The Importance Of Churn Analysis

The cost of attracting a new customer is always more than maintaining an existing one. LTV is the total value of your customer over the entire length of their relationship with your company.  

It's common for new SaaS companies to focus too heavily on acquiring new customers rather than kee...

Unlike regular churn, this metric is one to aspire to. Net negative churn means that total revenue from your existing customers surpasses the revenue lost to churn.  

Basically, your existing customers are spending enough extra money to offset the losses from those who churned. You can reac...

Customer retention rate is the proportion of customers you've retained over a specific time period. 

It's the direct opposite of churn rate. For example, if your retention rate is 80%, your churn rate will be 20%. 

Here’s how to calculate customer retention rate:

Custome...

Defined as the percentage of customers that cancel their subscriptions in any given time period, churn rate is an essential metric that can make, or break, the success of your SaaS business.  

That's why it's so critical to master churn analysis. No SaaS company can hang on to all its custo...

Analyzing churn by behavior can reveal important patterns related to certain features of your product. Perhaps customers churn right after they use a specific feature. In that case, your product and engineering teams should dig in further to identify the issue and create a fix.  

On the oth...

When preparing a churn analysis, it's important to think about churn in relation to both your business and your customers. The following suggested analysis methods will help you achieve this. 

Before starting your churn analysis, it's important to ask yourself: what problem am I trying to s...

This metric tells you how much you need to spend to acquire a new customer. As we already learned, it typically costs more to acquire a new one than maintain an existing one.  

A high churn rate means you’ll have to spend more money on acquiring new customers, which pushes up your CAC.

There’s a critical difference between voluntary and involuntary churn. Voluntary churn happens when a customer deliberately cancels or downgrades their subscription. 

Involuntary churn is often due to expired or declined payment cards, lack of funds, incorrect payment information, or poor p...

You can gain important context by examining your customers’ locations. For example, local tax regulations, payment processing methods, and payment gateways vary according to country. It’s essential for SaaS businesses to comply with these rules. 

If your customer base is widely spread aroun...

NRR(Net Revenue Retention Rate) can be calculated as: 

NRR= Starting MRR-Contraction MRR - Churn MRR + Expansion MRR/Starting MRR x 100

GRR(Gross Revenue Retention Rate) can be calculated as:

GRR=(Starting MRR-Downsell-Churn/Starting MRR

Net revenue retention rate (NRR), also known as net dollar retention, is expressed as a percentage. It incorporates several types of customer activity, including upgrades, downgrades and churn. 

NRR tells you how much monthly or annual recurring revenue you’ve retained from current customer...

To truly understand the nuances of churn and calculate its impact on your business, it's vital to take a holistic approach that considers all the metrics mentioned above.  

Customer retention is especially important, as it’s the flipside of customer churn. Improving retention rates not ...

In this approach, you group your customers according to the length of time they’ve been with your company. Analyzing churn by age is invaluable for identifying patterns across your entire customer base without getting bogged down by too many cohorts.

Customer cancellations directly affect your MRR. To clarify this, you can calculate a metric called churn MRR rate , which provides a percentage for the impact of churn on your business.  

First add up the MRR of lost customers over a given time period, then divide this number by MRR for th...

The basic formula to calculate churn rate is very simple:

Number of customers cancelling their subscription per time interval / Number of customers at the beginning of that interval x 100

Churn should be viewed as a prime opportunity to learn and improve.  

Churn analysis allows you to evaluate strengths and weaknesses in your existing processes, while improving your ability to deal with, and prevent, future churn. 

Losing a few customers may seem insignificant at firs...

Analyzing churn by cohort is a good way to begin your churn analysis. In cohort reports, you segment your customer base according to a specific time period. 

Cohort reports are useful because they produce numbers which are not influenced by new customer acquisition.  

They also allow ...