Our subs retention strategy: William Reed

Q: What are the key pillars of your retention strategy?

A: As a B2B provider, the fundamental basis of our membership retention strategy has always been building communities within our industry sectors. Ensuring our brands are a must have, not just a nice to have.

Our aim is for our brands to be at the heart of their industry and to stay with our members throughout their careers. We build strong relationships with our members through account management, regular contact and great content. We have built comprehensive onboarding and engagement flows to help our members discover our content and get the most from their membership.

For our specific tactical focus on churn, we have been reviewing our credit and debit card payment retention. We have been focusing on encouraging our customers to update their credit card details well before expiry to ensure continuity. We have also been testing the payment retry timing and frequency which has had positive results through our existing bureau system.

After our internal system retries, we have also addressed involuntary churn by working with a service provider who is helping us to further reduce failed payments and recover lost revenue from declines. In essence, when a customer’s recurring payment fails, the system automatically retries the transaction at optimal times and uses data and algorithms to determine the best strategy. It works with card networks and banks to improve approval rates and all this without contacting the customer. There is a percentage of revenue charge for this service, but we have seen an encouraging reduction in our churn rates due to these combined strategies and, of course, lifetime value is maintained, not just that one transaction as all our non-corporate customer base is on continuous payment.

We are also using propensity modelling to address retention and churn. We have worked with a consultant to analyse our data and highlight some growth metrics which includes elements which will affect retention. Interesting elements include engagement windows, when is the critical time when onboarding introductory offer members for instance; what content elements are important to retention; for example the number of newsletters a member is signed up to in the early part of their membership; how overall engagement quality affects retention, in particular how this is important across the members of corporate accounts; looking at member advocates within corporate accounts; patterns in accounts in terms of revenue paid against engagement and address accounts who are potentially underpaying; highlight highly engaged individual users to target for a corporate upsell; highlight corporate accounts with low engagement for account attention; using dynamic content to engage look-a-like potential members.

There is a lot still to explore, but we are confident that we will gain a significant retention uplift from some of these initiatives.

Our software provider has also helped our propensity to churn modelling by launching a traffic light system and percentage sensitivity to churn rate within our data. We are using this to target our customer base in the most effective ways. This is a current work in progress.

Q: How do you see this evolving over the next few years?

A: Continued focus on customer care and satisfaction. Further enhancement and development of our onboarding, engagement and churn / payment automated processes. More cross selling and bundling across brands to increase customer reach and engagement. More use of propensity modelling to identify drivers for churn and address them, including exploring the use of AI. Introduction of propensity modelling for new subscribers. Including the use of AI to dynamically place the right offers in front of the right customers. Continue to move away from a subscription model and embracing a membership model. Of course, we can’t forget the impact of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCCA), and how we navigate that as a B2B provider.

Three top tips

1. Never stand still. Keep testing and evolving to meet changing market conditions, customer expectations and subscription trends. Use your data.

2. Don’t forget involuntary churn. Some brands are losing subscribers and hard-fought revenue that could be saved with some attention and effort.

3. Always track engagement and act well before it becomes a problem for retention.