Tracking and improving long term patron retention

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#1

Hey there creators,

Hope everyone had a relaxing weekend. In case you missed it, we recently published a blog post on tracking and improving long term patron retention. What is retention? Well it’s really just a fancy word for how many of your patrons are sticking around and continuing to pay for your membership month after month.

Here are some of our top tips on improving your patron retention —

  • Deliver content regularly: In our research, patrons told us they want content that is consistently delivered. 80% of patrons said that in an ideal world, they would want content at least once a week.
  • Set expectations: Whatever your content cadence is, set expectations of content release or update frequency (i.e: “ a new episode every week”, “monthly tutorials”).
  • Keep communication open: Be honest and transparent about your timeline and potential creative slowdowns. Your patrons will feel more connected to your creative process, and you’ll keep them around for longer.

What are your strategies you can share with the creator community? I’d thought it’d be fun to gather here and discuss the results from the step-by-step guide as well as share strategies for improving patron retention that you have found to be successful.

Cheers,

Brian

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#2

Thanks for posting this.
From my graph it looks like things were going well, but I have no idea why there is a sudden drop. Is this pandemic related? or something else?

I have recently started to use Bonjoro for the purpose of Patreon Retention.

In practice for it to be actually useful you need to use Zapier to automate some of the workflow and filtering. It is an extremely time consuming and expensive service to set up. For this reason I’m not sure I would recommend it, but my Patrons sure did appreciate the personal video messages.

It would be great if Patreon provided some more inbuilt retention tools such as milestones and anniversaries that could link to services like Bonjoro in a more native way.

Patreon Retention 2019 - 2020
Patreon Retention 2019 - 2020995×543 50.2 KB

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#3

Hey @kombilife

Thanks for sharing your graph! It’s possible that you are seeing some patrons leaving due to financial instability. Perhaps you could look at your Exit Survey data to confirm this?

Thank you for the feedback on the Bonjoro integration. We definitely want to make it as simple as possible for creators to make deeper connections using messaging and keep track of milestones and anniversaries in PRM.

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#4

Thanks for the suggestion - I check thee Exit Survey all the time to see if Patrons are generally unhappy with our content. To be honest I don’t find it as useful as it could be, people mostly say “their financial situation changed”

Perhaps if there were a function to graph or show trends on what makes people leave it would be more useful.

It would be super helpful to see which posts / traffic sources / campaigns were most successful at recruiting new Patrons and also which caused more to leave so that we creators can make strategic decisions rather than guessing.

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