If you run any type of repeat or subscriber business, where you have an existing contract or agreed price, then your deals and marketing efforts to acquire new customers, can sometimes be perceived as negative marketing to existing customers if they aren’t offered any deals at all. Especially, if they are not happy or at risk of churn.
Can you quantify the value you provide customers?
how do we know if our Customers are realizing these benefits? Do our Customers know they are achieving these benefits? And more importantly – do our Customers agree that these are the key benefits they want from our offering? To answer these questions we need to make the Value Proposition more than just a marketing statement. We need to make it a living breathing part of the business.
Since you’ve been gone… How to encourage the sometimes User
When analyzing usage statistics for information to help with retention, I believe you need to look at usage by segment. Identify your Super Users as outliers – and segment them accordingly. You do want to keep them – they help you innovate, but look at them separately so that their behavior doesn’t impact thinking about the other segment of users. Then look at what the majority of the people are doing on the system. Try to make what they are doing as easy as possible. Though either the product or service solutions.
All Aboard! Helping Customers realize value from the get-go!
I would expect that for most subscription type services there can be a reverse bell curve to lifetime. With a blip of churn occurring early. Then customers that stay a subscription cycle or two will end up staying for some time. This is real churn, or at least the churn that is most worrisome, because it is often customers that leave before you recover the cost of acquiring them in the first place.
It’s not you it’s me – going deeper to find out why customers really leave
I find sometimes, people in business will almost go out of their way rather than take in bad feedback. The average person, in wanting to avoid conflict, will sometimes give a pat answer rather than discuss real reasons for stopping doing business with you. No one likes to talk about negatives. No one likes to deal with rejection. So customers vote with their feet, rather than give you constructive feedback as to why they have left.
When the inside matches the outside
Startups should first start with trying to understand the market and what you can uniquely offer of value to that market. That I meant not to ignore traditional branding activities, just not to prioritize that before they have product/market fit validated. And base your branding on this discovery.
