These customers may subscribe for specific reasons or seasons, and their engagement tends to follow predictable trends and model consistent use over a limited period of time. Their value to your business may vary depending on temporal factors, such as new episodes of a beloved show or a literal season like the holidays or sports playoffs. This allows for a few weeks or months of subscription renewal with opportunities to build habits and get to know the product more deeply.
By analyzing engagement patterns during their “on” seasons, you can identify opportunities to capture more value with relevant ancillary products or features, or offer modified pricing for more sporadic use during the times they would typically lapse.
Event-driven churn
These customers may be short-term, single-use subscribers who show up for an acutely specific event or promotion. In other words, they’re here for a good time, not a long time.
The distinction of seasonal churn is important. Events are at a meaningfully higher risk of being underwater from a monetization standpoint relative to costs of acquiring users. It is critical to ensure the economics of their subscription are not upside down on a unit basis, as this group can significantly impair a sustainable business model in the long run if they show up in high volumes. On the upside, they can provide healthy surges in organic traffic, expand brand awareness and may make sense as candidates for hyper-efficient media buys.
Preventable churn
This cohort represents customers who could have been retained with better education during their onboarding, engagement and off-boarding processes. These customers may not be fully aware of the breadth of content offerings, features and devices that your product provides, which can result in them leaving unsatisfied despite having the potential for a long-term relationship with your product. Deploying context-aware information to these customers based on their implied needs can help improve their understanding of your product’s value and reduce preventable churn.
Many business leaders assume churn primarily fits in the preventable category. Assuming so often leads to an overestimation of the opportunity for change and underwhelming results in efforts to reverse it. It’s understandable that businesses default to this because it’s typically the most straightforward to address: If people are unaware, just send them some messages or create some onboarding to make them aware, right?
