17 Strategies to reduce subscriber churn
In the subscription business, winning a customer is only the beginning.
If you're ready to take serious steps to reduce customer churn rates, there's a lot of good news. It takes some work, but it pays off noticeably in your monthly recurring revenue and customer feedback surveys.
1. Analyze why churn is happening
While exit surveys provide a baseline for understanding churn analysis, they often only scratch the surface. To gain deeper, more nuanced insights, consider conducting qualitative exit interviews. A direct conversation can uncover the critical details and "aha" moments that a static survey might miss. This task can be handled by your customer success team, product team, or outsourced to a specialized firm that excels at gathering unbiased customer feedback. It's important to recognize that this is a reactive measure, but the goal is to dig until you understand what turned a once-loyal customer into a statistic, providing valuable lessons for future retention strategies.
When you rely on customer satisfaction surveys, you miss out on quite a few reasons for customer churn, including some that point to whether this churn is voluntary or involuntary churn.
If unhappy customers misunderstood some step in the onboarding process, you might not pick up that nuance from a survey. That said, customer engagement surveys do have a place in improving your retention rates.
Notice customers are dropping off quickly after their free trial? It might be time to reevaluate your onboarding process. This crucial stage is one of the most important moments in the subscriber journey — your chance to showcase value, build engagement, and create lasting loyalty. To ensure users are getting the most out of your platform, consider using post-onboarding surveys to gather insights and assess their initial experience.
Tools like Recurly Compass can offer personalized insights on churn metrics and provide playbooks to help your team figure out how to improve your metrics.
2. Engage with your customers and get valuable feedback
If you want to know something, sometimes the best thing to do is just ask. Did you know that while the average business only hears from 4% of dissatisfied customers, a whopping 95% of customers will share bad experiences with others.
At every opportunity, you should invite and welcome customer feedback, both from your most loyal customers and from those who have decided to churn. While you might be the expert at marketing and selling your product, your customers may have a completely different perspective.
Conduct regular surveys of your subscriber base to get an understanding of how people are using your product, the features they'd like to see, and the challenges they're experiencing. This kind of engagement can help mitigate voluntary churn before it happens. Even after subscribers churn, it’s still important to engage with them.
Here’s how you can put this into action:
Send in-app or email surveys to active users to learn how they’re using your product, what features they value, and what pain points they face
Trigger cancellation surveys the moment a customer churns, so their feedback is fresh and accurate
Review feedback trends — if a large portion of churned users cite price, content, or feature limitations, it may be time to revisit your strategy
Keep it easy — the simpler the form (think checkboxes vs. open-ended fields), the higher the response rate
Track user engagement and create prompts/notifications to re-engage customers with new content, offers, or features. A good example would be Netflix sending notifications to users of new content or a new season of their favorite show returning to those who haven’t logged in for a while.
Implementing these techniques may feel like a daunting challenge to overcome. However, these don’t have to be manual processes. Recurly Engage provides the tools to implement these strategies with ease, turning valuable insights into revenue-generating actions. Whether you are looking for subscriber feedback, mitigating churn, or looking to re-engage subscribers, we’ve got your back.
3. Train your customers on your products
Signing up for your subscription doesn’t guarantee that customers understand how to use your product. Without proper guidance, they may struggle to see its value. The result? Increased churn simply because they couldn’t unlock the full potential of your platform. To prevent this, you need a clear, effective strategy.
Create content that helps subscribers become power users:
Create personalized onboarding experiences so customers see the value of their subscription right from the beginning
Offer free webinars to spotlight new features, share best practices, or showcase customer success stories
Post on-demand video tutorials for quick, self-serve guidance on using your product effectively
Host live product demos where customers can ask questions in real time and learn directly from your team
Share regular product tips and feature highlights via email or in-app messages to encourage feature adoption
Build a searchable knowledge base so users can solve issues or explore features on their own time. This can be a great opportunity to use AI tools to build a knowledge base that can proactively help customers. Check out how Recurly does this with our tool Recurly Compass.
In a SaaS business, this comes with the territory since you're creating a new product under your customers' feet. Teaching your subscribers how to realize the full potential of your products and services goes a long way toward keeping those customers. Sharing tips and tricks while listening to your customer feedback can create a virtuous cycle; the better you educate your current customers, the smarter your onboarding for new customers can get.
4. Identify those about-to-churn customers
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure — and preventing customer churn helps you avoid paying acquisition costs again.
Understanding your customer lifecycle and key conversion points lets you spot behaviors that often lead to cancellations, like reduced usage, fewer logins, or more support tickets. Recognizing these signals allows you to take action and reduce churn risk.
Finding customers at risk of churning is all about customer relationships 101: Talk to the quiet ones.
