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Slow Churned: How To Target Retention Efforts So They Don’t Backfire

There’s a lot of talk in on the Internet about retaining subscribers, but very little of it has hard data behind it. Heres a look at several academic research papers on the topic of why retention efforts can actually increase churn, and how to tailor retention programs so that they work the way they are intended.

You can focus on your acquisition funnel and your lead generation and conversion rates all you want, but for a subscription business, you'll be ignoring the biggest factor in total lifetime value of your customers unless you concentrate on retention. But don't take my word for it; take the word of the academics who devote their lives to understanding and explaining these issues. In 2004, Sunil Gupta found out that if you improve your acquisition cost by 1%, you boost firm value by 0.1%. If you b...

 

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