What are the best ways to handle churn? Cold emailing the customer to provide more value?
4
In my TOS i put: Nobody leaves alive. Worked so far!
As Nitesh said, the big question is why. In short, it could be you, or it could be them, or it could be a better competitor. or change in needs.
you should be capturing the reason for cancellation within the cancel form. Emailing 48 hours after they canceled isn't a bad move either, but more to offer your personal touch in making things right. You should already know why they canceled by that point.
1
"In my TOS i put: Nobody leaves alive." I love this!!! lol
With ChatMod, almost everything is handled through the bot. I'm thinking that we need to revisit this and have that cancelation in the dashboard with a cancellation form. Great thoughts here.
Is ChatMod a need to have or nice to have solution in your honest opinion? What about the opinion of current users?
Was this controlled acquisition or did you open the flood gates?
Obviously need more information, so the first thing I would do is:
Audit:
Target audience, channel, and messages:
a. We want to find out who is signing up
b. If they are actually target or not
c. If they're coming on-board at the right time or not
d. If your sales funnel is lacking in relevant collateral, I would look at this one closely for I would also want to know, what conversations are taking place before they sign-up.
e. Is there a demo that potential users can check out? Is this a guided demo? If not, why not? Maybe it's not needed, for although I had a brief look at your site (yes that was me), I didn't really dig in. I prefer guided demo's, not because of getting the user to sign-up, but rather for information, for the objective of the demo is to ascertain what they think/feel about the pen your selling, and in order to find that out, need to talk to them.
On-boarding:
a. If the on-boarding process is the right one overall
b. If the on-boarding process is tailored for different audience segments, as in what they want to experience is front and centre for them
c. Biased on-boarding process, ie your desire to get them to your Aha moment, rather than their's is skewing the experience, and thus missing out what we may well consider house-keeping, thus is the Aha moment you think they should have, above what they want to have, and is this also affecting your potential to learn from them.
d. Unwarranted and inappropriate automated on-boarding, ie, maybe people need to be on-boarded, maybe they need their hand held, not be a bot or whatever, but by a person.
Payment issues and other involuntary churn factors
Issues with the product, as in ease of use, too complicated, etc, etc. Yes some of these things fall under on-boarding, but we cannot unduly let the product off the hook.
Usage (audience segmentation):
a. How long are they using it before they churn (frequency and duration of sessions)
b. What have they achieved and where do they stop before they churn, etc.
c. Users who stayed put, same thing, and look for deviations, anomalies, etc, etc. Maybe some segments are more inclined to explore, maybe they hit on something that falls into what I mentioned before about biased Aha moments.
Exit survey: Not the biggest fan, not saying it isn't useful, but some points to consider:
a. Results can be biased in that, these are people who want to leave, and emotional disposition at this point may well cloud the information, if you even get any decent information. If there is a reason that says "Other", that's what I click, if I can even be bothered.
b. Putting those who are leaving above those who are staying, using and paying.
c. You may end up with information that is frankly not worth anything, bending and accommodating those not worth taking on-board, resulting in concessions, detours and modifications on an unknown group of people.
d. We do not know relevancy of those who are leaving, and the time and resources needed to find out, by a bootstrapped company, self-funded, pre-seed, may or may not be solo founder, means there needs to be focus, clarity, and efficient usage of resources. Focus on the ones who have stayed put, and getting value. I am assuming these would be paying customers.
e. For an exit survey to show any tangible and applicable insight, you will need a decent sample size, probably far beyond the number of users, and degree of churn you are currently at considering what stage you are at.
f. Don't try to feed everyone yet nourish no one. Nourish the ones putting food on your table.
Caveats for point 6:
a. Ridiculously high churn
b. Churn from core audience
That will do mate, got work to do.
Cheers, Ace.
3
In my opinion it's important to understand why you're seeing churn.
Have a really strong survey when people try to drop off and ask them why they are leaving. Do an NPV on how likely they are to recommend to a friend, ask them how you can improve, whatever it takes to get a real answer from them.
At the end of the day, your product improves when you know your customers needs inside out.
Once you are clear on those and what customers/sectors you're providing solutions for, you can definitely rest assured churn will drop.
You can also be smart how you collect this data. Maybe upon sign up ask them industry & more. And during exit ask them more targeted questions on why they are leaving.
