Thomas Hopkins

When looking at involuntary unsubscribes, set up additional payment processing systems in case a card gets declined with a specific system (e.g., Stripe) but could be approved with another one (e.g., PaymentCloud).

For voluntary unsubscribes, you must first understand what is correlated to unsubscribing.

• Engagement
• Content
• # of Devices used
• Payment system they paid with
• Perception of your brand and product

To improve subscriber retention you must understand your unsubscribe segments:

• Involuntary unsubscribes

Voluntary unsubscribes

The type of content consumption might not be correlated with retention rates. Example: Masterclass subscribers retain at roughly similar rates whether they consume content from a category or another.

You have to know your unsubscribe curve so you know when to engage users to keep them around. Focus your feature promotion and lifecycle during those times. Example at Masterclass: email at day 335 to let them know the subscription will renew

Voluntary unsubscribes can be correlated with how many different types of devices are used. If that’s the case, make creatives and content that display well on different devices. Be careful, though: it can be correlation and not causation.

Brand perception can be strongly related to subscriber retention rates. Here are a few things you can do to understand and increase that:

• Run surveys to understand how much content retained subscribers think you have (e.g., some think there is more content than there is, and retain hire)
• Let users know that more content is coming (e.g., Netflix’s “Coming soon”)
• Give the perception that the app is making the world a better place
• Give the perception that the app is having a positive impact on users’ life

Allow your subscribers to gift your product to somebody else. This can help with the retention of the subscriber gifting!

Do not focus on increasing app engagement for your subscribers until you confirm that higher engagement rates are correlated with higher retention rates. For example, at Masterclass, that wasn’t the case.

Subscription retention rate can be correlated with payment method (e.g., American Express vs. PayPal vs. Visa). Understanding this data can help you find more people with those payment methods.

Some tactics if your Retention is based on Engagement:

• MEME - More Email, More engagement. If you’re sending one email a week, send ten. People don’t unsubscribe, so overuse it.
• PEPE - Personalized experience, Perception Elevated. Send personalized emails based on the app usage.
• Use in-app messages, push, and email and leverage rich media.
• Have a weekly newsletter if you have the resources and content.

Each channel has a spend vs. profit curve, where there is an optimal spend. The curve is usually flat at the top, which means that when you increase spend you might not get more profit. You have to be willing to increase spend to know where you are on the profit curve.