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independenceone source · 2 more authors in those circles
standing

contested · 2 claims against 2

applies to

b2b, no audience needed

mixed results

confidence

medium

evidence

8 claims · 5 articles · 4 receipts

window

2015-04-24 → 2023-12-24

a single source, nothing corroborates it · contested

Narrow the audience when churn will not fall

Stubbornly high churn often means the customer definition is too wide, so retune toward the industries, sizes and job titles that already stay and judge the rate against your segment rather than an absolute figure. Trials that cost nothing to start inflate the number with window shoppers, and a tool people configure once beats one they open daily and keep comparing. The opposite case is argued too: serving several segments with one product spread word of mouth and lifted lifetime value as hobbyists turned into businesses.

What both sides agree on

  • Judge your cancellation rate against the segment you sell to rather than an absolute figure.
  • If signing up takes almost no commitment, expect window-shoppers to inflate your churn, and look at the figure excluding people who leave inside the first month.
  • Aim for a product where the dominant reason for cancellation is the customer's own business shutting down rather than anything you did.

Where this splits

Narrowing to one customer type is prescribed as the fix for high churn, while another builder measured consumer, prosumer and business segments in one product diversifying revenue and raising lifetime value as users moved between them.

  1. side 01 · 2 claims

    Narrow to one customer type to cut churn

    Jason Cohen · Tyler Tringas

    1. 1Read stubbornly high churn as a sign your audience is defined too broadly, and fix it by narrowing the product to one type of customer.
    2. 2If the pattern behind churn is who the customers are rather than what they do, retune the target profile toward the industries, sizes, stages or job titles that already fit.

  2. side 02 · 2 claims

    Serve several segments, they lift lifetime value together

    Justin Jackson

    1. 1Don't accept the received wisdom that consumer subscribers churn hard and cost too much to support - measure it on your own product before excluding them.
    2. 2Serving several segments with one product diversifies revenue against seasonal dips, spreads word of mouth between segments, and raises lifetime value as users graduate from hobbyist to business buyer.

What it returned

  • 15

    ConvertKit was losing 15-20% of users a month in a crowded email marketing market; after Nathan Barry refocused it solely on authors the author expected churn to fall quickly, as it had over the preceding six months

  • 3%

    His rules of thumb for an acceptable monthly cancellation rate are 3% for consumer, 2% for small business and 1% for enterprise.

  • 3%

    Baremetrics had the most erratic churn on the list, between 3% and 10%, which the author attributes to how trivially easy it was to enter a card and connect a Stripe account

  • That was the main cancellation reason at Storemapper

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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