Retention Talk

Triaging customer feedback

• At Loomly they view retention as a tripod. The customer success team looks at data and helps to work with customers, the engineering team builds features and fixes bugs, and the management team works on growth and strategy. As they grow, the entire team is obsessed with scaling the feedback loop to make sure they stay in touch with customers and understand all concerns.

Term optimization

• The folks over at Loomly make sure to offer an annual subscription both at sign up and once a monthly user has been using the product for a few cycles. By checking customer behavior and how active they are, they can prompt them with the best value for the customer.

Locking out customers.

• Locking out a customer can be a last ditch effort to keep them around. By sending dunning emails and communicating the value that will be lost, hopefully you can avoid locking out a customer. But sometimes, it’s the only way to get their attention. Make sure to freeze the account without deleting valuable information in there. That way once you do recover the payment, your user won’t have to reset everything in their account. You don’t want your delinquent churn to turn into an active cancellation.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space.

Indicators of Engaged Users

• As Janna says, they look for the number of comments on the app as it’s a clear indicator of someone testing it out to see if it works. They also look at if a user is integrating another tool on the app. Folks who fail with integrations and may not post as much aren’t likely to stick around in the long run.

Predicting Churn

• A huge part of what the folks at ProdPad have been doing is trying to figure out which activities people are or aren’t doing before they churn. The data is transferred to the CS team who then reach out to customers whose usage has dropped off.

Iterating on Packaging and Pricing

• A big piece that Janna and ProdPad are looking at is how to better package and price the product to provide the proper value at the right size for the right customers. Pricing is a crucial tool in retaining customers and it seems they’ve been doing it right over at ProdPad as Janna says their first customer ever is still with them.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space.

Options to provide when cancelling

• With wine delivery, Winc often runs into problems with delivery when no one is able to sign for the package which can lead to cancellations. In the cancelation flow they make sure to address this issue by educating customers on alternative options they may not have thought of such as getting it delivered to a FedEx location or a local Walgreens.

Focusing on the second month retention

• At Winc, they use a first time incentive to acquire customers. Delivering a fantastic product is great, but it's about setting the right expectations and then delivering on those expectations month over month.

Using NPS to understand holes in the customer experience

• When Jai first started, he discovered through NPS that there was a big hole in product availability. Despite pandemic struggles, the team was able to rally around getting the number of products that customers were asking for on the site. With CAC increasing year over year, they have been able to drive higher LTV by being on top of the latest wine trends and making sure more SKUs were available to their customers

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space.

Keeping churned customers in the company biome

• During the cancellation process the team asks questions but is careful not to over do it. Customers can still keep their account and still get access to the free tools and white papers that are available. Kelly understands that a cancelled customer does not necessarily mean they are gone for good so they make it easy to return.

Figuring out what a successful customer looks like

• It isn’t always an easy task but replicating success is tantamount to reducing churn. When you examine your app and look for movement patterns it can become clear where your efforts should be doubled and even tripled. Successful customers make churn an afterthought.

The customer isn’t always right

• As Kelly says, the biggest mistake a product team or a company can make is allowing the customers to drive the bus when it comes to the roadmap. You have to reset yourself constantly and align to what the market fit is or the product fit is for the user that you're trying to solve the problems for. Low hanging fruit can be tempting but getting distracted by the things that there isn’t a market fit for can be deadly.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space.

Moving away from the "solution-first" mindset

• As Kevin puts it, they try not to just keep fixing every single problem a customer comes to them with. Instead they gather data around the underlying problem and use that to improve the product. Instead of making faster horses, Meister is trying to evolve into cars.

Activation is the first step in retention

• If folks sign up but don’t activate, writing an email to ask what happened can illuminate problems in your onboarding process. A customer who doesn’t understand the product in the first place is unlikely to stick around and boost your LTV.

Build a strong relationship with other teams

• Sometimes there can be a natural tension between product and other teams. Kevin says, the solution is to work together with customer success and sales because all teams have contact with the user. Additionally, people who come through your self-service funnel are just as important as customers who sign up through the sales team, and oftentimes these are people who are educated about your product and interested to move forward with what they already know.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space.

