Slay The Churn Beast! Clever Churn Mitigation To Maximize Revenue From Existing Customers

Let’s talk about the five letters that keep you up at night, CHURN! (Not so) Fondly dubbed as the ‘churn beast' it can come in different forms like customer, product activity, revenue, involuntary churn, and so on. Though churn is the common enemy across industries, the types of churn you measure and how frequently you do it can be unique to your business goals.

For product-led growth companies, measuring and mitigating churn is as important as figuring out their growth strategy. In PLG, we rely on our product’s self-serve motion heavily to drive growth. The same motion makes it extra hard to figure out and tackle churn at scale with much less human interaction.

Existing customers have never been more important. The top reasons being:

1. Increasing CAC rates: Research shows that Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) has been shooting for the stars for the past few years. Depending on how mature your industry is, your B2B CAC may have increased anywhere between 50% to 70%.
   
   
2. Competition: We all know the inspirational stories of companies that started in the founder’s garage. If there is a problem out there faced by enough businesses and individuals, chances are, someone is already working on a solution. Anyone can start building a SaaS product at virtually $0. You might be in stealth mode right now but you already have competitors.
   
   
3. Customer Trust: Everyone is going by the same marketing and sales playbooks. It’s harder to gain the trust of a prospect every day. Your existing users, however, know your product’s capabilities first-hand. You already have their trust and attention through your product.

Acquiring new customers to replace the churned customers is not a sustainable strategy for growth. At the very least you might be working very hard to not incur losses. Churn mitigation is essential for growth. Now comes the billion-dollar question — how do you do it? Inflection can help!

Act Early to Prevent Churn

The best way to mitigate churn is to act early rather than react. Predicting possible churn, and noticing early warning signals, gives you a chance to prevent it. This is where we come in.

Inflection.io is the only B2B marketing automation platform for product-led growth. You can drive adoption, expansion, and delightful engagements with your users based on a comprehensive view of the product activity, people, and account data — their new identity profile.

With Inflection, you can get a unified view of your customer. This gives you the advantage to drive your marketing campaigns at scale with a better understanding of where your user is coming from — their context.

Move beyond personalization to contextualize your customer communication. And, we built a no-code experience (not even SQL) to create custom tokens to help product-led marketers succeed with reduced dependency on engineering resources.

Here are some clever ideas which you can use to slay the churn beast with Inflection. This is where product-led marketing can get some inspiration from the ways our CSM colleagues succeed in account orchestration and team up to mitigate churn risk.

Communication Is Key

Stay in touch with your customers post-purchase. Guiding the customer to see value through your product in a way that’s beneficial to their business increases engagements and creates product champions. Inflection can help you leverage the right mix of product activity, account, and person data for customers at scale. Here are some campaigns you can run to prevent churn today!

• Automate periodic health checks of the account and remind your customers of the value they are receiving from your product.

• Leverage customer segmentation based on their use cases and proactively send out tutorials, guides, and case studies that resonate with your customer's unique pain points. This helps your customers get to relevant resources without having to sift through your resources library. This in turn can reduce the number of support tickets raised and drive greater product adoption.
  
  
• Set up notifications to alert your CSM if the user activity goes beyond a lower limit. For example, 10 days of inactivity, or not adding any new projects to a workspace in the past month, etc. Alerting your customer success team gives them enough runway, and the product usage details,  to save the account from churning.

A Friendly Nudge

A timely alert can help you identify churn risk and give your team a chance to sustain your recurring revenue streams. You need to know when there is a drop in product activity from a customer or account to be able to act on it. Inflection can help you keep track of billions of product events by millions of users to drive re-engagement campaigns

Imagine triggering an email like this to customers when their product activity drops below a predetermined threshold.

A nudge in the form of an email reminding the user of what they are missing out on, in other words, creating FOMO might jump-start your customer's product usage once again.

Drive Revenue With A Self-Serve Motion

Growth is the antidote for churn. When you set up automation to check on product usage, you also know if the user is reaching the upper threshold of plan limits. Use this as an opportunity to drive an expansion campaign to remind users of the value they enjoy from your product and what more they can do with an upgrade.

Upselling and cross-selling through self-serve motion makes lives easier for your team and your customer too.

Here’s a sample email you can send to pitch an upgrade, powered by product and account activity data.  

When your value is apparent to the user, you are making the decision to upgrade easier for them. Empower them with tools, in this example, a direct link to upgrade their plan.

Timing It Right

It is also equally important to time this kind of email right. Sending it too close to your customer’s subscription renewal date might even instigate churn. Reminding them well ahead, as shown in the previous sample email, gives them enough time to start using the product for their benefit again.

In the same vein, sending an invoice for an advanced plan after the customer spills over their limit of usage can be counterproductive to gaining their trust. The sample email shown in an upselling scenario can be timed to give the customer a chance to upgrade their plan.

Also, be mindful of sending too many emails in a short period because you’ve identified an account to be a churn risk. Annoying the customer into renewal is not a thing! This is where your CSMs can work their magic to do a personalized pulse check before the renewal date approaches.

To Summarize

Measuring activity churn shows you the redflags in user behavior as they reduce or entirely stop using your product. This is the only type of churn that helps you take action before you lose a customer. It is hard to keep track of all user activity in a PLG environment considering the sheer volume of product events that are recorded every day.

Product-led companies deserve a purpose-built solution to support their marketing, unlike legacy marketing automation platforms. Inflection was built to solve this and more.

We support millions of users and billions of product events. This, when combined with firmographic and demographic data from your CRMs, provides  a powerful combination of unified data to drive highly contextualized customer engagement .

Leverage product, account, and person data to automate marketing campaigns that are contextual beyond personal for your customers. Have meaningful conversations with them at scale to understand their friction points in your product and deliver solutions.

To see Inflection in action, contact us here.