I'd also build an internal dashboard on frequency of use for the guys leaving.
If you see they're leaving and they've barely used it, you know you can work on better onboarding - adding webinars for starters or whatever works for you.
Hope that helps!
1
Overall, I don't spend that much time on people who are walking out the door because I want to focus on the product and the people who are continuing to pay for my service.
I listen to everyone who writes to me regardless of whether they are paying me or not, but I don't go chasing people who are leaving to ask them why.
At first, I did ask people why they were leaving and the responses were generally low-quality because they had already 'checked out'... they just weren't invested anymore and their answers were either vague or clearly designed to end the conversation... "It's not you, it's me." 🙄 I realized pretty quickly that I'd rather hear from people who are unhappy but still using the product.
I do pay attention to my churn rate which is currently 1.4% for the previous 12 months for my consumer app. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's down from 1.75% for the 12 months prior to that. Most of my churn is from failed card transactions even with Stripe's recovery feature (which is awesome, btw).
In the interim, I introduced a feature that a lot of people wanted which boosted engagement and I also started sending out comeback discounts after a period of time.
Also for my product, sales slump during the Summer. The people who churn during the Summer who come back tend to resubscribe at the start of Fall. It may turn out that there is a seasonal cycle for your product as well.
1
Cold emailing would be right in case you could create an appealing and creative email to catch customers' attention.
What we have seen so far and it worked like a charm - see which users are online and send them an in-app message using any chat service which allows you to do so (in our case we use Intercom).
See what are their blockers from sticking to the product. For example, through a convo with one of our users, I have found that the blocker for that particular user was that we didn't have a strikethrough text editing button. So each time that user had to write an email with strikethrough, she had to go back to Outlook and send it from there.
And we were not aware of that blocker, because the team building the product don't use strikethrough.
Second thing - don't over-thinking. Talk to your customers. Be aware that by default (almost always) free users will want more free software, paid users - better software.
From our experience, while building Flow-e, improving the current features and product, by eliminating blockers have finally paid off.
An improvement over new features.
1
Hey @sethlouey, I'm working on a startup to help SaaS companies reduce churn. Just getting started, but I'd love to hear about the issues you're having. Feel free to contact me at the email in my profile.
In my TOS i put: Nobody leaves alive. Worked so far!
As Nitesh said, the big question is why. In short, it could be you, or it could be them, or it could be a better competitor. or change in needs.
you should be capturing the reason for cancellation within the cancel form. Emailing 48 hours after they canceled isn't a bad move either, but more to offer your personal touch in making things right. You should already know why they canceled by that point.
"In my TOS i put: Nobody leaves alive." I love this!!! lol
With ChatMod, almost everything is handled through the bot. I'm thinking that we need to revisit this and have that cancelation in the dashboard with a cancellation form. Great thoughts here.
Hello @sethlouey.
If you don't mind me asking:
What's your churn rate?
What's the figures from your cohort analysis?
Why do you think customers are churning?
What's the churn rate in your industry?
Is ChatMod a need to have or nice to have solution in your honest opinion? What about the opinion of current users?
Was this controlled acquisition or did you open the flood gates?
Obviously need more information, so the first thing I would do is:
Audit:
a. We want to find out who is signing up
b. If they are actually target or not
c. If they're coming on-board at the right time or not
d. If your sales funnel is lacking in relevant collateral, I would look at this one closely for I would also want to know, what conversations are taking place before they sign-up.
e. Is there a demo that potential users can check out? Is this a guided demo? If not, why not? Maybe it's not needed, for although I had a brief look at your site (yes that was me), I didn't really dig in. I prefer guided demo's, not because of getting the user to sign-up, but rather for information, for the objective of the demo is to ascertain what they think/feel about the pen your selling, and in order to find that out, need to talk to them.
a. If the on-boarding process is the right one overall
b. If the on-boarding process is tailored for different audience segments, as in what they want to experience is front and centre for them
c. Biased on-boarding process, ie your desire to get them to your Aha moment, rather than their's is skewing the experience, and thus missing out what we may well consider house-keeping, thus is the Aha moment you think they should have, above what they want to have, and is this also affecting your potential to learn from them.
d. Unwarranted and inappropriate automated on-boarding, ie, maybe people need to be on-boarded, maybe they need their hand held, not be a bot or whatever, but by a person.