Check out the full writeup here.

Going to where your customers already are

• Supercast has a philosophy to not try and take listeners away from the platforms they are familiar with. They are able to cut down the number of steps for fans to support their favorite podcast enabling Supercast to have an advantage in keeping folks around due to the inherent value of being easy to get to.

Making cancellation reasons easily accessible to the team.

• At Supercast, they feed all reasons for cancellation into one slack channel. This way as Jason says, he can check in periodically to determine if there is a trend or just bad luck.

Understanding the customer journey

• Not all cancellations are due to a bad impression. For business models like podcasting, there is an extent to customer satisfaction. The reason they may be discontinuing your service is because customers have used it to the outcome that they were expecting.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space.

Check out the full writeup here.

Eating your own dog food

• It’s essential to know how your products work from a customer perspective. At Close, Stephany says that the sales and CS team both use the product on a day to day basis. It’s easy to put yourself in the shoes of your customers when you already are there in the first place

Learning from customer feedback

• When you listen to your customer, you will no longer have to wonder what is wrong with your product or how you can make them stay. They will proactively point out the areas in your product that they want improved. The key however is to act on that feedback, don’t just write it down.

The two buckets of churn

• Putting churn into two buckets: avoidable churn and unavoidable churn. If you’ve done your offboarding properly, you’ll know if a customer left due to a reason that is within your control or not. Focusing on responses you get from surveys that contain something like a lack of a feature request, an adoption issue, and so on will empower you to observe fixable trends to give retention a boost.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space.

Check out the full writeup here.

Drive automation to form as many connections as possible

• Segmenting clients is the first step in retaining them. Different clients have different MRR and different needs. Utilizing automation tools to determine segments will cut time spent in figuring out customer problems to get quicker answers.

Gather information in the cancellation flow

• We talk a lot about adding friction to the cancellation process but Maja illuminated that often times different segments require different cancellation processes. It might be better to reach out to enterprise level clients preemptively whereas smaller to medium customers require help from support at the point of cancellation.

Be proactive about term optimization

• If you have a customer for a few months and usage looks good, you can use push notifications or emails to ask them if they’ve considered upgrading. Using a discount is a great way to get folks to upgrade as well.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space.

Check out the full writeup here.

Utilizing Social Proof

• Search your company name, a hashtag, or other key phrases on twitter to see what folks are saying about you. Automation and outsourcing is your friend here if the operation becomes too time intensive. Otherwise set up a time periodically to review any social proof that is out there.

Implementing exit surveys to figure out reasons for churn

• There are all sorts of reasons folks will stop using your product. Adding a little bit of friction to the cancellation process can have a big impact on unlocking retention solutions. In the case of Jenna and Who Gives a Crap, some folks may just be re-engaging in a non-subscription manner.

Communicate early and often

• The team at Who Gives a Crap makes sure to stay on top of their delinquent churn with dunning emails. When they noticed a high churn rate in Australia, they did some digging and found out that the hyperlink to update payment systems wasn’t working. Fortunately they caught it early due to consistent tracking and checking in with their metrics.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space.

Check out the full writeup here.

Acquiring customers the “right” way

• At Trade Coffee, they use data to make sure they get people coffee that they are guaranteed to love. There's a bright line between doing what’s necessary to acquire the right kind of customers the right way versus acquiring customers and figuring out how to retain them later.very single interaction with your customer is either a value-add or a value-diminishing interaction.
• A VOC (voice of the customer program) survey can very easily be a value-diminishing action. Asking for a lot of information takes time. But it doesn’t have to be a survey per se. Get creative. Look at or evaluate through a community forum, review sites, and more.

Retaining customers one bag at a time

• Mike talked a lot about focusing on the experience had with the product on a single unit basis. Did they like the taste of the coffee? Did the bag show up on time? Did they make some sort of customization to their order? By providing the best experience possible, retention becomes second nature.

Reduce the friction of your cancellation process… but don’t eliminate it entirely

• Making your cancellation process difficult isn’t going to inspire a customer to come back down the line. Try to figure out why the customer is cancelling. You may not be able to change their mind at the moment, but you can figure out how to prevent future cancelations for the same reason.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space.