Key takeaways:
Many SaaS businesses and Chargebee users view churn and retention as two sides of the same coin, but each metric may have unique strategies and focusesA lot of SaaS brands look at churn and retention similar metrics; when you reduce churn, you can in theory improve retention. As a result, most businesses focused on stopping churn, because it feels most immediate and significant.
This does make sense; a churned customer can be a lost source of revenue that is unlikely to come back, which can slow down business growth and prevent scalability. But it’s important to understand that preventing churn and actively increasing customer retention may involve two different approaches— and prioritizing retention can ultimately have bigger pay-offs long-term.
Customer retention is ultimately crucial for preserving revenue and long-term growth. While Chargebee’s subscription management software offers basic data about customer cancellations, you can use Baremetrics to actively improve retention through actionable retention insights. And in this post, we’ll show you how.
Churn and retention can be two sides of the same coin, but it’s important to understand the differences between reducing churn and improving retention.
Reducing churn typically involves reactive measures designed to stop customers from leaving, including the following:
Enhancing retention, however, is often more proactive. It focuses on creating stronger customer experiences so that they never want to churn in the first place. And while reducing churn can help you hold onto your gross revenue, prioritizing retention can be essential to driving higher customer lifetime values (LTV) and stronger brand loyalty.
Examples of retention-enhancing strategies may include:
Improved retention rates can promote revenue stability and growth across your entire customer base, yielding exceptional results that allow you to scale over time.
Chargebee’s subscription management software does have built-in features designed to potentially reduce churn and improve retention. These include the following:
These features can all be useful when it comes to enhancing retention, but they don’t always help businesses understand could improve the customer experience and which factors may be contributing to churn. (Pro tip: You can use Baremetrics to monitor Chargebee churn).
Want to learn more about how Chargebee stacks up against its competition? Learn more here:
For a complete look at how Chargebee (with Baremetrics) fares against other products, check out our Chargebee Alternatives piece.
While Chargebee offers basic features that can help improve customer retention, their insights into why customers may churn and what factors are preventing retention are limited. For this reason, Chargebee users can integrate with Baremetrics to leverage our advanced Cancellation Insights feature to get the data they need to retain customers— and revenue— longer.
Baremetrics’ Cancellation Insights feature allows businesses to learn more about why customers leave.
Our Cancellation Insights gathers and analyzes feedback from customers who actually cancel. And while this does help track reasons for churn, it can also help you determine why customers failed to retain.
You can receive feedback from targeted customer surveys to determine why they’re failing to retain instead of relying on guesswork, and see trends in your cancellation data. .
Are customers churning because your product is too expensive? Or were there ongoing technical issues, and they could have been retained with an improved UX had a few technical glitches been resolved?
You can use Cancellation Insights to improve retention by doing the following:
Some customers may always be at risk to churn if a competitor swoops in with a lower price, and churn is practically inevitable if your client’s organization shuts down.
Technical issues or trouble using the software, however, impact the customer experience. Resolving these issues can rescue the CX, and can help you retain customers so that they aren’t even considering churning on their own.
If you’re already using Chargebee for subscription management and billing, you have a few retention-focused features at your disposal. Integrating Chargebee with Baremetrics to leverage our Cancellation Insights, however, can take your customer and revenue retention strategies to the next level.
We’ll analyze your Chargebee billing history and subscription data so you can do the following:
Subscription managers who want to get the most out of their Chargebee and Baremetrics integration should take the following steps to improve retention:
Churn reduction is great— we consider it “slaying the churn beast.” Focusing on customer retention, however, can help you hold on to more customers and revenue while establishing valuable long-term relationships. This makes it easier for businesses to scale, as you can invest more in customer acquisition costs when LTV increases.
And while churn and retention efforts can overlap, remember that retention prioritizes creating value and ensuring customers are satisfied long-term, not just trying to salvage the relationship at the last minute.
Managers should leverage Chargebee and Baremetrics data together, using our analytics and insights to find new ways to build customer loyalty long-term.
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