JUSTINE JACQUOT
Approx. reading : about 8 min
One of the most important obstacles that companies face when offering subscription offers (SaaS, subscriptions …) is how to track and limit customer loss, and in particular the attrition rate (called CHURN).
If you are not vigilant, your business could find itself caught in a downward spiral of unsubscribe and consequently generate financial losses.
While the churn rate can be measured monthly or annually, no matter how you lower it, churn rate is bad for any business, no matter how small.
According to a SaaS industry survey conducted by Forrester Research, the average annual churn rate for companies with sales below 2.5 million euros is approximately 9.5%. However, this study indicates that small and medium-sized businesses that do not have an action plan in place to optimize customer retention can end up with annual customer churn rates of between 31% and 58%.
A high CHURN can completely jeopardize the survival of the business.
In other words, your business should focus on retaining customers at least as much as winning!
So while customer acquisition and winning strategies may seem like the road to growth and profitability for many businesses, customer churn can slowly siphon off all of your earnings.
Indeed, winning or acquiring new subscribers costs money. You must invest in advertising, promotion and other commercial discounts etc … in short, the commercial costs associated with winning over customers can quickly become significant.
How could you profitably grow if every time you spent money on a subscriber, the subscriber left you before you could even recoup your commercial costs?
Retaining subscribers and combating CHURN should be a priority for your teams.
According to Bain & Company, an increase in customer retention of just 5% can result in a 25% increase in profits from your subscriptions.
So where do you start?
In this article, we’ll explore three ways for your business to meet the challenges of tackling customer churn and thereby take the profitability of your subscription-by-subscription solutions to the next level.
While a near zero turnover rate is ideal, it is naturally unrealistic.
In some cases, the churn rate is voluntary, such as when a customer actively chooses to unsubscribe from your product or service owed.
In other cases, the churn rate is unintentional, such as when technical problems or payment discrepancies cause your business to lose customers; who would otherwise continue to subscribe.
However, no matter how your business churns against industry benchmarks, there will always be room for improvement.
Here are three strategies to reduce your customer churn rate.
To retain and keep customers from jumping ship at the first sign of a better deal, you need to build trust.
How do you build trust?
Be transparent, especially about how you bill. No one likes a surprise bill to appear on their credit card statement.
Your billing solution should be able to clearly present to each customer the amount of services they have used and their pricing model so that they can clearly relate their usage levels to the value of the services provided by your platform.
Better yet, show usage trends, note recent changes in service packages or pricing models, and even offer recommendations on other services your customer may benefit from based on their usage.
Your billing solution should also be configured to automatically send customer notifications, transaction receipts, and notifications about upcoming subscription or payment method renewals.
In other words, take every opportunity to communicate with your customers in the most personalized ways possible.
If you do, they’ll be more likely to stay subscribed.
Automatic billing can make life easier for you and your subscribers.
Unfortunately, recurring payments can also lead to payment failures – the number one cause of unintentional unsubscription. A common example is when a customer forgets to update their payment information after their credit or debit card is lost, stolen, or expired. When payment is due, the customer’s card is refused and their subscription is canceled.
The easiest way to reduce the unintentional churn rate due to payment failures is through prevention. Just taking a few proactive steps can make a big difference.
Some examples of effective proactive measures would be:
You can’t always prevent a failed payment. However, you must establish a failure management plan and adapt your payment monitoring process in order to automatically revive your customer or your bank thanks to the reminder functionalities integrated into your subscription management platform.
After a failed transaction, instead of blocking the customer account, the dunning feature automatically attempts to re-initiate the payment at regular intervals. It should also provide you with methods of communicating with affected customers simultaneously to facilitate resolution of the problem.
By using a platform that offers the possibility of managing payment failures, you will lose fewer customers due to purely technical problems during payments.
Having a flexible billing process makes life easier for your customers and reduces the risk of termination and therefore loss of revenue.
Two ways to give flexibility to your customers can be for example:
The flexibility of your payment model and providing your customers with more customizable payment preferences not only helps control some of the factors that influence the voluntary and involuntary churn rate, but they help your business be more attractive to your customers who need agility.
Notification
Pricing & Coupons
Smooth Payment
Self-Care portal
KPIs and reporting
While it is vital for every business to closely monitor customer satisfaction, it is not enough for subscription-based businesses. The retention of subscribers is a crucial issue of profitability and sustainability.
Your business should take advantage of the customer churn prevention features present in modern underwriting management solutions to remind, update, and communicate with customers on the status of billing information.
Not only that, but also being able to anticipate and adapt to different customer payment preferences can help retain a more diverse customer base.
So, if you want to better manage your subscription billing process and reduce your churn rate, we invite you to participate in a Recurseeve demo.
Our customer support team is ready to help you make billing your subscription not only simple, but proactive in tackling CHURN.
To learn more about Dotsha and understand how we can help you successfully reduce CHURN, contact our customer support team and book a demo.
Dotsha delivers the first order-to-revenue platform designed to put every subscription-based or usage-based business on autopilot … from quote to cash!
Your business can scale fast without turning its back-office into a mess!
Keep growing faster… we’ve got your back !
All-In-One platform that unify your back-end while the MRR just keeps growing, Dotsha’s plaform is an easy to use and quickly implemented cloud-based platform that augment your existing information system with robust API integrations in order to deliver optimal automation with minimal code. You will forget we are there!
JUSTINE JACQUOT
Approx. reading : about 8 min
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