On your own, retaining subscribers can be a daunting task. However, with the help of a subscription and billing platform, you can reduce your company’s churn. “Churn” is the rate of subscribers you lose in a certain amount of time, and it’s an important metric to track. Lost subscribers can lead to lost revenue. As a result, understanding how to keep your churn low is essential. By leveraging a subscription management platform, you can start working toward possible solutions. You can even test different methods for retaining subscribers. Here are four ways you can use a subscription management system to reduce your churn.
Create Personalized Dunning Campaigns to Mitigate Churn
“Dunning” is the process of sending email communications to subscribers after their payment has failed. Your main goal here is to have the customer update their account information. As such, dunning is a critical piece of the puzzle when mitigating churn. Dunning campaigns can be a simple way to recover these failed or declined payments. To decrease your churn rate, it can be helpful to create a personalized dunning campaign.
A billing platform that allows you to contact subscribers with a personalized message can help you understand what issues they are experiencing with payment. First, it could be a simple matter of insufficient funds. In this case, you can try to process their payment at a different time or on a different day. Or the subscriber’s credit card information expired and their account needs updating. With a strategic dunning campaign, you can account for these variables and more. That way, your company can decrease its churn rate.
Make it Easy for Customers to Change Their Subscription
Sometimes, customers will stay if they can change or pause their subscription. Therefore, they are less likely to cancel. A subscription and billing platform makes it easy to give customers this option. A subscription management solution allows you to create as many plans as you need. This allows you to give subscribers the ability to change their plan as part of your cancellation flow. The right subscription management solution will also allow you to test different plans. You might experiment with new pricing and plan options. This could include fixed, tiered, volume-based, hybrid, stairstep, and much more.
Integrate Multiple Payment Options Into Your Billing Platform
By offering multiple payment options, you can use payments as a growth strategy. This is critical to any successful subscription business strategy. A billing platform that supports multiple payment gateways can increase conversions and retention. The modern customer has their own preference for how they want to pay. Consequently, if your platform doesn’t accept their preferred payment option, you could be missing out on potential new customers—or losing existing subscribers. In short, it’s essential to assess what gateways and payment methods are right for your subscribers and your business, now and in the future.
Provide Incentives for New and Existing Customers
A core strategy to reduce churn is a win back campaign. This is an offer, incentive, or deal provided after someone churns to win them back. Promotional offers can increase retention and drive subscriber acquisition. They also build stronger customer loyalty, which corresponds with higher lifetime value. In short, all the benefits deliver more revenue and growth to your business. Make win back campaigns a part of your churn mitigation strategy and your churn calculation. That way, you can assess the efficacy of your efforts and the quality of your subscriber base.
About Recurly
If you are ready to take the next step in evolving your subscription-based business, Recurly can help. In all kinds of markets, from pet food to software, businesses are introducing subscription-based models to build recurring revenue streams. Recurly has been a key part of the recurring payment industry for over a decade and has helped manage over 40 million subscriptions. Their expertise features a range of smart tools to help your company adapt quickly, scale globally, and increase customer lifetime value. They understand the difficulties you face and remain a partner throughout your subscription journey. Whether you are iterating new pricing models or want to optimize your formula for churn calculation, make Recurly your top choice to help your business thrive in the modern business landscape.
Recurly can help you retain more subscribers and grow subscription revenue. See how at https://recurly.com/
