The Retain step captures all customer cancellations and churned subscriptions. It focuses on the key churn issues - cancelling customers, reasons given for unsubscribing, and the timing of churn in the context of the subscriber lifecycle.
Key Performance Goals
Lower your churn rate
A primary goal is to gradually decrease the rate of paid subscriber churn. A decline of just 2% has a huge cumulative effect.
Recover cancelled customers
Finding and recovering customers who have cancelled should be a major focus at this stage. Once they have hit ‘unsubscribe’, the clock is ticking to change their mind.
Improve 3 month retention rate
Your cohort analysis is one of your best measures of longer term retention effectiveness. The first two months will account for 50-80% of all subscriber churn. Increasing 3 months retention is a primary basis of longer term profitability.
Important Attributes
Subscription status
Once a subscription status changes to ‘stopped’ - it is time to take action. These customer accounts require urgent intervention.
Cancellation reason
Why the customer cancelled is key to understanding what has the best chance of changing their mind.
Activity & engagement
If a customer has cancelled, it is important to understand just how engaged they were with your content before that happened.
Segment Actions to Use
Annual subscribers who cancelled yesterday
You need to respond quickly to a cancellation decision. High value customers who cancelled yesterday are an important group to focus on.
Action: Incentives are often necessary to change a customer’s mind here. Experiment with different special offers to find the most cost-effective discount.
Customers cancelling due to experiential reasons
These are customers who cancel due to poor player. streaming, or support reasons.
Action: Content isn’t driving this cancellation, so an acknowledgement with an apology discount gives the highest probability of success with this segment.
Highly engaged customers cancelling
These are customers who are in the top 10-15% of content consumers who nevertheless have decided to content.
Action: This group frequently cancels because they are quickly exhausting your content library. This means they like it - so focus on teasing upcoming content.