Most businesses deal with churn, even the ones that don’t call it that. Businesses with recurring revenue deal with churn most directly.
We want to keep the customers we have. We want them to renew over and over again — whether we bill monthly, annually, or on some other cycle.
There are several keys to managing churn:
- Identify your churn rate and how it’s affecting growth overall.
- Identify what is causing churn — where in the cycle do customers tend to leave?
- Attempt to forecast and prevent future churn. Find customers who are slipping away and bring them back before they cancel.
- Offer a quality exit experience to churning customers.
- Create a winback routine to try to get them back.
I’ve been listening to a podcast all about churn, called Churn.fm, that I’ve enjoyed a lot. The host interviews people managing churn at SaaS companies and talks about methods they’ve used or are using to improve churn to keep more revenue.
Here are a few episodes I liked:
- Churn at ChargeBee with Arundhati Balachandran.
- Churn that’s masked inside high growth with Aazar Shad of Userpilot.
- A human-first approach to churn with Casey Graham of Gravy. (His firm offers this service.)
Also, from WordPress Podcast WPMRR — Joe and Christi talk about churn, MRR, and ARR in their latest episode, and it falls nicely in line with these others, but with a WordPress bent.
I would bet most of us aren’t paying enough attention to churn. We should be! Give these a listen, and if you aren’t tracking and working to improve churn, it’s time!
