Three steps to reduce churn for product leaders.
Most people forget 75% of what you're told in training. Your customers will only remember a quarter of what you told them during onboarding. It's too easy for B2B tech companies to rely on the onboarding process to improve retention. Onboarding processes have a real impact, but it's not enough to achieve world-class retention and drive exponential growth.
Nurture usage
You must remind the user of the features they could use, ideally in a timely and relevant manner, i.e. not an email with a long list of all your features. Your nurture activity comes in a few different flavours:
It's either off-site or on-site.
Or is active or passive?
Ideally, you use a good mix of nurture actions, including alerts, suggestions, signposts or value reports.
Improve user experience
Addressing user experience issues could be a massive project, so we should break this down into critical areas of focus. In order of importance:
Happy path for the most common “job to be done”.
Make it easier to repeat workflow tasks.
Don’t bother with the edge cases.
Innovate to stay relevant
If you agree that the problem space your product addresses is dynamic, we need to tweak it to remain relevant and sustain our product-market fit. There are several sources to capture potential changes:
In collaboration with customer success, the product team can identify the key pains users suffer.
Changes to the “jobs to be done” by the target user.
New system integrations are needed as new tech becomes mainstream, e.g. Slack.
Changes to law and compliance.
A product leader in a martech I coach is focused on reducing churn. They quickly increased the usage and adoption of a new feature. They identified an excellent nurturing activity that adds value to their customers. They rolled out a reminder in just two weeks based on the lack of crucial user activity and subsequently saw a decrease in churn. Based on cohort analysis, eight weeks later, they have seen a reduction in churn. WIN!
