As marketers and entrepreneurs, you already know how challenging it is to attract new customers. That’s why smart businesses focus on retaining their existing customers rather than attracting new ones.
This will not only help them achieve their conversion goals faster but will also help them save a ton of money that they would otherwise spend on marketing their business. But for all that to happen, understanding customer churn becomes extremely important.
Doing that will help you strategize your marketing plans better and boost your profit. So what exactly is this customer churn?
What is Customer Churn?
Sometimes, you end up losing your customers without even realizing it. Your customers randomly discontinue buying from you or cancel their subscription within a certain period of time. This is called customer churn. And because of that, you end up losing not just your customers but your revenue too.
You can calculate your customer churn by dividing the number of customers you lost during a certain period by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that time period. Then multiply the answer by 100.
For example, if you have 200 customers in a certain period and 184 by the end of that period, then your customer churn is (200-184)/ 200 *100 = 8%.
Why Do You Experience Customer Churn
Now that we know what customer churn is let’s understand why businesses experience customer churn. There can be various reasons for that.
For example, your customers find another brand that is offering better products and services than yours. If that happens, your users won’t think twice before opting for your competitor’s products over yours.
Sometimes you may not offer a proper onboarding program that teaches your audience how to use the product or service. This can confuse your users, and they might opt out of your business. So you end up losing your customer even before they start their journey with you.
Another reason why businesses experience customer churn is when the customers don’t align with your brand value. For example, you might want to focus on creating environment-friendly products. But your user’s beliefs may not resonate with yours. In such a case, they might tend to opt out.
These are just a few reasons why you may experience customer churn. There can be many other reasons behind it. But whatever the reason may be, it’s important for you to prevent the churn from happening. But how do you do that? Let’s find out.
1. Analyze Your Churn
No matter how hard you try to prevent customer churn, every business has to experience it at one point in time. However, you can stop this from happening by analyzing it at the right time. To do that, keep a close eye on your churn.
Look at how often it is happening. Does it happen after a specific period of time? Also, figure out how and when it happens for your typical customers.
Now make a list of it. Then figure out why this is happening based on when and how you are losing your customers. Now put all the trends together and work towards decreasing your churn rate.
2. Ask for Feedback
Your next point is to look deeper into why you’re losing your customers. For that, apart from identifying the problem, you also need to know how to solve it. And what can be a better way to know that than to ask your customers about it directly.
Reach out to your customers and ask them how you can improve their experience. Ask them to offer their feedback and make sure to take their suggestions and feedback seriously. Use them to improve customer satisfaction. This can be through improving your product, offering better customer service, or anything that you think can improve the overall experience of your users.
3. Offer Brilliant Customer Service
Another very important point to consider is to offer brilliant customer service to your users. Make sure that you have a seamless onboarding process for your new users. It’s important for them to understand how to use the product when they first start using it.
You should also train your customer service team to handle your customer queries politely and patiently. To make it even more effective, empower your employees to make decisions when needed. This will help you fast-forward things when needed.
4. Build a Community Around your Users
A great way to build brand loyalty is to create a community around your users. You can have a dedicated marketing team solely for that purpose. To make things easier, leverage the power of social media. Create social media groups where you can engage your users through high-quality posts and comments.
You can also go live from time to time to interact with your users face-to-face. This will help you build connections with your users and understand their expectations better.
You can also use these groups to plan an event, announce your offers, and do things to build a strong connection with customers. Doing little things like this will help you build customer loyalty and decrease your churn too.
So these are some of the easy ways to prevent customer churn for your business. Always note that reducing customer churn can become a lot easier if you have proper data with you. So focus on identifying the cause and document your findings. Doing this will help you understand what steps to take in order to lower your churn and boost your profit.
