We have written about how churn kills SaaS businesses (and how to minimize churn), but we can’t stress how important this is. That’s why we have decided to create a top 11 list for some of the absolute best resources out there for learning more about this serious problem.
Getting Started: Understanding Churn
SaaS Churn Rate: What’s Acceptable? by Lincoln Murphy at Sixteen Ventures
Lincoln has written prolifically on the topic of churn, and this is a canonical piece from him that not only explains churn and its importance, but gives you loads of reference material for learning more about churn.
A Better Way to Calculate Your Churn Rate by Devin Brady from Recurly
Did you know Netflix was sued over how it reported their churn rate? Make sure you are doing it right and read this article now.
How 43 Public SaaS Companies Calculate Churn by Pacific Crest Investment Bankers
If you are curious how big companies report their churn rates, Pacific Crest has created an exhaustive study that’s really easy to read.
How to Reduce Churn
3 Things We Did to Reduce Churn By 68% by Josh Pigford at Baremetrics
There are many ways to reduce churn, but if you just want to know the 3 biggest and most effective ways to reduce churn, read this article.
22 Ways to Reduce Churn with Growth Hacking by Lincoln Murphy at Sixteen Ventures
If you are ready for an exhaustive list of ways to reduce churn, this is it.
NPS To Customer Happiness: How we reduced churn by half in only 2 months by Mention
Did you know you can reduce churn using NPS alone? Don’t take our word for it, other startups have been able to independently get great results.
How One SaaS Startup Reduced Churn 71% Using “Red Flag” Metrics by Alex Turnbull of Groove
A novel approach to stopping churn is to analytically detect when a customer is about to cancel their account and pro-actively step in and try to prevent it. Learn about Groove’s “Red Flag” metrics and see if you can apply them to your own company.
The 17 Emails We Send to Engage Customers, Reduce Churn & Increase Revenue by Josh Pigford at Baremetrics
Creating authentic relationships with your customers is key to reducing churn, and email is a great way to make those authentic relationships. Most companies get this part wrong. They send feature releases that nobody cares about instead of really helpful information. Josh has created a great template for doing DRIP email right.
Advanced Topics in Churn
Why Negative Churn Is Such A Powerful Growth Mechanism by Tomasz Tunguz from Redpoint Ventures
Most people don’t realize that you can actually have negative churn! The idea is that upgrades and up-sells make up more money than what is lost by cancellations and downgrades. If you can make this happen, get ready for incredible growth.
If You Only Knew – How Much Your Relative Churn Rate Matters by Dan Burkhart from Recurly
This post asks an interesting question… what’s better: lower churn or more customers? They show all the data behind this fascinating thought experiment.
The Maximum Viable Churn Rate For A Startup by Tomasz Tunguz from Redpoint Ventures
What’s the maximum viable churn for a startup? A very interesting little post from a venture capitalist expert in SaaS business models.
Did we miss one of your favorite churn posts? Please post them in the comments section…
Great list, thanks! Here’s another good article with rather scientific approach: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/modeling-churn/
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Terrific resource list! I’d found some of these in the course of writing my book on Subscription Marketing (about using marketing to offset churn.) Others are new to me, so thank you for collecting and sharing them.
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Great resource – thanks for sharing! You didn’t miss this blog, since it was written after your blog published 😉 but it is another fantastic resource on SaaS churn. Industry leaders such as Brian Halligan, Alex Turnbull, Josh Pigford, David Skok, and others give their #1 tip to reduce SaaS churn in “16 Tips to Reduce SaaS Churn from Industry Leaders”
https://www.chargify.com/blog/16-tips-to-reduce-saas-churn/
Awesome round up! Maybe this is interesting for you guys as well:
Another way to decrease churn, can be to assign/suggest more appropriate plans to customers who are actually using less than their current plan and would be better of with a ‘lower’ plan. It turns out however, that, although this is meant well, this could even increase churn.. Found it here:
http://www.newneuromarketing.com/how-to-stop-losing-customers-by-doing-less