Last Tuesday, we discussed that often to scale advertising campaigns you need to fix the business…

Because you can only lower your CAC to 0, but there’s an unlimited upside to increase your LTV.

Strong retention and customer lifetime value is something all unicorns with $1B valuation have in common.

5 case studies to increase LTV and Retention:

#1 How Calm 3Xed their retention:

1. Calm team segmented their users by the features they use.
2. They analyzed the retention of each user cohort per feature.
3. They found that users who use this one feature retain 3x higher longer than average.
4. This feature is setting reminders for their daily meditation session.
5. The problem was that less than 1% used the reminder feature because it was hard to find. It was somewhere deep in Settings.
6. They solved it by making Daily Reminders more prominent. They showed a window right after a user completed their first meditation session, asking them to set a daily reminder.

40% of users who saw this, set a daily reminder and their retention tripled!

Source: amplitude.com

Study your customers with the highest retention, what products they buy, what features they use, etc. Learn how you can get more of these customers or get more of your other customers to be like them.

#2 Duolingo - 2Xed retention.

1. Duolingo introduced a personalized learning path, which is adjusted in real-time based on the user's progress and mistakes.

2. They leveraged the power of streaks, which are a series of consecutive days a user engages with the app. Duolingo prominently displays streak counts, encouraging users to maintain their learning 'streak'.

3. They also implemented a 'streak freeze' feature, allowing users to keep their streaks alive even if they miss a day, which can be purchased using in-app currency, thus also driving engagement with other app features.

The result? Users who engaged with these personalized paths and maintained their streaks were 2.5 times more likely to stick with the app long-term.

P.S. I had a 365-day streak on Duolingo when I was learning German.

#3 Days Brewing, a 0.0% alcohol-free beer maker saw an increase of their LTV by 62% from customers engaged via text compared to those only contacted through more traditional channels.

#4 Oatly, a milk company. - 2X-ed LTV.

1. Oatly implemented a dedicated Oatly Subscriptions landing page, which included an FAQ section addressing common customer inquiries and concerns.

2. An on/off toggle was added to subscription product pages, simplifying the process of becoming a subscriber.

3. These updates led to a 188% increase in monthly recurring revenue and more than doubled the lifetime value compared to one-time purchases.

#5 B2B SaaS increased LTV by 400%

Crystal is a B2B SaaS company founded in 2015 that offers an adaptive selling tool for B2B sales teams.

1. Initially, most of Crystal's revenue came from self-service, credit card payments (PLG model).

2. Crystal struggled with scaling using PLG alone and realized they needed to shift their model to increase their lifetime value (LTV).

3. The company began a transition around 2020, hiring a VP of Sales and VP of Customer Success, focusing on B2B sales.

4. They placed new limits on their self-service accounts and nurtured small accounts into larger, more profitable B2B deals.

5. Crystal observed that team subscriptions had significantly better retention rates than individual ones, prompting a shift to a more B2B-focused sales model.

6. The shift resulted in tripling the Revenue per user and improving net retention rates to approximately 120% for B2B accounts.

7. The new model includes a freemium base that leads to different levels of accounts (MQLs, Mid Market, and Enterprise) with tailored sales strategies.

This change in the business model increased their LTV by 400%.

Hope you can find some ideas in these insights that will allow you to increase your retention and LTV, allowing you to fix your business, and increase viable CAC, so you can scale your campaigns.

Cheers,

You are a free member of

Growth Catalyst Club

1. Get 1 on 1 Facebook Ads help.

2. Spending >$3k/mo on FB ads? | Get A Free Audit (worth $500)