Amazon, in contrast, is perhaps the gold standard example of retention prowess. The company’s subscription program, Amazon Prime, has been a particular triumph in retaining customers, largely due to the two-day free shipping included on thousands of items, but also many ancillary benefits that have been added to the program, such as its video and

The product’s initial base of 55,000 users were also highly active; about half of them returned to the app at least once a week. The founders chose a freemium business model—the basic version of the app was free, with the option to upgrade to a paid pro version for a $49 annual subscription, and the conversion rate to the paid version was an

When it comes to monetization, analysis starts by returning to the basic mapping of the entire customer journey, which, recall from Chapter Six the team should create when it first starts the growth hacking process. The goal at this stage is to highlight all of the opportunities in the journey—from acquisition to retention—for earning revenue from

Whichever you choose, your reports should be insightful and actionable. Too many reports are nothing more than “data puking,” as Google Analytics expert Avinash Kaushik calls it.18 Just disseminating metrics helter-skelter does little more than create confusion.

LEGENDARY BUSINESS EXPERT Peter Drucker famously wrote many years ago that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.1

So it’s vital to take an analytical approach to finding out why that aha moment hasn’t been achieved—and how to achieve it—rather than relying on conjecture. For this there are three key methods, all of which should be employed in concert. Additional customer surveying, including interviews and getting out in the marketplace to talk to customers

1. BRAND AMBASSADOR PROGRAMS These programs generally combine the power of social rewards with that of tangible ones. By designating members as high-status users, these programs confer social recognition, and most also offer a series of perks.

WhatsApp’s North Star was therefore the number of messages sent, rather than, say, daily active users, because even if a user is active with the app every day, but is only sending one message, it’s unlikely that WhatsApp is their preferred choice for communicating with their network.

A/B testing should also go far beyond the language and design of landing pages and marketing promotions. Remember that a core tenet of growth hacking is experimentation all through the customer experience funnel: not just customer awareness and acquisition but also activation, retention, revenue, and referral.