Payment issues and other involuntary churn factors
Issues with the product, as in ease of use, too complicated, etc, etc. Yes some of these things fall under on-boarding, but we cannot unduly let the product off the hook.
Usage (audience segmentation):
a. How long are they using it before they churn (frequency and duration of sessions)
b. What have they achieved and where do they stop before they churn, etc.
c. Users who stayed put, same thing, and look for deviations, anomalies, etc, etc. Maybe some segments are more inclined to explore, maybe they hit on something that falls into what I mentioned before about biased Aha moments.
a. Results can be biased in that, these are people who want to leave, and emotional disposition at this point may well cloud the information, if you even get any decent information. If there is a reason that says "Other", that's what I click, if I can even be bothered.
b. Putting those who are leaving above those who are staying, using and paying.
c. You may end up with information that is frankly not worth anything, bending and accommodating those not worth taking on-board, resulting in concessions, detours and modifications on an unknown group of people.
d. We do not know relevancy of those who are leaving, and the time and resources needed to find out, by a bootstrapped company, self-funded, pre-seed, may or may not be solo founder, means there needs to be focus, clarity, and efficient usage of resources. Focus on the ones who have stayed put, and getting value. I am assuming these would be paying customers.
e. For an exit survey to show any tangible and applicable insight, you will need a decent sample size, probably far beyond the number of users, and degree of churn you are currently at considering what stage you are at.
f. Don't try to feed everyone yet nourish no one. Nourish the ones putting food on your table.
Caveats for point 6:
a. Ridiculously high churn
b. Churn from core audience
That will do mate, got work to do.
Cheers, Ace.
In my opinion it's important to understand why you're seeing churn.
Have a really strong survey when people try to drop off and ask them why they are leaving. Do an NPV on how likely they are to recommend to a friend, ask them how you can improve, whatever it takes to get a real answer from them.
At the end of the day, your product improves when you know your customers needs inside out.
Once you are clear on those and what customers/sectors you're providing solutions for, you can definitely rest assured churn will drop.
You can also be smart how you collect this data. Maybe upon sign up ask them industry & more. And during exit ask them more targeted questions on why they are leaving.
I'd also build an internal dashboard on frequency of use for the guys leaving.
If you see they're leaving and they've barely used it, you know you can work on better onboarding - adding webinars for starters or whatever works for you.
Hope that helps!
Overall, I don't spend that much time on people who are walking out the door because I want to focus on the product and the people who are continuing to pay for my service.
I listen to everyone who writes to me regardless of whether they are paying me or not, but I don't go chasing people who are leaving to ask them why.
At first, I did ask people why they were leaving and the responses were generally low-quality because they had already 'checked out'... they just weren't invested anymore and their answers were either vague or clearly designed to end the conversation... "It's not you, it's me." 🙄 I realized pretty quickly that I'd rather hear from people who are unhappy but still using the product.
I do pay attention to my churn rate which is currently 1.4% for the previous 12 months for my consumer app. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's down from 1.75% for the 12 months prior to that. Most of my churn is from failed card transactions even with Stripe's recovery feature (which is awesome, btw).
In the interim, I introduced a feature that a lot of people wanted which boosted engagement and I also started sending out comeback discounts after a period of time.
Also for my product, sales slump during the Summer. The people who churn during the Summer who come back tend to resubscribe at the start of Fall. It may turn out that there is a seasonal cycle for your product as well.
Cold emailing would be right in case you could create an appealing and creative email to catch customers' attention.
What we have seen so far and it worked like a charm - see which users are online and send them an in-app message using any chat service which allows you to do so (in our case we use Intercom).
See what are their blockers from sticking to the product. For example, through a convo with one of our users, I have found that the blocker for that particular user was that we didn't have a strikethrough text editing button. So each time that user had to write an email with strikethrough, she had to go back to Outlook and send it from there.
And we were not aware of that blocker, because the team building the product don't use strikethrough.
Second thing - don't over-thinking. Talk to your customers. Be aware that by default (almost always) free users will want more free software, paid users - better software.
From our experience, while building Flow-e, improving the current features and product, by eliminating blockers have finally paid off.
An improvement over new features.
Hey @sethlouey, I'm working on a startup to help SaaS companies reduce churn. Just getting started, but I'd love to hear about the issues you're having. Feel free to contact me at the email in my profile.