Focus on customers with minimal interactions with your company. For instance, if a regular user hasn’t logged in for weeks, send a quick “we miss you” or “what’s new in our product” email. If they’re reaching out for support often, have a customer success agent proactively schedule a conversation. Do they have an open service request? Have they been unresponsive to surveys? Or have they simply gone inactive?
Look for trends and patterns in this group. Identifying these behaviors and responding appropriately can significantly reduce churn.
5. Define your churn goals and identify your most valuable customers
Define your acceptable churn rates and which customers you're committed to keeping. Set thresholds for a monthly acceptable churn rate, maximum churn tolerance, and any churn thresholds that would signal new action for your marketing teams.
Then, identify those valuable customers already showing loyalty with their wallets. Make sure your customer success teams know who they are. You’ll want to identify customer signals that indicate when churn is possible. Make sure your teams have a firm grasp of what makes a most valuable client. And do better than simply identifying the big spenders.
Once you know which customer types are most profitable, who's most ready to cancel, and who's most likely to accept offers, your teams will be well-positioned to manage churn rates.
6. Create cancellation saves
Not every subscriber who hits “cancel” actually wants to leave. The data bears this out as well, 20% of all acquisitions are returning subscribers. Many are simply weighing their options, feeling uncertain, or reacting to a temporary issue like price or value perception. That’s where cancellation save tactics come in.
The cancellation moment is your opportunity to learn what’s happening. The most effective tactic is often the simplest: just ask. By implementing a brief exit survey, you can uncover the specific reason for the cancellation. You can then use simple methods to win them back before final cancellation. Sometimes, customers need a break, or they just need to see more value in the service.
However, your save attempt must be truly targeted. The customer's answer should directly determine the offer you present.
Problem: "It's too expensive" -> Solution: Offer a limited-time discount or an option to switch to a lower-cost plan.
Problem: "I have too much of your product right now" -> Solution: A discount is the wrong move. Instead, offer to pause their subscription for 1-3 months or reduce the delivery frequency.
Problem: "I'm not using the service enough" -> Solution: Offer to downgrade their plan or provide resources (like a quick tutorial) to help them get more value
Successfully preventing cancellations requires targeted testing and careful monitoring of strategies. With tools like Recurly Engage, you can automate this process and achieve better results.
7. Offer incentives
Think about the last time you stayed in a hotel. You paid for a room expecting a bed and a clean bathroom. At check-in, you're given a warm cookie, find mints on your pillow, and enjoy a free breakfast the next morning. These little extras make you feel welcome and valued. Next time you travel, you'll likely book with the same hotel. The same idea applies to your subscription business.
Value-added services such as member-only content, premium support access, and additional features make your product more attractive to paying customers. While you might only see a marginal increase in your operating costs with these offerings, you'll see an exponential increase in brand loyalty and reduced churn.
💡 Recommended reading: MarketMuse uses smart promotions to fuel subscriber growth
8. Be proactive about communicating with customers
Dunning is the process of communicating with customers (usually by email) to try to collect payments due. In the subscription business model, dunning is specific to reducing churn because of failed payments. Most involuntary churn in subscription businesses happens because of an expired payment card. Because you know when your customers' cards expire, you can easily send them reminders to update their card information.
We recommend sending multiple emails during the dunning process as this gives customers multiple reminders to update their payment information. While sending multiple reminders is a good start, relying solely on email is an outdated approach that leaves revenue on the table.
An in-app message prompting a user to update their payment information is far more immediate and contextual. It catches them while they're actively engaged with your product, making it a clutch move for reducing churn with less friction. With tools like Recurly Engage, you can do just that.
For global companies, you must speak your customer's language. This is never more important than during sensitive financial communications. Sending dunning messages in your customer's native language shows respect, builds trust, and dramatically increases the likelihood of a successful payment update. A message they can't understand is one they will almost certainly ignore.
Recurly can also help you proactively fight churn automatically. You can use automated tools that work silently in the background to update card details and intelligently retry failed transactions. This approach is powerful because it's invisible to the customer — recovering revenue without ever prompting
9. Turn billing obstacles into your allies
Credit card changes, billing info changes, or a simple typo on payment information can cause involuntary churn. However, you don't have to leave these process problems to chance.
Mastercard, Visa, American Express, and Discover cards all offer an automated service that monitors customers' credit cards for changes and makes updates to the records whenever necessary so that recurring transactions can be processed successfully. The right subscription management platform can avoid a failed payment before it even occurs by integrating these account updater tools.
💡 Recommended reading: Maximizing subscription revenue recovery
10. Deploy a subscription billing and management platform
A credit card transaction can fail for over 2,000 distinct reasons, but many of these failures are temporary and recoverable. Credit card transactions that fail can automatically be retried using a subscription billing and management platform. The reason for the failure determines the frequency and timing of the retries. For example, if a customer has insufficient funds, this may take longer to rectify than other failure types. This kind of “intelligent” retry logic means that retry attempts are set at a schedule that will most likely lead to success.
