How to Improve SaaS Retention & Reduce Churn Rates

Losing customers is a waste of scale-up energy.  Reducing churn is one of the most important strategies that any B2B SaaS or Enterprise Software company must do.

We've broken down our retention strategies into a series of videos that provide guidance on how to reduce SaaS Churn Rates.  We'll explore everything from ensuring the right customers in the first place and pricing to rerouting cancellations and improving user experience and interface design.

It may seem like a no brainer for retention, but can impact your churn rates is getting the right customers. Marketing to anyone just to increase numbers can backfire.

The primary action in churn is cancelling or downgrading. We talk about how to turn people who want to cancel back and keep them on as customers.

Data and analytics can make you better than a fortune teller when you determine activities that happen before someone cancels then start to watch for them and act.

How Support Teams Can Reduce SaaS Churn Rates

Your support team is there to help reduce churn, but how do you utilize them to constantly improve retention for your software product.

Smart Software Dashboards to Reduce Churn Rates

A dashboard can be a central location for your users and their stepping stone into your product every day. The right dashboard strategies can influence churn rates.

Software products should not live in a vacuum controlled by just you. Getting feedback is essential to determining why people cancel and what you can do to retain them.

SaaS Pricing Strategy - I’m going to bid one dollar, Bob.

Pricing can not just influence bringing on new customers and your conversion rates in sales, but also how long a user stays and whether they evaluate cancellation.

We've got to stay in touch with our users, but often the strategies can be focus on transactional emails while your users need nurturing and knowledge.

Retention has to be owned by someone in the organization. It is so imperative to growth that it needs to be responsible and accountable.

Our process of mapping a customers experience from sign-up to cancellation and determining how to improve their experience at every step unlocks the issues causing churn.

Customer service is the oxygen of your user's experience with your product. There are lots of ways to handle customer service and picking the right one can keep or lose a lot of customers.

In today's age we can see everything. Tracking the right information in your product, creating funnels, recording sessions, and setting up alert systems can significantly impact retention.

What features should be next are not just a cool experience of writing code, but should be a strategic exercise in making decisions that will keep users.

Sticky features and approaches make it hard for users to leave. If you can make a sticky product, it will significantly reduce churn rates.

The first hours, days and weeks of a user's experience set the bar for whether the will churn or not. Great care should be taken to creating an amazing onboarding experience no matter how short or long it is.

Looking for a Retention Coach to help your team crush churn?

We are now offering a powerful retention coaching service.

Understanding SaaS Retention & Churn Rates

Retention

As SaaS companies we are often selling our products as monthly or annual subscriptions. Ensuring users renew their subscriptions or don't cancel is the act of retaining them.

This can be one of the most important strategies for a SaaS company as when a lot of users are lost consistently, it makes it very difficult for the SaaS company to be successful.

Think of it this way, there was cost in marketing and sales to acquire the customer and any profit made per month must not only cover the per customer cost but also pay back the acquisition cost. If you are losing customers too quickly, often the acqusition cost can cause a loss or it takes to long to scale your customer base.

For SaaS companies, retention is an important strategy that must be taken seriously and dedicated resources applied on a consistent basis to fight the loss of customers.

The series we have created here on SaaS Retention is all about the strategies and tactics a SaaS company should be using to reduce their churn and increase retention.

Churn Rate

In many cases the opposite of retention, churn rate is really the metric of lost customers over a month or year. Most companies track their churn rate and set goals to reduce churn rates to a certain amount.

The trick is that there are different ways to calculate and look at churn, so often industry standards are not something easily determined which is what most SaaS companies want to match.

The strategies and tactics to retain users are how we reduce churn rate.

Meet with our retention team about your churn rate.

One quick call and we'll share our approach - no pressure.

Additional Resources on SaaS Retention

6 SAAS RETENTION STRATEGIES TO MAXIMIZE GROWTH

Yes, churn is inevitable - every customer will abandon your product eventually. But boosting your retention is more fun - and way more valuable - than acquiring more customers.

How to Calculate Churn and Retention in SaaS

High customer churn and long CAC payback periods will most definitely burn through your cash and ultimately lead to the demise of your business.

SaaS Churn: Measure Revenue or Customer Retention?

"How do I measure the success of a SaaS business?" questions depend on so many different factors, it's super-hard to generalize.

Essential SaaS Metrics: Revenue Retention Fundamentals

One of the key metrics we look at when deciding whether or not to provide capital to a SaaS company is retention. It is so important, in fact, it is a standard covenant in our committed credit facilities.