Aim to speak to people who stop using your product so that you can understand what happened. Why did they decide to cancel their subscription?
The easiest way to get started is to reach out to the people who churn out of your billing system. It’s important to know if they couldn’t use the product, if they didn’t like it, or if you’re just dealing with happy churn. The only problem with contacting people who have decided to stop using your product is that the response rate can be pretty low.
I’ve found that reaching out to people before they stop using your product has a much higher success rate. On way to estimate when someone will stop using your product is to track markers of disengagement.
Measures of engagement are unique to each product. You can spend a lot time getting this right but I wouldn’t over think it to begin with. You just need to think about your product’s core action. If you’re a bookmarking app, a good measure of engagement would be whether or not someone bookmarked something that week.
If people don’t bookmark anything for 2 or 3 weeks in a row that’s a strong marker of disengagement and would be an excellent time to reach out.
You can only realistically speak to 2-3 people a week so there’s no need to automate anything when you start. Manually build a list of users that meet this criteria and use the contact list for a few weeks and then repeat.
These posts are thoughts-in-progress, they’re meant to be conversational. Let me know what you think. Comments, questions and feedback welcome 💬
Other thoughts on dealing with churn…