Why You Should Make Retention Your New Growth Strategy
We’re launching Brightback out of stealth.
Acquire, grow, acquire some more.
That’s the mantra for most SaaS and subscription companies today. As an industry, we invest millions acquiring and converting customers. Startups buy ads, set up new technology and build out sales and marketing teams. It works. Businesses are growing at unprecedented rates.
But then a funny thing happens. The customers we worked so hard to get leave. Or downgrade. And there’s little to no effort spent to save them.
We let churn just happen. Even though it’s 7X more expensive to acquire a customer than to retain one.
For a long time, acquisition has been the primary focus of growth, but it’s come at a cost. When companies don’t start with a retention strategy at its core, the potential revenue loss is staggering. For example, over five years time, two subscription startups with identical acquisition rates will end $42M ARR apart with just a 5% difference in net MRR churn. Ouch.
The customer is in control
It’s true, there’s more success in the SaaS industry than ever before, but there’s also more competition. In a few clicks, customers can find a product that’s a perfect fit for their needs and sign up. But then their needs change or a new product shows up. And just as easily as they joined a service, they can cancel it.
Losing users is so common, most leaders don’t even know when or why their last customer canceled — let alone why. This is a big problem.
The reality is 15–30% of customers cancel for the wrong reasons. They indicate preventable issues like not onboarding correctly, not seeing value (but still need it) or not having the time to find the features and functionality they need.
If companies don’t know why subscribers are canceling, they can’t improve the customer experience, and the cycle of churn repeats itself.
Meet Brightback: We’ve automated customer retention
Brightback is the solution for customer retention at scale. And we’ve officially launched early access.
Finally, growth and success leaders can meet customers at the point of cancel, automatically serve up personalized offers and collect data about why accounts left or were saved. No engineering effort is required besides adding a code snippet.
Over the last 10 months, we’ve accelerated product development, refined key retention benchmarks and worked closely with our pilot customers to evolve our automated approach to segmenting and saving subscribers while ensuring a positive user experience.
A scalable retention strategy is a competitive advantage
We’ve found that a systematic retention strategy increases MRR in a sustainable way. We’re providing a growth lever that CROs and success and product growth leaders can use to hit their churn targets and get closer to their customers. With Brightback, companies meet customers at the right place, at the right time with the right offer for the right reason, and they’re reducing churn by 10–20%.
A bright future ahead
I’d like to give kudos to our incredible team members and investors that have made Brightback possible. Our team has years of growth experience in SaaS, and I believe we’re uniquely positioned to help subscription companies solve their most critical business challenges. (If you want to join us, we’re hiring.)
This week, we’ll be at the Growth Marketing Conference in Toronto continuing to help growth leaders understand why retention is the new acquisition. I’ll be on stage with one of our most successful customers, Crazy Egg, showing Brightback in action.
Ready to grow through retention? Try Brightback now.
What’d you think of this post? I’m on Twitter for your questions and feedback.
