Introduction

Churn eats away at SaaS revenue slowly but surely. This guide shows five clear ways to stop churn and keep more paying users.

What's the problem it solves?

SaaS companies lose money when customers cancel or payments fail. This article shows which actions can cut churn fast and help teams keep more revenue month after month. It focuses on both types of churn: customers who leave by choice, and those lost because of billing problems.

Quick Summary

This guide explains how even small drops in churn can lead to big wins over time. If you go from 3% monthly churn to 2%, you save almost a full month’s revenue across a year. The article breaks churn into two parts: active (people cancel on purpose) and passive (payments fail). It also shows that some fixes work before a person cancels, while others work after. The best strategy uses all of them.

The article outlines five proven methods to cut churn: ask why people cancel and make an offer to stay, run billing recovery campaigns, re-engage inactive users, get monthly customers to switch to yearly plans, and make payments more likely to go through. Each method is shown with examples, success rates, and math to estimate how much money it could save. The article ends with tips to build a full churn-fighting plan using these ideas together.

Key Takeaways from the article

• Focus first on fixing lagging indicators like failed payments and cancellations
• Asking canceling users to stay can cut churn by 5%
• Dunning emails and retries can recover 10% of lost revenue
• Re-engaging inactive users can lower churn by up to 15%
• Moving users to annual plans can cut churn by 25%
• Fixing payment problems like expired cards can reduce churn by 30%
• Use a mix of methods before and after users churn, and for both voluntary and payment issues
• Build your plan fast, because churn savings grow over time through compounding
• Use a churn calculator to pick the best strategy based on your own numbers

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