Churn rate

Minimise Churn Rate – 6 Tools for Churn Analysis 

While focusing on churn rate can be seen as a negative, with many SaaS companies instead looking to focus on the positive aspects of their retention rate, putting a focus on this metric can have a huge impact on your business growth.

What is Customer Churn Rate?

Churn or churn rate is a metric describing the number of customers or subscribers who have unsubscribed from your SaaS platform during a given time period.

Providing exceptional service, as-well-as building and maintaining customer relationships is crucial for your subscription business, especially if this is what your business model is built upon and is your main or exclusive revenue stream. Knowing your churn rate can help you to take action to improve your customer relationships by inspiring you to investigate why customers are unsubscribing, or more worryingly, why they believe one of your competitors offers a better deal than you do.

What are the Benefits of a Low Churn Rate?

If your business has a low churn rate, you’ll be beongoingnefiting in several ways.

The obvious benefit is that if your churn rate is low, your revenues are more stable. While you will always have on-going business development activity if you’re looking to grow your business, a low churn rate will reduce the stress on sales teams to close deals and find new clients. This itself also protects your revenue, as you won’t be potentially offering discounts in order to get clients onboard. Your profitability also benefits, as you won’t necessarily be needing to invest more in marketing in order to attract new business.

A low churn rate also means a higher retention rate. This increases the likelihood that your clients are going to become brand evangelists, giving your SaaS platform powerful social proof and the potential to enjoy the massive benefits of word-of-mouth marketing.

What Metrics Can You Use in Conjunction with Churn Rate?

There are several metrics you can use in conjunction with customer churn in order to get an overall view of your business's health and to aid strategy and growth decisions.

• Retention Rate is the obvious one. Remember that the way you measure churn and retention rate may mean that a churn rate of 10% doesn’t mean you have a retention rate of 90%. If you measure these metrics across the same time period, then you will get such a result. Alternatively, if you’re measuring monthly churn vs. annual retention, for example, if you want to measure how many customers stay subscribed for longer than a year, then you may need to take a closer look.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). You should already consistently review your CAC but using it alongside your churn rate can take your business analysis to the next level. A high CAC can be a sign of many things, such as ineffective marketing or sales. If this correlates to a high churn rate you can start to look at where the issues in your business lie. Is your marketing targeting the most relevant audience for your product? Does what your sales team sells correspond with the service clients receive when they sign up?
• Annual Contract Value (ACV) and Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). Reviewing these metrics alongside your churn rate will help to give you some insight on the types of clients that are unsubscribing, as well as the impact this has on your revenue and profit. You can then link this back to reviewing your marketing, sales, and service toward these specific clients. Do high-spending clients leave more regularly in the first three months? Do low-spending clients sign one contract but not renew? Complete your investigations so you can improve your business.

How Can You Analyse and Minimise Churn?

As a SaaS business, your target Churn rate is always going to be 0%. However, you should accept that this is unlikely to happen, even the very best businesses can’t make everyone happy all the time. What you can do is maximize how you manage churn to both maintain current business and grow new business.

Read more: What is a SaaS subscription?

Calculating Customer Churn

The churn rate is usually given as a percentage, but you can also report this as the real number of customers lost in the time period you are looking at. You can even express it as the value of recurring billing retained versus the value lost.

How you calculate the churn rate is up to you. Just ensure that everyone in your business is clear on how you are measuring it so that analysis and action based on your churn rate are consistent.

Churn Rate % = ( X # of customers - Y # of customers ) / X # of customers * 100

X # of customers: the number of customers at the beginning of a time period.
Y # of customers: the number of customers at the end of a time period.

Let’s say your company starts the year with 500 customers and ends it with 450. The churn rate is 10% since your company lost 10% of its customers.

Within this, you can then choose whether to analyze which of those 450 customers were actually with you at the start of the year, and other metrics as we described earlier.

