Knowing your customer churn is pivotal to the success of your product. And even though tracking the number of people who decided to unsubscribe from your app isn't the most pleasant thing, a hard truth is always better than a sweet lie. If you want to learn more about tracking and reducing customer churn, in this article, we'll tell you how to do it effectively with Apphud.
Tracking Customer Churn
It may sound ridiculous, but customer churn is the only metric that makes startups happy when it goes down. In our previous article, we've already explained what customer churn is and how to calculate it. So, feel free to check it for more details!
But today, we'll revolve around tracking and reducing this metric with Apphud. So, how should you track your customer churn?
First, you should know your churn rate, calculating both losses in subscribers and revenue.
Second, you should have enough data to predict when subscribers will churn. To understand when a subscriber is churning, you should handle a notification from Apple called DID_CHANGE_RENEWAL_STATUS. Using this notification, you can find whether the renewal was turned off or on.
In Apphud, we made this function even easier! You can divide the notification into two different event types: Trial Canceled and Subscription Canceled.
When a user cancels auto-renewal of their free trial subscription, it's called Trial Canceled, while Subscription Canceled means that a user canceled auto-renewal of their paid subscription.
Third, analyze your subscription churn. As you can see from the Apphud chart below, we calculate the number of subscriptions lost during the selected period but leave out new paid subscriptions that could happen inside the period.
Keep in mind that churn can be negative, which is excellent news! It means that your app has a substantial value for customers. This may happen if your app allows customers to have more than one subscription simultaneously and the user adds a purchase to existing ones. When it happens, we call it "expansion."
Subscriptions Churn, ApphudAnd last but not least, you should understand why your subscribers churn. You can send them a push notification or survey to ask why they decided to cancel their subscription.
Luckily, Apphud has built-in mechanics to ask for this info:
How to Prevent Customer Churn With Apphud?
More people keep unsubscribing from your app, worse it's for your business. How can you grow when your customers' dissatisfaction with the product keeps increasing? You lose money and your product's trustworthy reputation goes down the drain. That's why you should take all possible actions to prevent customer churn. And as there are various ways to do that, this is what we recommend you to do.
Collect Feedback
Ask churned users to leave feedback by offering them a survey or text area input. This information may help you discover problems in your app that you aren't aware of.
Customer Churn Survey, Feedback Collection, ApphudImprove onboarding
Did you know that nearly 50-60% of subscribers make their payment after onboarding? That's how important it is to make onboarding perfect! This is primarily a product job, and we doubt that Apphud or any other service can help you with this. What we can do is help you measure conversion rates for your paywalls.
Retention
You should add more quality content and work with reviews. Remember that your app retention is interlinked with subscriber retention. So, the higher the retention rate, the more subscribers you'll get. The goal is to have a great product that people would like to use as frequently as possible. And Apphud can help you with that.
To keep retention, all you have to do is use our Rules to interact with your users. For example, send them daily scheduled push notifications or manual push campaigns dedicated to some holidays or special events.
Audience
We highly recommend you try to target different audiences and add localization. It's highly likely that users from another target group will convert better and churn less. In Apphud, you can analyze revenue and conversions among different countries, app versions, and many other filters.
Experiment with pricing
You should also experiment with pricing and A/B testing for subscriptions will help you with that. Luckily, Apphud has A/B pricing experiments that would allow you to find a better price for your subscription to increase retention.
Customer Churn, A/B Experiment Analytics, ApphudWin back churned customers
There will always be churned customers but you can always try to convince them to come back. You can offer users who canceled their subscription a discount or an additional trial to re-engage. How does it work, you may ask.
First, you need to detect when the user canceled auto-renewal and then send them a push notification. If the user opens a notification, you can intercept this in code and show the in-app screen. That's what we do in Apphud.
Want to know more? Check out our article!
Churned Customers Win Back, ApphudReduce involuntary churn
About 30-50% of subscribers cancel their trial within 1 hour, while another 20% of subscribers cancel it within three days. The rest are either converted to paid subscriptions or go to a grace period because of billing issues. Their subscription couldn’t be renewed, but it's not canceled.
If a user changes payment information or method, the subscription will be recovered. That's why your goal is to notify them about billing issues within the app in advance to reduce churn.
Involuntary Churn Reduction, ApphudConclusion: Customer Churn
As you can see, churn prevention is a complex process that requires work on each stage: ASO, product, marketing, customer service, localization, and pricing optimizations. But you can let us do the job!
With Apphud you can measure and prevent customer churn, leaving your worries behind. As we described in the article, we have plenty of tools to do that effectively. Built-in surveys, feedback collection, in-App screens with discounts and automatic payment processing, A/B experiments, churn charts - we have everything you need and even more!
Want to try it out? Then sign up for FREE!
