How Musora Combats Churn with Customer.io

Musora is all about making the world a more harmonious place through music. Serving close to 200,000 online learners, the brand offers great teachers, top-quality lessons, and student-centered online communities. Musora’s suite of apps teach students drums (drumeo), piano (pianote), guitar (guitareo), and voice (singeo). 

Its main offering is an annual subscription, which means driving strong retention and reducing churn is key to success. And every student matters: even a half-point reduction in churn rate can make a major impact on revenue over time. So as Musora’s subscriber base expanded, its retention process had to evolve too.

That’s when Musora partnered with Customer.io. With a powerful personalization and segmentation engine at their fingertips, the brand achieved:

• 3.5% increase in win-back conversions
• 35 person-hours saved per week
• 10x more real-time data processed

Challenge: manual process, delayed data

Early on, Musora handled cancellations manually. A full-time retention specialist emailed each canceled subscriber individually, crafting one-off offers in hopes of retaining the customers. That process had a conversion rate of just 3%. 

Even after Musora partially automated the process with another customer engagement tool, campaigns had to be triggered manually. Eventually, as the roster of students grew, so did the volume of cancellation requests; delays made it impossible to send campaigns at the optimal time.

“We would have too many events going through and get backlogged in the pipeline. You’d get cancellation emails 48 hours after you canceled rather than immediately after. Everything was a little bit chaotic; we were sending out manually processed emails. We knew something had to change.”

—Randy Epp, Product Director, Musora

Solution: Level up with Customer.io

When Musora started using Customer.io, they found an opportunity to revamp their entire reengagement strategy. They pinpointed the exact reasons customers were canceling, created a sophisticated campaign to deliver personalized offers, and automated everything to free up the team’s time. Here’s how they did it in three steps. 

1. Gather key information at cancellation

Musora started by leveling up data capture at the moment of cancellation. Prompting users to pick from ten different cancellation reasons, it also offered two opportunities to give free-form feedback.

To develop the cancellation reasons list, the team dug through past cancellation emails to learn why people typically canceled. Their research identified about 30 reasons, which the team then narrowed down to ten:

The final screen provides the subscriber an opportunity to give more detailed feedback. 

While only five to ten percent of students provided in-depth feedback, those messages were an incredible learning opportunity for the Musora team. 

2. Build a hyper-personalized campaign

Crafting effective campaigns always begins with a brand’s knowledge about the people it serves. Drawing on the lessons learned from the existing labor-intensive process, the team mapped out potential reengagement options for each cancellation reason: 

Using Customer.io’s visual workflow builder, Musora created 10 different personalized paths based on cancellation, catering the offer to each customer according to their cancellation reason. 

The resulting campaign distills the marketing team’s hard-won knowledge of all the nuances of how to re-engage students into a fully automated process. For example, students who canceled because the price was too high received discounted plan options. Those who canceled based on lack of usage, in contrast, were offered a free month of service and a free one-on-one lesson. 

3. Bring in hundreds of data points per second 

The final piece of the puzzle was increasing data handling capacity — not just to handle the current number of cancellations, but to continue scaling with Musora’s growth. 

Customer.io’s platform brought in 10X more data in real time, allowing the brand to send the right message at the perfect moment. 

“Customer.io has been an opportunity for us to go in there, recover more money, make it a profit center, and also reduce the amount of manual labor that we had to do.”

—Randy Epp, Product Director, Musora

Outcome: 3.5% jump in conversion + 35 hours/week saved

Musora’s hard work paid off as their re-engagement conversion rate rose to 6.5%. What’s more, the 35 hours a week the team was spending on manual re-engagement tasks can now be spent adding value elsewhere. 

“We’ve increased [conversions] three percent from going to Customer.io. And we only considered it a conversion if it was within three days of that email, which is a pretty tight time window. When I look at the overall scope, those emails are converting double or more of what is actually in the conversion window there.”

—Randy Epp, Product Director, Musora

Do more with your resources

Musora’s achievement did more than boost conversion rates and repurpose its talent; it allowed the team to focus on big-picture strategy. That’s the power of clarity with Customer.io.

“We all want the thing that shows up on the metric and also the time back to do other things. I will say [retention specialist] is a pretty stressful role, so not only is it saving hours, it’s saving a lot of emotional investment. It’s causing a lot less stress within the organization.”

—Randy Epp, Product Director, Musora