How are companies driving engagement and retention?
New tactics and examples from Reddit, Replit, DuoLingo, Netflix Linear and more
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In their latest update to investors, DuoLingo’s CEO explained that a change to their UX resulted in a major uplift across DAUs, time spent learning and paid conversion.
The change involved moving away from using hearts which are lost to a new “Energy” bar that refills when a user gets answers correct. The impact on core engagement and retention metrics was pretty impressive. DAUs, time spent learning and free to paid conversion all increased after the new UI:
We have rarely seen a feature move more than one of these metrics, let alone all three. - Duolingo CEO commenting on the impact of new UI changes
It’s now been a full year since we last looked at how companies are driving engagement and retention. Since then, new AI products like Lovable have hit the market, companies like Figma have released their engagement and retention metrics in preparation for their upcoming IPO and the likes of Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic have released a series of new features in their AI assistants designed to drive up engagement and retention.
In this Deep dive, we’re going to explore some of the new features and tactics that leading tech companies across SaaS, B2C and B2B are deploying in 2025 to drive up engagement and retention.
If you’re interested in exploring some of these new tactics and potentially applying them to your own product then this Deep dive should help.
Coming up:
Real world examples of engagement and retention tactics from companies including Figma, Reddit, Instacart, Replit, Instagram and more.
Why some of the fastest-growing AI companies are reportedly struggling with "huge" churn rates - and the quick-fix tactics they're deploying to combat it
How one company makes it nearly impossible for customers to leave, and the specific tactic that boosted net dollar retention to 134%
A controversial new way that an AI company is planning to use notifications to boost engagement
The engagement and retention tactics featured in full
How this new analysis is structured
This analysis contains practical, real world examples of new features, tactics, policies and more designed to boost engagement and retention.
Here’s a snapshot of some of the examples included:
These examples cover a bunch of different tactics including:
UX improvements - changes to the UX of products that are either directly or indirectly designed to boost engagement and retention. For example, Netflix has launched a new homepage which it says boosts engagement and retention.
Notifications - proactive notifications that are carefully crafted to re-engage lapsed users and drive higher levels of engagement.
Policies - the adoption of new policies can impact retention - especially in the AI era with ethics and safety becoming a more fundamental issue for customers.
New products / features - one of the most powerful tactics for driving engagement and retention: building new products and features. Some of the new features include home page redesigns that boost activation, voice UX, AI agent integrations and new features that increase the cost of switching to competitors. Companies are also launching new products in their portfolios to appeal to wider groups of user segments. We’ll analyse these together to understand their impact on engagement and retention.
Engagement and retention tactics - a closer look at each of the examples from leading companies
Now let’s take a look at some of the examples from the companies featured in this deep dive.