Churn rate is a proportion of customers who stop paying for a product or service during a given time period. It’s the complete opposite of growth rate, making it one of the most important marketing and sales metrics for subscription-based companies.
It’s a seemingly easy-to-understand metric. But the simple formula to calculate churn rate has some limitations and potential traps many marketers may not take into account. Also, contrary to popular belief, you can influence churn long before someone becomes a customer.
There’s quite a lot to explore here. In this article, you’ll learn the following:
What makes churn rate so important
How to calculate churn rate
What’s a good churn rate for your business
Nine ways to decrease churn rate
Let’s dive into it.
What makes churn rate so important?
There are multiple reasons why keeping track of your churn rate and working with it can help to boost your marketing performance. Well, five main reasons to be specific.
1. Direct revenue impact
Churn rate is a decelerator of your growth rate. But unlike the growth rate, a certain percentage of churn is here to stay. Many fast-growing companies may fall into the trap of ignoring high churns when their growth is much higher, but it’s not a sustainable business model.
A 15% churn rate may not seem that bad when a startup grows 200% year-over-year. But that growth rate will eventually fall, and the churn may not. Any company will sooner or later suffer from high churn rates even if they weren’t such a big problem initially.
The sooner you start tackling your churn rate, the better. It has compounding effects. Let’s consider two companies with $1M ARR (annual recurring revenue) each and a similar growth rate of 25%. But they have different churn rates (scroll horizontally to see all table columns):
Year 0 ARR Year 1 ARR Year 2 ARR Year 3 ARR Year 4 ARR Year 5 ARR
25% growth
5% churn $1,000,000 $1,200,000 $1,440,000
$1,728,000
$2,073,600
$2,448,320
25% growth
10% churn
$1,000,000 $1,150,000 $1,322,500
$1,520,875
$1,749,006
$2,011,357
That’s what a difference of 5 percentage points in churn rate can do to revenue. The higher you churn, the slower you grow. Easy as that.
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2. Influence your word-of-mouth marketing
Word-of-mouth marketing (WoMM) is the process of influencing and encouraging natural discussions about a product, service, or company. I’m sure you’ve subscribed to some product or service because someone you trust told you about it. For this reason, WoMM can be one of the most powerful marketing channels.
The fact that more than 14,000 new customers in 2020 told us they were referred to Ahrefs by their friends is the best proof of WoMM’s importance:
Person said in registration form they learned about Ahrefs through friends
Churn rate reflects how well you meet the expectations of people who sign up for your product or service. While we can’t directly translate high churn into dissatisfaction, we can assume it’s a signal for a need to significantly improve your WoMM.
3. Early indicator of bad news for your business
Noticed a big spike in your monthly churn rate? Chances are you did something wrong that month.
Maybe product changes got negative feedback? Increased pricing? Any bad publicity? Or it could be your competitors stepped up their game and poached a significant number of your customers.
At any rate, having such an early indicator of these changes always comes in handy.