3 years ago I fell in love with churn. Well, not churn exactly but what to do about it.

I was working in-house and we’d hit a slow down in our growth. It was meteoric in my first year there (good old unicorn hockey stick growth) and while we were still growing, it wasn’t anywhere near the pace of those early days.

So we had to ask ourselves some tough questions.

“What would happen if we didn’t do any more growth? If we never brought in another customer?”

After the sales team was done freaking out, we realized that no new customers meant two things:

1. We got to focus on the customers we’d already attracted.

2. By doing the above, we could not only maintain but grow our MRR.

And so my love affair with churn reduction began.

By focusing on the customers we’d already attracted, we kept them around longer. Increased CLTV.

We helped them grow their businesses through education. We became valued partners, not just another piece of software. And they told their friends. Decreased CAC.

When a competitor came into the space with lower prices, more/better features, or a really shiny blog, our customers stuck with us. Decreased revenue churn.

Why weren’t more companies doing this???

As I transitioned out of my in-house role and into freelancing, I looked around at all of the Growth Hacks and sales bots and felt like I was holding a little secret in my pocket.

Hey, um, what are you doing to support your existing customers?

“Yeah yeah yeah,” they’d say. “But first let’s work on making the onboarding experience for new customers as solid as possible. We’ll worry about retention later.”

Over and over I’d talk to founders who desperately wanted to shore up their onboarding. Their goal was to give a good experience up front for the thousands of new customers they were bringing on.

So I built my Trojan Horse

There’s an old sales saying that goes something like “sell them what they want, give them what they need”. I knew that what I really wanted to talk about was long term retention and what my clients wanted to talk about was supporting their new customers.

Okay.

Since part of long term retention is having a great experience from Day 1, I decided to play that onboarding game.

And play I did.

I spent 6 months writing email onboarding tear downs, became an authority on onboarding via email, and booked out clients again and again (as my rates went up and up) right alongside the successes I helped my clients gain.

I wrote the definitive guide to eCommerce email marketing for Stripe Atlas.

I revamped onboarding for Podia that led to a 10% increase in customer conversions.

I co-hosted an email onboarding webinar with Litmus.

I worked with dream clients like Sujan Patel, Amy Hoy, Egghead, Tech Ladies, Kettle & Fire, IndieHackers, and more.

And I spoke at conferences and on podcasts about the power of specialization.

Ever an advocate for email as a powerful channel for customer messaging, I knew that the time had come to unpack that Trojan Horse and lay all of my cards on the table.

It’s about your customers

The path to greater revenue isn’t always attracting new customers.

Turning the customers you’ve already attracted into customers for life means that (if you have the right pricing strategy in place) as they grow, you grow too.

And it all starts with fixing your churn.

Because fixing your churn means:

• Increased MRR
• Increased CLTV
• Decreased CAC

And decreased customer churn (obviously?) means decreased revenue churn.

That’s for what.

“Hey Google, how do I fix my churn?”

I launched Fix My Churn because that’s what I want to help you do. Our work is still centered around email (it will always and forever remain my favorite messaging platform) but we now have the opportunity to support everything email touches: help docs, in-app messaging, affiliate/referral programs.

The Fix My Churn Method is built on the fact that email is never done:

Analyze

Customer research via surveys and interviews
Review of support tickets and chat logs

Strategize

Create list of email experiments to run based on analysis phase

Fix

Run monthly campaign experiments, reporting back on the previous campaign in the following month

Analyze is a full month dedicated to a full audit, customer interviews and surveys, and building a series of email experiments to run with. The following months are the running of and reporting on those experiments. Like so:

• Month 1: audit and research
• Month 2: write 2 variations on sequence #1, set those live
• Month 3: write 2 variations on sequence #2, set those live, collect data on sequence #1, choose winner
• Month 4: write 2 variations on sequence #3, set those live, collect data on sequence #2, choose winner
• Etc. for as long as we both see fit.

Our goal is to hand you a report each month that tells you you’ve (at the very least) recouped your investment in email through reducing revenue churn via our work together.

With some back-of-the-napkin math, it’s easy to see what this can do for your brand. If you were converting 500 paid customers a month from free trials and your average revenue per user was $50, a 10% boost adds $30,000 to your annual revenue.

If you’re worried about your customer churn, you aren’t alone.

I’m worried about it too.

Thanks for being here and reading about this evolution. It’s time to tackle the most fun problem there is to solve.

Let’s talk soon.

-Val

Chief Email Officer, Fix My Churn