Hello friend,

I hope your week has gone swimmingly. A few announcements before we begin:

🌞 We’ve helped a company go international and reduced CPA by 60% whilst doing this
🌞 I ran 3x workshops for SYSTM on acquisition, creative strategy, and mobile growth
🌞 We ran a product-focused roundtable for all the portfolio founders of a fund (to raucous feedback)
🌞 We’re launching our first-ever live event series, and you’re invited. Details here (and at the end)

Have a beautiful weekend,
Hannah

How to win back lost customers

It wasn't until I went through my first benchmarking session with Apple, back in 2017, that I learned about win-back strategies. Back then, I found out that we weren’t doing so well: we had a 6% month-2 win-back and an 8% month-6 win-back.

That means after 6 months, only 8% of the people that churned returned 😬

We had the highest retention rates in our peer group, meaning that when someone becomes a customer, they’re very likely to stick around, however, if they ended up churning, our rate of bringing them back was abysmal.

To put this into perspective, the best-performing product in our group was winning back at a 35% rate by month 6.

They were performing nearly 500% better than us. Ouch.

In our defence, we were a young product and had spent exactly zero hours working on our win-back strategies.

That 35% astounded us. It kicked us into gear and very soon after, we were elbows deep focusing on win-backs. There was a lot of opportunity — we could only go up from there.

And we did. To 30%.

Understanding the broader context is crucial though. For most subscription products, especially those with a paywall with a trial that appears during onboarding, 80% of the trial opt-ins occur within the first two minutes of someone creating an account.

What are win-back campaigns?

Win-back campaigns are efforts to re-engage people who have stopped using our product, or "churned". For subscription products, these target users who've turned off auto-renew and whose billing period has elapsed, encouraging them to re-subscribe.

In my first win-back campaign, we built a small banner into our app. When a user cancels their subscription, their billing status changes from active to cancelled. This status change triggered the banner, which offered a discount to resubscribe. Simple, yet effective - we immediately saw an uptick. This was just the beginning of our win-back strategy.

How do we actually do this?

• Understand why 
  The most important thing to do when building any new channel or function is to have a thorough understanding of why. You can do this with surveys and feedback forms, however, I'd strongly recommend getting onto the phone with some real people and talking 1:1 to them.

• Use multiple channels
  Push notifications can drive conversion up by more than 25%, however you shouldn't stop there. Experiment with in-app notifications, targeted re-engagement ads, and email.

• Experiment
  Create a backlog of different initiatives and start to work through those. We ran an A/B test to see whether people would convert at a higher rate with a higher discount, so we offered 20% off to group A and 30% off to group B. Both groups converted at the same rate.

• Be persistent but not annoying
  Getting the timing right for when you're sending your win-back messages is crucial. At one of my companies, we identified that the average day our annual subscribers changed their billing status was around day 290, so guess when we focused? Spoilers: Day 280.

• Optimise your web flows
  Simplifying and optimising your flow can result in 50%+ increase in conversion, so make sure you're paying attention to where people are dropping off.

Where to start?

If you don't already, concretely, know why someone is churning, it's time to find those out. Set yourself a goal of talking to five people this week — just five for 20 minutes each — about why they're no longer using your product. Record what you find out and use these learnings as the foundation of your win-back campaign.

The original (and full) version of this essay can be found on the RevenueCat blog.

You’re invited
APERTURE SESSIONS: Summer Breakfast

​APERTURE SESSIONS is an invite-only gathering of top leaders and emerging voices in the tech and startup space. 

​This a place where perspectives are shared, ideas are born, and new connections are made. 

​We bring together a mix of thinkers and doers for honest, insightful discussions. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or senior leader, or you've been making waves lately, you'll find yourself at home here.

​Each session features an expert panel conversation, followed by a facilitated discussion to get to know what’s been on each other’s minds. You'll hear insider stories, all while enjoying a delicious breakfast in a cute, Old Street community space.

If you’re interested in speaking at this event or a future event, let me know.