that have not issued tokens, TGE can be seen as a form of delayed reward. During the waiting period for rewards, some users may feel that their actions lack meaning due to the absence of timely feedback and may give up on continued participation.

One way to address this issue is to provide some immediate, visible incentives or feedback to encourage users to continue participating. For example, the project team can set milestone rewards or periodic rewards to incentivize users for their continued participation before TGE. These rewards can take the form of virtual rewards, honor badges, or community status upgrades, making users feel that their contributions are recognized and motivating them to continue participating.

Currently, there is a trend in the market: introducing a points system as an immediate incentive, measuring users' contributions through points.

The author has previously written an article on the points system, detailing its benefits and how to quickly build a points system, which can be referenced (Community Management Practice: Points System).

Healthy Growth

Some rely on advertising for growth; some rely on third-party growth platforms; some rely on KOLs, spending large amounts of money on advertising and marketing. While communities can indeed grow rapidly in a short time, once investment stops, the number of community users will quickly decline. For communities that have entered the maturity phase, improving user retention rates is essential for achieving healthy growth. Integrating the product into users' daily lives makes using the product a habit.