Subscriber retention – ten top tips

Last week, we held a webinar, sponsored by Acrotrend, which looked at ‘How data can be used to optimise subscriber retention’.

An expert panel of Claire Overstall, SVP, Global Head of Customer at The Economist, Abi Spooner of Atlas and formerly Customer Strategy Officer at Dennis Publishing and Shailesh Mallya, co-founder and CTO at Acrotrend, served up loads of top tips.

Here are ten of them:

1. For publishers whose retention strategies are not (yet) data led, start simple and don’t over-complicate. Identify key data points and build from there.
2. Decide on your key data points and make sure you can visualise and track them via a dashboard.
3. Make sure you fully understand your customer value proposition. This knowledge should inform all your subscriber comms.
4. Monitor engagement continuously. If a subscriber is not using your brand, then they will churn…
5. Insights are great, but it’s what you do with them that counts. There should be defined actions throughout the customer journey.
6. Talk to different parts of your business. Each one will bring different insights to the table.
7. Promote data literacy cross-company so that everyone uses the same definitions when talking about subscribers and understands how the key metrics are calculated.
8. Plot your customer journey. All you need is a blank wall, lots of post-it notes and string. The journey will not be linear and customers do not always behave as you expect them to.
9. Segment and personalise but beware of over-segmentation. If segmented to the nth degree, there is a risk of subscribers sliding between segments and consequently receiving mixed messages.
10. Find a unifying metric, based on lifetime value, to make sure your acquisition and retention teams are working in harmony.

To hear more about the above and to catch other top tips, you can watch a recording of the webinar, which included a fifteen minute Q&A, by registering here. It was a fascinating discussion.