3 Ways to Maximize Subscription Retention

When it comes to retaining subscribers, small victories matter. The increasingly mobile and connected world has left the days of market capture in the past, and customer churn rates over 50 percent are typical in most industries. However, acquiring new customers remains much more expensive than retaining existing subscribers, so even an increase of 1 or 2 percent in retention rates can have a significant impact on net revenue. Tactics for meeting this goal should be hyper-specific and targeted, but there are three broad strategies a company can adopt to inform their planning and maximize subscriber retention.

Identify Pivot Points

Every subscription has a life cycle, and that cycle is marked by pivot points that serve as reliable indicators that a customer may be considering a departure. While sales and acquisition efforts usually do a good job of shepherding customers through the first “start of contract” pivot point, that individualized attention usually drops off once the customer is subscribed. The “renewal of contract” pivot point may seem like the next most important moment to target for retention efforts, but in between the two points any number of other events might have occurred that are influencing a customer’s decision. These “change of life events” can create a pivot point any time they make a customer re-evaluate their plans for the immediate future. Such moments can range from the personal, such as a marriage or home re-location, to the strictly business, such as quarterly revenue reporting or a product launch. Businesses should be able to identify these change of life pivot points as soon as they happen, then use them to target subscribers for outreach and retention initiatives.

Uphold the Relationship

Accurately identifying pivot points depends on a tangible and information-productive relationship between businesses and their subscribers. In many cases, a subscriber will only enjoy dedicated client status during the period where individual sales representatives are treating them as proprietary leads. Once subscribed, most customers enter a broader pool where their interaction with the company is less frequent and personalized. This represents a missed opportunity to continue gathering intel on the subscriber, and can make it impossible to reliably predict pivot points.

Gather Data, Comb the Data

Businesses should never neglect the opportunity that their own systems present for gathering subscriber intel that’s important to retention efforts. Every subscription life cycle leaves its history behind, and over time a business should be building up a robust database of those life cycles. The raw data can and should be rigorously mined to identify pivot points, address moments of retention failure and predict the behavior of future subscribers.

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