One of the things no one tells you when you launch your subscription box business is you will have to contend with churn.

When we launched in 2016 we had no idea what churn even was (making butter? ) – let alone what it meant to the growth of our box

We thought once you signed someone up that was it – you simply multiply your monthly price by # of subscribers and you can start dreaming of quitting your job and living off your business full time

While this is still 100% possible (I have clients taking the leap this year of all years and going all in on their box as their business grows)

In order to make your box a true success you must master the art of retention

Luckily, in this post, I’ll give you a crash course on how to do precisely that…

When you get a handle on your churn, and you can keep it at 10% or under – you’ll grow your business much faster

Not only that, your customers will pay your more money over time, allowing you to pay yourself from your business and live the life you want from your box (if we can do it with no prior business experience then you can certainly do it too)

It took us many years to get to our current situation in our business – but today I’ll share my best churn reduction tips to get you there faster…

Here’s what you can do to reduce your subscription box churn👇

1. Survey your churned customers and ask them why they cancelled

We set up automated surveys that are sent to people after they cancel their subscriptions.

• We ask them what they liked/didn’t like
• Did they find it a good value for money?
• Is there anything missing?
• If there was anything we can do to bring them back?
• What price would they like to pay?
  
  

2. Rank the 3 most common reasons

Over time your surveys can gather up hundreds or thousands of responses

When we see trends in some of the reasons people cancel

We take the top 3 and ask ourselves how can we fix those reasons 

The more we can fix the lower our churn will be

3. How to work on ways to fix those reasons

Didn’t like certain things, include them less or replace them with something else

Poor delivery issues, offer more courier options

If it’s financial, you can still fix it – just add more value to the experience

Most people give up when they hear it’s due to finances, people aren’t broke they just don’t see the value in your service

Community, information, access or insider discounts and deals are all great ways to increase customer loyalty

Try them before worrying about pricing

Most people are already not charging enough for their box

And most people will still say its financial when it’s not

4. BONUS: ask people for their email in the survey so you can identify them, if you have time or have staff, reach out to them and offer them whatever they want to bring them back
   
   

Pro tip: It’s always cheaper to reactivate an old customer than pay to find a new one

5. Reactivate Past Customers

We’ve been focusing heavily on reactivations for the last few weeks, emails, SMS even direct mail to past subscribers has seen us bring back hundreds of past customers for way less than FB advertising costs.

Lesson: there is always an opportunity somewhere – even when its hard you can still win

Hope this helps!

If you have any questions in relation to churn or email marketing for your subscription business, feel free to reach out to me and I am happy to help in any way I can

As always if you’d like to chat with me about implementing email marketing for your box so you can acquire more customers, retain more customers and upsell them to make more money – book a call with me here: https://calendly.com/garyredmond/45mincall