5 Tools That You Must Use To Reduce Churn
Churn is one of the most important key metrics in a SaaS business. Your customer churn rate has a direct impact on your customer lifetime value and whether or not your business can grow. If your customer churn rate is higher than 15%, then even if you bring on 15% new business, you’re still not growing. There’s a lot of ways to reduce churn, and most of the time this is just basically figuring out what is causing the churn. Is your product not ready yet? Is your product not good enough? Is the experience terrible? There are tools out there that can help you monitor your churn rate and even warn you when they notice a sign of churn.
1. ChurnBuster
ChurnBuster is one of the best tools that specialize in monitoring churn and helping you reduce churn. Churn Buster saves you thousands of dollars every month by ensuring your customers update their payment information. When you set out to build your company, did you anticipate how many customers would be failing payments every month? It’s crazy how much revenue you lose, and those customers are a major contributor to your churn rate.
Some successful companies/startups have reported that they were able to reduce churn by more than 50% using this tool, which in result saved them thousands of dollars.
Churnbuster will send out emails in the case of any fail payments. If you have phone numbers for your customers, Churn Buster will reach out on your behalf. If you want to contact customers yourself, we’ll make it easy by telling you who and when.
Using Churn Buster to reach out to customers by phone substantially increases the number of customers updating their payment information.
The app also includes an awesome and clean reporting tool with daily metrics.
2. HookFeed
Hookfeed is another one of those tools that are made to save you thousands of dollars by helping you reduce churn. Hookfeed is used by companies like Segment, idonethis, and Runscope.
Hookfeed does more than just show you metric. It can also be used as a CRM for your SaaS business with built in customer profiles. You can filter a lot of things in HookFeed. For instance, some questions you can answer with HookFeed: “Has anyone from Google ever signed up for a trial?” “Which of my plans has the most churn?” “Which of my customers are most valuable?”
When you have a large customer database, you might not have time to talk to each individual customer. Hookfeed provides you with the data to keep you in touch. Know who has raised funding, who has a large team of employees, and how likely they are to convert to a paid customer.
About 5% of credit card charges will fail. HookFeed tells you when it happens, and gives your team the context they need to rescue your customer.
Hookfeed also integrates well with Helpscout to help you monitor your support tickets. Hop on a call with a customer before they churn!
3. Firstofficer
First Officer is a stripe monitoring tool that reports in depth metrics ranging from MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) to cohort analysis and most importantly to churn as well.
Are new customers happier than the old ones?
The behavior of a small group isn’t visible in total churn, but it shows in monthly cohort charts.
MRR is the no 1 SaaS metric and it isn’t just a single figure. To really conquer it — you must divide it as First Officer might say. With First Officer you can see the trends and compare performance between plans. View just one metric or compare them all in one place.
Their pricing is pretty straight forward. There is a hobby package for 29$/month that allows you to have up to 250 customers. This works pretty well with bootstrapping SaaS companies. You can then upgrade to the 79$/month package if you grow.
4. Intercom
Intercom is the bread and butter to everything in saas! I use Intercom for almost every single product that I’ve built and any startup that I’ve worked for. It’s not specifically a tool aimed towards reducing churn, but it’s an awesome tool that does just about anything including support.
Ever notice that little white chat widget on the right side of your screen when you log into an app? That is Intercom’s automated system. Intercom has one of the best support systems and email drip campaigns that you can use to reduce churn. Intercom will warn you as soon as users are “slipping away.” I’ve always had daily notification set to notify me when a company is slipping away. That way I can look into right away and communicate with that user to see if they are experiencing any problems.
Intercom’s automation drip campaigns are a life savor. I usually have a few days set out for these campaigns to auto send out emails, so that I can receive feedback from my current users. All of them are extremely personalized and matches their name etc.
Intercom shows the people using your product and what they do in it, making it easy to quickly find the right people to ask for feedback. Automatically ask users for feedback right after they’ve used a feature, in your app — when and where they’re most likely to respond. Automatically send an email to users when they become inactive to learn what made them move on, and what would have made them stay.
At the end of the day, reducing churn is all about making your customers happy and communication is the first step to learning more about their needs. You could also segment your users based on Twitter followers , country etc.
5. Ambassador
Who are your most valuable customers? You can argue that it is the one that is paying you the most money, but I think the most valuable customers are the ones that advocate and refer your product to others. A user is more likely to continue using your product if their friends are using the product as well.
Ambassador provides the most flexible, customized experience for your referral and affiliate programs. Referral, partner & affiliate channels can all be managed in a single dashboard via Ambassador. Ambassador works by allowing you to build campaigns and allowing others to refer your product.
You can then, reward Ambassadors for referrals with cash, points, virtual currencies or swag and receive actionable metrics to measure ROI. With Ambassador you can leverage the power of the social web to influence purchasing decisions. Use Social recommendations to increase sales and conversions.
Ambassador integrates easily with your favorite 3rd party applications. From newsletter software to billing applications and even Salesforce and Hubspot, our integrations keep your referral program running smoothly while syncing data between your favorite applications.
Reward/Affiliate programs like this will keep your customers happy and in return you will lower your churn rate.
This was a post I wrote on http://inspirebeats.com
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