Analysing Churn on an Ongoing Basis

When a client unsubscribes, make sure you find out why. Sending all your clients an “exit interview” when they leave is a great way to accrue valuable data.

You can do this on a qualitative basis; however, it is always better to acquire some quantitative data so that you can make changes accordingly. If 70% of your churned clients say they didn’t like a specific element or feature of either your SaaS platform or your service, you have a great indicator for something you need to fix.

Once you know the reasons why churn happens, you can turn to customer churn prevention. You should look at the user data via your analytics platforms, and look for the common usage patterns before a customer leaves. This should help you to develop an internal customer churn prediction model. If you can use data to predict when a customer might be about to leave, you can contact the specific customer prior to you anticipating them doing so, or even better, proactively address the issues in your business that leads to the behavior pattern that ends in a customer churning. In this context, an internal churn model can be a fantastic “early warning system” of where you need to focus to prevent churn.

Paying Attention to Your Existing Customers

While it is understandable that you want to focus on the customers that are churning, let’s say you have a very small churn rate of 3%. That means you have 97% of your customers that are consistently happy with what you’re doing.

As well as surveying your churned customers, remember to speak to the huge numbers of your existing customers who are happy with your service. You can still ask these customers similar questions on the basis that you want to make them even happier.

This will make your customers feel valued and as if they are a part of your growth and success journey and is a powerful way to minimize your churn rate.

Refocus on New Customer Acquisition

If you spend a lot of time on minimizing customer churn by engaging with those that unsubscribe or show common usage patterns consistent with what happens prior to a churn, you will build up a picture of how successful you are at preventing churn or getting customers to re-subscribe.

If, despite significant efforts, you find that your churn rate remains consistent, reconsider pooling your resources elsewhere, and focusing more on new customer acquisition. As much as you want to minimize churn rate, ultimately you will have customers who plan to leave no matter what, and you could be wasting resources by spending too much time on trying to keep these.

6 Tools to Help You with Customer Churn Analysis

The marketplace is filled with great tools to aid your SaaS business with customer churn analysis. Let’s end by looking at six of them.

1. Optimove

Optimove is a useful tool not just for churn analysis but for managing your whole business. Whether you want to learn about your best-performing promotions or discover how you can personalize your offer for each and every customer, Optimise will give you all the data you need to maximize your customer base and reduce the numbers who leave.

2. Qualtrics CustomerXM

Qualtrics CustomerXM is a tool that helps you lower churn by providing insight into how users feel about and interact with your product. the tool can distribute surveys to customers via various channels, you can collect this valuable feedback and also engage users. The best part is that the Predict IQ™ technology identifies customers and accounts likely to churn and tells you what is driving that behavior, giving you key insights you'd otherwise have to spend weeks gathering manually.

3. IBM SPSS Modeler

As one of the world’s biggest IT businesses, it’s not a surprise that IBM are prominent when it comes to churn analysis. IBM’s SPSS Modeler is available as a standalone service or as part of it’s IBM Watson Studio offer. This tool uses machine learning to predict customer churn and give you actionable insights so that you can proactively address the issues that may be leading to customers unsubscribing from your SaaS tool and minimize your churn.

4. Trifacta

Trifacta is a tool that describes its purpose as “data wrangling”, taking complex datasets and presenting them in a simple, accessible way. Trifacta can save you crucial time and money in helping you get the analysis you want quicker, enabling you to make decisions and take action to minimize customer churn.

5. Alteryx

Alteryx is a great business intelligence platform that can help you to both predict customer churn as well as deploy strategic solutions to manage and prevent churn. Alteryx is a “self-service” tool, allowing you to plug in as much or as little data as you want to gain insights that will help you grow your business.

6. Singula Decicions

Remember what we said earlier about looking after your existing customers to effectively manage and reduce churn? Singula Decisions helps your business to drive engagement with customers, while also providing you with actionable data and insights that will help with customer acquisition and business growth.