Churn Rate Reduction with Retention Emails

Most efforts at user retention are post-cancellation. What if you could know someone was going to cancel before they did?

For subscription services, it’s pretty easy to identify who is about to cancel. Look at their usage data.

Let’s look at a simple example:

A user signed up 2 months ago and is paying for your site monthly. They are going to cancel at the end of the month.

How do you know?

Here is their usage pattern:

As you can see, they’ve used the site 4 times in the past 6 weeks. What’s most important is that they’re engagement is dropping. They have used the site 0 times in the past 6 weeks. If that’s far off your normal user engagement (and it should be), you want to be proactive.

What can you do to stop churn?

If the user doesn’t cancel before they receive their next bill, they probably will after they do. Here’s a great opportunity to identify this user and engage them with a re-marketing email establishing the value of your product.

Firstly, you want to be able to see these at-risk customers in aggregate. Once you’ve grouped all of your at-risk customers, you can start measuring if your customer retention efforts work.

Once you segment users then create triggered emails to communicate why they should keep paying you. At the very least, it’s an opportunity to start a dialogue about how you can improve your product. Users who feel a connection to you are less likely to cancel. Try different techniques to see what works. And as with all your marketing efforts, measure conversions to see how successful you are at re-engaging customers.

If you measure your efforts, you’ll know what works and what doesn’t. Churn is an issue for every company, and with the right tools in place you’ll beat it.