Increase subscriber retention in 8 steps

Digital Strategy

Role of DxO  

Digital experience optimisation (DxO) is the systematic process of unifying and optimising the digital experience across the entire digital customer journey - acquisition, onboarding, engagement, cancellation and win back.  

Traditionally brands have focused on acquisition, but this is only the first step, all customer relationships need to be nurtured to maximise the opportunity for connection with a customer (or subscriber) and drive retention rates and recurring revenue. 

 

How to increase subscriber retention in eight steps: 

 

1. Understand your customers 

Often brands start with analytics but to effectively understand your customers you need to go beyond this and use a combination of research methodologies to truly comprehend their behaviours and attitudes - what needs and goals they have, why did they subscribe, what do they like and don’t like about the subscription?

 

2. Identify drivers for retention and churn 

Undertake acquisition cohort analysis, which means group customers based on when they subscribed to your product or service. This enables you to identify key points of churn on the customer journey and any key churn differences. 

Deliver a behavioural cohort analysis to identify which product and subscription features have the biggest impact on retention. For instance, for a client we discovered that after 360 days those who signed up to a newsletter were 34% more likely to remain a customer than those who didn’t.  

 

3.Drive early stage engagement 

Onboarding is the first experience a customer has with your brand and is vitally important to tackle post-purchase anxiety and reinforce that they have made the right decision. 

To achieve this, you need to develop an onboarding strategy which is: 

  • User-centric
  • Value-based
  • Seamless
  • Multi-channel
  • Holistic
  • Continuously evolving

 

4. Optimise middle stage engagement 

Use marketing channels and triggered communications on an ongoing basis to encourage customers to reengage with your product and brand. It could be via a newsletter, social media, or printed communications. We have found the most valuable customers are the ones who have created habits with your product in the first 100 days after purchase. 

 

5. Customer feedback 

Ongoing feedback from customers, using surveys such as customer satisfaction and NPS, are vital to predict churn and risk. Look at three categories of customer:  

  • Detractors: Those who are not satisfied and are at high risk of leaving. They need targeted communications to encourage them to remain customers.
  • Passives: Who are at medium risk of cancelling their subscriptions.
  • Promoters: Who are very happy with the relationship and could be upsold to and generate referrals.

 

6. Triggered engagement strategy 

Use the insight from the customer feedback activity and target churn risk customers and with a triggered engagement strategy, such as an email campaign. 

It’s important to take a ‘decision tree’ approach mapping the customer behaviours/actions to your communications and tailoring follow up communications accordingly to the different segments.  

 

7. Cancellation  

Customer feedback is again vital to understand why subscribers are cancelling. Once you understand their motivations you need to use these to inform your engagement and cancellation strategy both on and offline. 

Value statements need to align with the reasons for the cancellation. For example, if a key cancellation reason is lack time to get the most out of the subscription, emphasise the subscription benefits so that they’re more motivated to make time to enjoy their subscription.  

 

8. Build a win back plan 

The odds of making a sale to a recently lapsed customer is 60% higher than selling to a cold prospect so make sure customers who have cancelled form their own segment and don’t treat them the same as cold prospects. We have found a win back programme of four emails works best: 

  • Reminder of the brand and value of the subscription.
  • Pitch an exclusive special offer to encourage them to come back onboard.
  • Last chance email, offer ends soon – to create urgency.
  • Final goodbye email.

 

Those brands that follow these eight steps to increase subscriber retention will benefit from low subscriber churn, while maximising recurring revenue and customer lifetime value.