How we increase Surfingbird user loyalty

Typically, such articles are very general and come down to tips from the series “Make a good product, exercise in the morning and listen to your mother - and then your users will come back to you again and again.” I, though I do not promise a silver bullet in terms of increasing the retention rate, but I will tell you what exactly we are doing for this in Surfingbird .

In our case, a third of users remain with us, and forever. They use Surfingbird every month.



The very first task that we must solve is to be in the user's mind. Associate with the recommendation system / time killer and show that the recommendations of Surfingbird can be trusted:

• We start from the very first steps, that is, from registration - we show men the most popular interest categories for men, women - the corresponding female categories. This helps us to launch the “Surfingbird - personal Internet” trigger (now, however, only a part of users see this).
• Then the user notes the interests, and we take him by the pen on the site in the first minutes, explaining what and how it works and, most importantly, what else is on the site, in addition to the toolbar in the recommendations. Not everyone likes it, but it is necessary.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• If he missed the intro and got into the feed, we immediately send 7 recommendations to it so that the new user has something to do until he puts the first like.
  
  
  
  
• Our studies of user behavior show that everything is tied to likes. In other words, the user becomes ours if he likes 5-10 pages with content. After this, magic happens, we pull the rabbit out of the hat, the user rejoices and stays with us forever.

That is, you always need to understand what action leads to the receipt of "your" user and try to shorten the path that he walks from the moment he logs on to the site to complete this action. This is your main KPI.

• Cold start. When you come to us, we know nothing about you, except your interests. We need not to push you away with our crazy ability to generate recommendations. It's like getting to know a girl and shouting to her at the first minute, “I have a huge dick, and I know how to deal with him, believe me!” Great tactic, but not for everyone. At first, we show you pages and videos selected by the hands of content managers from the most popular. That is, we skim the cream from the best pages and show you this at the very beginning. Thus we form the first impression of Surfingbird. You think "ok, even if I saw this photo or video, why not express my sympathy again." You like, we will find out your preferences, and now the mechanism of personal recommendations has started.
• Geography. This advice is not for everyone, but if you work with content, there is a very big chance that for Omsk residents jokes about Omsk people will not be as funny as for residents of Moscow. We set up different experiments and came to the conclusion that for some cities, targeting content by geographical features has its advantages.
• Tactful reminders and tips. In our case, it is "you put few likes, so that recommendations are better, put more."

This page, done in 5 minutes, helped us increase the number of likes by 350% in two days. Sometimes stupid decisions in the forehead can work better than mathematical algorithms. We just say: user, click the fucking like, we don’t understand anything about your preferences.



Ok, the user has registered, I understand how the service works. He liked everything, but sooner or later he will end the session and close the site.

Our task is to remind ourselves and return it back to us. And do it regularly.

The most active and free of our tools in this is emailing.
Many will say that this is fffuuu. But I will say that the percentage of opening letters reaches 25%, with more than half a million base. So that’s ok, it works.

We work with mail in the following order:

1) The letter "Welcome to Surfingbird" (service features, etc.).

2) A personal newsletter in which we remind you that we select the content personally for you.

3) Editorial newsletter - in it we collect the most interesting, in our opinion. Here we can fool around with the headlines from the series “Beer, Torture and Fasting” and try to expand the user's circle of interests.

4) Project news - everyone loves to see how progress is progressing, and everyone loves good news. More often tell users about your successes and that you have everything under control.

5) “We miss you” - a letter that is sent to users if they do not come to us for a long time. In the letter, we first push a little bit to pity, and then offer the most popular content.

6) Specialized newsletter (aka “Friday Tits”). It started as a joke, but now every Friday users who have chosen Erotica receive a newsletter with 15 naked girls. Why is this important to us? Imagine that you are sitting in your stuffy office or on a boring couple at the institute. And then it comes, this is a magic letter. You open, and there are selected photos of girls. What could be better? You are glad you have endorphins produced, and all thanks to Surfingbird. For us, just such a combination is important: joy = Surfingbird.



What is especially worth mentioning, we send through our mailing system. We tried to use Amazon SES, but it is not only expensive, but also slow (maximum 90 letters per second). There is a unique pixel in the letter to watch the number of discoveries; we also monitor how everything goes throughA special service of Mail.ru .

In addition, we weight links with UTM tags and then collect data through the Google Analytics API to put them in our interface (rather than digging into GA every time).