How do you deal with churn?
We all worry about growth, pumping up our traffic numbers and getting more people IN to the product, but how do you handle the OUT?
I guess I have two questions:
- Do you track your churn? Is it a problem?
- What do you do if someone is about to churn?
In my case, churn is a huge problem. 5% of my customers churn every month, 20% of them in their first month. It's somewhat natural (mentorcruise.com), it's a mentorship, it's doomed to end at some point and even more doomed to not be a fit within the first week.
It's difficult to keep people when they want to go, but I try to make churn a positive experience:
- Let people leave a review
- Free text field of what we could have done better
- Suggestions, if e.g. someone wants to leave and come back later, to instead pause the subscription
How does your churn event look like?
I would not call the first-month churn. More like an extended trial.
I am assuming you are referring to mentees churning. I imagine you may also track how long mentors stick around and are actively mentoring? As a mentor I first 1. put in the work to find the right mentees that are a good fit 2. prefer to guide them for a long term (at least 4 to 6 months). This does require setting some expectations up front, in terms of how much work it takes to see progress (with something like learning to code). It is sad when people give up too quickly or don't put in the work. We will see if this works, started few weeks ago.
This looks really cool to avoid churn: https://customerawesome.com/
I am running my small Shopify app with Saas model. Regarding your questions:
Yes, churn is a problem for SaaS. I would like to reduce it as low as possible. When a user uninstalled my app, I would send him an email asking why he left. However, the reply is very low. Usually, I guess users don't perceive the app values.
First of all, I design an easy-to-follow onboard tour guide. I tried to use hotjar to record where users stuck, sentry to record where users had a problem, drip emails for the first 2 weeks. TBH I can do very little when users are about to leave.
IMO, churn is all about value. If my app creates enough values, users will not leave. Having said that, it's so hard to discover what user needs. I can only understand that merchants deadly want traffics, sales, customer contacts by pading $$.