Just moving from 3% monthly churn to 2% monthly churn can translate into 9% less ARR churn in 12 months - or in other words, give you another month’s worth of revenue.

Churn might not always be voluntary

There's the voluntary churn where a customer decides to cancel their subscription to your Saas.

But, there's another type that might account for a high percentage of your total churn - involuntary churn.

This is when your customers forget to update their payment information.

Prevent your users from getting their subscription cancelled, or refunded, by sending them email reminders ahead of their subscription renewal.

You should ideally send 1 or 2 email reminder, a week or a few days before the renewal date.

Churn is a lagging indicator

Churn rate happens when clients cancel their subscription or stop buying.

But it doesn't just happen out of the blue.

There are events or specific moments that made your clients slowly become unsatisfied with your SaaS.

It's important to investigate what caused them to cancel their subscription.

Talk to your customers

Something you can do right now is call customers that have churned.

Ask them what made them cancel, what elements were they not satisfied with in your SaaS.

Well, ideally, you should talk to everyone right now.

You can solve about every business problems by talking to your customers.

Talk to people and ask why they gave you money, or why they didn't give you money.

When people want to cancel or cancelled, go on the phone, and understand what went wrong.

Don't minimize what they say, get MORE angry about the reason they cancelled.

Finally, ask them what would it take for you to make this right for them.

Often times, you will find that tiny things can be implemented to make them happy.

Onboarding

The most successful businesses do the unscalable.

Handwritten notes, calls to check how the product is, and your onboarding should be the same.

Don't try to bulk onboard, instead take the time to 1 on 1 onboard your clients.

Talk to them about the reasons why they're using your SaaS, how to get the most out of it, why it will solve their pain, etc…

Mention ways to upsell them or how clients similar to them have found success using your SaaS, sell the vacation, don't necessarily talk about the details or tiny features you have. Talk about their end goal, and what specific feature will help.

Your goal is to reinforce their decision, especially within the first 24 hours after their purchase, to make sure they're impressed with your business and how involved you are with your clients.

Finally, make sure to include next steps during the onboarding call.

You need to have quick wins new clients can "unlock" early in their journey to build momentum.

Notice irregularities

Track how often your customers are using and interacting with your SaaS.

As soon as you notice irregularities or drops in their activity rates, send an email, call, check on them.

Make sure to know why they started using your SaaS less frequently.

It will help you improve your product or understand what's wrong early, preventing further decline.

But it's also going to show your customers that you're checking on them, you want them to win and succeed.

Strategies to lower churn rate

There are other ways to reduce churn at the last minute, instead of fixing the lagging indicators, which we just saw.

Offer discounts: Offer to pause their subscription, offer churn discounts, provide fewer features

Automate dunning flows: Card updaters, retry the card again, email and in-app notifications, payment update forms

Upsell to annual subscription (with a discount): Monthly subscriptions mean that you need to deliver the same or more value every month, while annual subscriptions mean that you just have to provide more value than the annual price at least once in the year - much easier to keep customers longer while increasing revenue)

Fix your churn today

Cut customer churn by 25-30%, and win back customers before they're lost forever with baobun.studio