Spend 5 minutes on this every month + free Google Sheets template 💖📊
Super brief overview:
Retention is incredibly important (I’ll explain why exactly in this post). Unfortunately a lot of people are calculating it totally incorrectly 😅 I made a free template in Google Sheets you can use to figure out your actual retention.
What is retention (and are you calculating it wrong?)
A long time ago, I wrote a post all about retention (if you’re new, you can read it here). Retention represents the percentage of people who renew each month. Despite what you may think, retention is actually NOT the number of people on your “rebill on” list. Just trust me. I’ll get to that in a second though.
Why is retention important?
Retention is a great metric to check on once a month, to have a pulse check on if fans are enjoying your page enough to renew
When you try new things on your page, you can see whether or not it makes people renew MORE OR LESS. That’s important!!
Examples of things you can learn from your retention metric:
You might find that doing rebill rewards literally doesn’t affect retention at all and maybe isn’t worth your time (or the opposite - maybe it makes retention increase a ton, so you know you should prioritize rebill rewards!)
Maybe different sale prices have a big impact on retention
Maybe different business models (sending a lot of ppv, no ppv) affect your retention
Maybe how active you are in chats affects retention
Literally anything you do could affect retention
In general, we should aim for retention that improves month to month — or at the very least, is consistent. Seeing a big dip in retention suggests you might be doing something new that is hurting your business 👀
Spending a few minutes per month checking this takes like NO time at all, but gives you such a good glimpse into the health of your page. Here are some examples of how I have learned from retention:
Tried posting weekly “throwback” posts to re-share old full length content to the wall. Did this 1x/week and noticed retention improved!
Ran a VERY cheap sale (like $5 instead of the usual $35) and noticed that retention went down a ton the next two months.
Stopped doing free photos/videos in mass messages (bc they were disrupting my chatting flow) and it literally didn’t impact retention at all yay
Some ways YOU can use this metric:
Figure out if sending way more or way less ppvs has any impact on people renewing
Figure out if a sale has any impact on people renewing
If there’s something you low key hate doing…try not doing it for a month and see maybe it doesn’t even help retention at all so you can stop doing it 👀
If you’re just looking at the “rebill on” list size, you probably have incorrect info.
The “rebill on” list is in my experience is never the same amount of people as people who actually renew each month. I dont know why for sure, but my guesses are:
Sometimes people think they’re going to rebill, but they use a prepaid card that actually makes the rebill not go through
Sometimes people leave rebill on because they know there are rewards, and then they turn it off before the rebill happens
The real source of truth of how many people renew each month…is by looking at the “renew” stat on your fan subscription page.
If you look at the numbers yourself, you’ll see that your “renew” number does not match your rebill list size. If you ever find a definitive answer as to why, please let me know haha.
The right way to calculate retention is, for example:
(the number of people who renewed in February) divided by (the number of people who were there in January)
Anyway - I was making an analytics breakdown for a friend for a case study and decided to make it into an editable Google Sheets template that anybody can use :)
When you open the doc, click on “file —> make a copy” so you can save it to your own drive and edit it there.
It looks like this:
Once you make a copy to your drive, you can edit the first few columns to see what your retention is! Once you plug in your fan numbers, retention will calculate automatically <3
How to calculate your retention
Step 1:
Open my Google Sheet template and save a copy to your own drive. Click on “file —> make a copy” so you can save it to your own drive.
Step 2: Go to your statistics (here) page and go month by month) and replace the numbers in columns B, C, and D. You don’t need to edit anything else on the page! The retention will calculate automatically!
Go month by month and change the date filter on your stats page ^
That’s my speech on retention!
I promise, incorporating just a few minutes each month into checking this metric will spark SOOO many ideas. I hope you enjoyed today’s lesson!
Good luck out there,
Kelly