Have you ever experienced the never-ending frustration of filling up a leaky bucket?
If the bucket is free of leakages you don’t need to exert extra effort to fill it up continuously. Instead, the water you put in remains conserved in the bucket and is in the good condition for use.
Similarly for a business, when there’s an element of leakage in your sales, business or marketing process you will inevitably start losing your potential customers.
Therefore, you want to create a situation where you are patching over the holes and making your business watertight, rather than re-filling the bucket.
It is easier to gain a new customer than it is retaining your old ones. However, despite the gaining of a new customer, your business will fail to grow if you’re consistently losing your old customers. It is a one-for-one situation, one step forward, and one step back.
It also creates a falsely deceiving situation where you believe business performance is positive due to frequent sales, but they are solely to replace lost business.
This is called customer churning. It’s the situation when a customer starts leaving you because of various reasons. However, in business, there are two kinds of churn rate – customer churn rate and revenue churn rate.
CUSTOMER CHURN RATE
It can be defined as the percentage of customers or subscribers cancelling or leaving the particular service.
| Customer churn rate can be calculated as-
Customer churn rate=(customers at beginning of month-customers at end of the month)x100% / customers at the beginning of the month |
For a company’s growth to develop sustainably, it’s necessary that the customer churn rate of the company should be below that of new customers attained.
The lower as the customer churn rate percentage is, the more difficult and challenging it will be to achieve the company’s growth targets.
REVENUE CHURN RATE
The revenue churn rate can be defined as the percentage of loss of revenue per month or per year. It can be expressed as a normalized value such as monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
| Revenue churn rate can be calculated as-
Revenue Churn Rate = [(MRR beginning of month – MRR end of month) – MRR in upgrades during month] x 100% / MRR beginning of month
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The lower the churn rate your company has, the more revenue your company will gain that month.
| Customer churn rate | Revenue churn rate |
| 1. It gives you an insight into how good you’re at retaining customers.
2. If it’s not been monitored, even a low customer churn will become a serious problem. |
1. It gives you an insight into how good you’re at retaining customer revenue.
2. If you succeed to upsell your customers on higher packages and sell additional recurring storage/users, you can prevent customer churn.
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10 Ways to Reduce the Churn Rate of Your Business
To know how to retain those existing customer and reduce those churn rates follow those 10 ways described below.
- Find the root cause of each customer leaving you
Before you stumble upon finding the solution to any problem, you need to know the root cause. For that, you need to analyse and determine what has caused the problem.
There’s not just one reason behind a customer churning from their agreement with a business, it is usually a combination of many reasons, or can be different motives for each situation.
But you need to identify these by making first hand contact with the ‘churners’.
The very simple methods to find out why they left you are following-
- Call the customer (most preferred as it gives you an immediate response)
- Send a personalised email and ask the reason for leaving you.
- Send customer exit survey
Going forward the feedback collected from this will allow you to take corrective action.
- Communicate with your customers
It’s been observed most often that companies talk to their customers only when they need to make a deal with them or when customer contact them when they have a problem. However, this kind of neglecting behavior should be reversed. You must strive to maintain availability of communication right from the point of lead generation.
Rather, you should make it easy for customers to talk to you even after they have signed the deal with you. You should follow up for courtesy and make sure that they’re not facing any kind of problem related to your products or services.
It is not about bombarding their inbox with a plethora of emails but you can do something better to keep yourself and them connected with each other. Below are few of the things that will help you with the same.
- Customer satisfaction surveys consisting of 10 or less most important questions. Don’t fill the survey with 50 or more questions as this makes people feel bored and view it as a work which makes them think less and can even make them leave the survey in the mid. Do provide a blank space for each question so that they can write what they think about that specific thing.
- People using your product may have many questions and suggestions related but they don’t know where to comment or suggest their opinions so it would be great if you build a feedback bar on your website.
- You can make direct contacts with your customer through social media by answering their questions. If somebody feels they can’t talk about their problems openly on social media, you can ask them to email you and assure them that you’ll follow-up them immediately.
- Apprehend the first impression
A good first impression is a key to further relationship and bonding. If you impress your customer at the very first time, your strong presence will have an extended effect.
Once they have started using your product it doesn’t mean you should stop following-up and checking in. Send them emails about the use of the product and how they can make full use of the product. This kind of behavior represents how much you care about them and reduces the churn rate. People appreciate attention.
- Offer a personalized customer service
Personalized customer services are one of the best ways to keep your customer happy as this service allows them to communicate with you directly. Co-browsing can be one of the best examples that adds a personal touch to your service.
It allows the user to share the webpage with the agent and at the same time, the user can see the live navigation and operation going on the screen. Since it provides a visual connection with the user, it also builds an immediate trust with them.
Also, because you’re offering them the solution and to navigate through the complex situations they are into, you are giving them another reason to stay with you.
- Meet your customer expectations & surprise them with additional services
This is the bitter truth but it’s the reason for most of the customers leaving your company and your products. When you fail to meet your customer expectations -they leave you.
To ensure your customer doesn’t leave you, do meet their expectations and if possible, surprise them with additional services your company is able to provide.
This way you won’t only make your customer happy but they will be delighted with your offerings and won’t even think of leaving you.
You set your own expectation bar and now you must strive to not only match but go beyond it to prevent your customers even thinking about an alternative.
- Concentrate on competitive advantages
When you pitch somebody to use your offerings, often the very first question they have is- “How is your product better than competitors?”. Likely or unlikely you need to answer the question intelligently.
It’s important to make your customers aware of the benefits you’re giving them, from the very beginning only so that don’t confuse with your competitor’s offerings. You must outline your USP’s (unique selling pints) to give your business leverage in the discussion and going forwarded, a constant reminder of what this deal brings over theirs.
One of the best ways to show how your product is better than your competitor is by comparing yourself to competitors on your websites’ landing page.
- Convert your weaknesses into strengths
When you know your weaknesses you should accept it and should be able to handle it properly. If you make any mistakes don’t blame it on others, instead, assure the people at other ends that you will do every possible thing to fix it.
When you’re 100% loyal, open and honest with your customers, you build an unbreakable trust with them and in return customers become loyal to you and as a result, you reduce the customer churn rate.
- Catch the churning customer before they actually churn
Believe me, it’s not too difficult to find out whether your customer is happy with your offerings or not. If your customer is about to churn intentionally or unintentionally, their use of your offering will reduce. They won’t be using it as much as previously.
You can identify this through engagement surveys on your website and other research into your user base.
You should try to re-engage yourself with those customers and ask them why they are leaving you. Apologize them for the same and ask them to give you chance to improve your product.
- Indulge in making it hard for your customers to ignore and leave you
Suppose you provide 20 days Free Trial to users to test the service before they purchase any premium plan. Also, you provide them access to each and everything with a premium customer support.
As a result, the user will enjoy all the best features of your services and will love it so much that it would become impossible for them to leave you or even ignore you.
Obviously, when you’re getting what you actually need, then why would you look for something else?
- Assure them that they are using the best product before they leave you
Don’t live in the blind faith that your customer isn’t aware of your competitors. They do know and in no time they will switch to them if something better is offered to them. Therefore, whenever you launch something new let them remind of the quality you provide them. Convince them that you’re the only one who is providing this new and unique thing.
Anthony Musker:
I am a digital marketer and content writer at Whoisvisiting.com. I implement the marketing activities including email, social and SEO – I have various experience within sales and marketing teams, working for start-up companies and in the PR industry.