The goal is to maximize revenue gained through retry attempts, while also being mindful of the fees related to these transactions to make sure they stay within reason.
Top subscription management platforms, like Recurly, take advantage of billions of data points and machine learning to attempt retries at just the right time, thereby minimizing retry costs for merchants.
💡 Recommended reading: Strategies to minimize churn & maximize revenue
11. Target the right audiences
If they joined for the free lunch, will they pay for a five-course meal? Rather than trying to save every user, it's more effective to focus your retention efforts on customers who are a good fit for your product. Your products and services have value, one that grows as you develop your offering. When you have identified those subscribers who keep delving deeper into your products, then you can keep looking for more customers like them. If you're offering cheap, starter specials, you may be attracting the wrong potential customers.
When you find customers who see themselves sticking with your service for the long term, those are customers worth the effort to retain.
12. Prioritize your onboarding process
Early subscriber churn is common when customers feel like they're not sure how to navigate a product or use it effectively. If you're seeing a high churn rate after the first few subscription periods, you might need to take a hard look at your onboarding process.
It’s not enough to simply have documentation, emails, and tutorials. Every element must be a deliberate expression of your brand's voice and values. Think of a brand like Apple — their setup process isn't just a series of steps; it's a seamless and polished introduction to their entire philosophy. Your onboarding content should serve the same purpose.
For higher-priced B2B products, this principle is embodied by your customer success team. Their role isn't just to walk new customers through setup, but to personally establish the trusted, supportive relationship your brand promises, ensuring every question is answered with the care and attention that will define your partnership for years to come.
13. Help your customer teams offer killer customer service
When you run a SaaS company, you'll have access to plenty of customer behavior data. So if you want to offer killer customer service, set up a department of people whose sole task is to make sure your customers are getting the most out of your products and services.
Customer support handles emergencies. Customer success is like the dietician and fitness trainer. They're signing up your customers' power users for webinars, treating the VIPs to unique offers, and overall showing the best side of your products and services.
For simple troubleshooting, consider creating an online help center that is easily indexed by search engines and generative AI models to make sure easy questions have easy solutions.
14. Study complaints, review sites, and community forums
Ever wonder what your customer satisfaction surveys aren't telling you? Go to the forums.
The community forums, third-party review sites, and your own customer complaint box are all a treasure trove of valuable feedback. This customer retention rate booster takes thick skin and some de-personalization. Go into it with the air of an anthropologist or as an outside researcher trying to understand your business. Trust yourself that you can identify which complaints are in bad faith and which ones are customers you genuinely lost due to a process you can fix.
Because the good news is, it probably is solvable. Your team will fix what's broken, add what's missing, and tune the slightly misaligned expectations. And if it's nothing you can solve, then add the findings to your research into reasons for customer churn.
15. Send your brightest and best to answer big cancellations
Get the short list of your company's most winsome and charismatic B2B sales reps. Then make them your premium subscriber savers.
If you spot a high-value customer making signals that they're about to cancel their subscription, send in your all-stars. It'll take effort to turn around a situation headed south, but that's what defines high-performing teams. It may only take a bit of listening, some well-posed questions, and a short-term incentive. You'll know for sure only once you've sent in the pros.
16. Show off your competitive advantages to your current customers
You created your subscription business to offer something unique or in a unique way that no one else in the market has.
Grab your marketing team, have a fun lunch outing, and talk about what makes your business unique. Explain it clearly and have them repeat it in their own words. Discuss your key differentiators until everyone can confidently say what sets your product or service apart and what customers lose by leaving. Then use the most memorable phrases in places where your customers will see them.
Make this an annual exercise. This comes from an old writing exercise: Say it straight and then say it great. And while it may seem like preaching to the choir to tell your current customers why the subscription they're paying for is so valuable, don't take your customers' loyalty for granted.
17. Offer long-term contracts
What might be the most outrageous versions of your products and services that you don't think any customer would ever choose? Longest possible terms? Most wide-ranging value? Take it as a challenge for your products and services team. You might be surprised to find a customer will still subscribe to it.
The right upgrade offer with a long-term contract will win over any customer who's already enjoying the benefits of your products and services. As a result, these customers are secured against churn for a significantly longer period compared to the rest of your customer base.
Raising your customer retention rates comes down to this...
Reducing customer churn starts with turning one-way communication into a two-way conversation, focusing on listening to your customers, not just talking at them. Then studying your customers will help you anticipate their needs and develop imaginative ways to overcome objections. Then your business must participate in your customers' day-to-day lives so you can establish and reaffirm the value you're bringing.
Reducing churn can feel like trying to hit a moving target. To help you suss things out, we've created this compelling guide that helps you cut your involuntary churn rate to 1% and boost subscription revenue by 11% MoM.
If you’re ready to see more, book a demo today.
