With easily digestible SaaS churn metrics and analyses, you can expect a wide range of benefits for your company. Some of the many advantages of knowing and understanding your churn rate include:
Churn is important because it's a representation of lost revenue from what is traditionally a business' most lucrative and secure source of revenue—your existing customer base. In B2B SaaS, this is doubly important because a churned customer not only presents a loss of a contract, but a loss of opportunities for upsells. If you're not tracking your customer churn rates, it's very hard to provide accurate financial forecasting for future business strategy.
To report on churn, determine your churn rate and segment out your customers into different groups you've identified as important to your business model. Evaluate their churn performance and identify what opportunities exist in the ongoing customer care management process to mitigate churn for each segment. You'll also most likely want to calculate what potential revenue earnings look like relative to operational investment in your churn risk reduction process.
A churn analysis is an examination of when, how, and why your existing customers are cancelling the contract for your product or service. This analysis will involve identifying the factors that contribute to a customer's decision to cancel and opportunities for your team to act to minimize these situations.
There are several important metrics you should include in your churn analysis of your subscription base. Most obviously, you'll need your cancellation rate over a given period, but it's extremely valuable to include a cohort analysis that identifies customer segments with their own respective cancellation rates. You should also understand the acquisition cost and lifetime value of each audience segment to determine the financial feasability of reducing churn risk for each audience segment.
Churn risk is a customer modeling metric that helps your SaaS business understand how likely an existing customer is going to cancel their contract. Analysis methods like cohort analyses can help you identify these customer segments and provide you insight how to reduce your churn risk.
To manage your churn as a B2B SaaS company, you need to understand why you're losing customers. Doing so involves a deep look at your KPIs as well as an examination of how you are managing your subscriber's experiences. A strong onboarding program followed by an effective customer experience management program helps ensure your customers know the benefit your service provides and provides you with feedback to improve their experience.
To win back previously churned customers, you need to understand why they left and improve your product and customer experience, and then conduct outreach to re-engage with them and earn their business once more. You'll need to look at your financial data to understand from an operational standpoint how valuable it is for your sales team to re-engage these lost contracts.. If you can demonstrate the value your product provides that they did not see when they decided to end their contract with you, they're likely to become a customer once again!
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