Growth HackHow Mention decreased Churn by 22%

Measure

Mention had a high churn rate and wanted to decrease it. They measured a few things in their app, including customer support response times and whether users activate third party integrations.

Find the bottleneck

Mention knew from previous analysis that customers who activate social integrations within the product are less likely to churn (and also more likely to convert on free trial).

They though that more responsive customer support for unhappy customers would also reduce churn, but I think this was a hunch.

Experiment

Mention made a few changes. They didn’t do it in an experiment, so I don’t know what changes had the most effect.

They setup customer support so that paid customers questions would get answered first. Free users still got support, but paid customer questions went to the front of the queue.

They also sent automated emails to users that were having trouble setting up integrations. Users that setup integrations were less likely to churn, so increasing the rate of users activating integrations should decrease churn.

The results were a 22% decrease in voluntary churn in one month. This is pretty impressive.

Next Steps

If I was Mention and wanted to keep decreasing churn, I would consider doing the following.

Finding out why customers are cancelling their accounts. Once you know this, you can identify the most common reasons for people leaving (bottlenecks) and fix those. In my opinion, the easiest way to do this is to get recently-churned customers on a video call and ask them why they started using your product and why they stopped using your product.

Some companies run exist surveys in their product. I have found it hard to get these right. Customers often just select the top option or “it was too expensive”, regardless of what the real reason is.

Mention didn’t talk about their Dunning Churn, churn from user’s cards failing. It would be interesting to know if that is high or not. If it is high, then they might need to look at ways to increase their payment authorization rates.