October 14th, 2009 | Published in churn
Okay, I struggled with getting this blog post out. It turns out that I’m far more interested in spouting on about the factors that effect churn rates when I’m in a pub somewhere. That said, I promised to talk about the factors that influence churn rates and here are my thoughts on the type of application and how rates differ between them. Read the rest of this entry »
October 7th, 2009 | Published in churn
Sign up 400 people each paying €25 a month and retire. That’s the name of my game. Well not really. As the ever so clever (and annoyingly correct) Caelen pointed out in his latest Bizcamp tour de force – it is not quite that simple. Churning milk makes you butter and churning customers make you penniless – eventually. Subscriptions have a lifetime and eventually people will ebb away little by little unless I maintain and enhance the services we offer them. So how do we avoid churn? Well, we don’t. We mitigate it. There are several approaches but for this blog post I’m just going cover payment methods and how they effect churn.
Not all methods of payment methods are created equal when it comes to reducing churn. Here is the top five as far as I am concerned in reverse order:
5. Paypal: Not everyone can get their head around Paypal but for the tech crowd pretty much everyone has an account. This is a plus and a minus. For those used to using Paypal it makes it easier for them to sign up. On the down side, it also means that they are that much more used to canceling subscriptions. Read the rest of this entry »