📰 7 Effective Ways to Reduce Customer Churn Through Personalization

There’s nothing conventional about building a startup.

In the beginning, you’re usually a few people dumb enough to think you can just will something into existence… and compete with companies who have considerably more money, employees, resources, awareness, experience, etc.

Translation: it’s hard as shit.

But that’s also why I absolutely love startups — it forces you to think and approach things differently in order to compete.

There are so many things we do at beehiiv that others may consider unconventional:

Entirely remote workforce (and ~30% international)

Barely any meetings

Full transparency into financials and company data

Every employee has shares in the business

…and so many more. But today I wanted to share an unconventional solution we came up with in the early days to help us scale quicker and never compromise on talent density.

Nearly nine months after we launched, in August 2022, we were a small team of about eight.

A few months earlier we tragically lost our friend and CTO, Andrew Platkin, and despite all of the turmoil, we were beginning to come out on the other side of that (a story for a different time).

We were looking to bring on a new CTO and were in late stage conversations with Noah Pryor. He was previously the first hire at Teachable and scaled the engineering team to over 85 people as their CTO.

I was also in desperate need of a Chief of Staff to help operationalize the business alongside me.

I had been speaking with Preeya Goenka, who was our former CSM at Sailthru back when I was working at Morning Brew, and knew that she’d be a perfect fit for the role.

But at the time (in August 2022), she had just recently left Sailthru and was now a VP at a no-code AI startup that had raised over $28M.

Good news: we were talking to two incredibly talented candidates we liked a lot.

Bad news: we were a tiny eight person company that raised a modest seed round, and couldn’t possibly afford these hires.

I’m approaching two years of podcasting (and just crossed 10M downloads and 3M YouTube views!), so now feels like a good time to reflect on how I got here.

I was incredibly hesitant to start a podcast. There are a trillion podcasts, they’re a lot of work, and it’s so dorky to tell people you have a podcast 🤦. But thanks to a nudge from Harry Stebbings, and having a newsletter platform to help kickstart it, I took the leap. Two years in, I’ve learned a ton, and the podcast is consistently a top 10 technology podcast globally, with a 5.0 average star rating across nearly 4,000 reviews. Even better, the messages I get daily from listeners melt my heart.

In today’s post, I share my podcasting lessons (so far), along with my tech stack, workflows, things I wish I’d known when I started, and advice to anyone thinking about starting a podcast. My approach isn’t necessarily the best or smartest, but it’s what I do.

When building effective social media ad campaigns, the biggest question isn’t “How much should I spend?” It’s “For every dollar I spend, how much do I get back?”

how to measure social media roi In other words, it’s all about return on investment (ROI) — how are ad spending and customer conversion linked? Understanding this makes the amount you spend less important and instead lets you focus on the impact of your social ads.

In this piece, I’m taking a look at how to measure social media marketing ROI, how to improve it, and offering a look at eight tools to help you streamline the process.

Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous? By far, the Facebook group has been the best thing so far. It's helped give us a good understanding of our audience, the language they use, and the questions they ask. This feeds back into marketing, content, SEO, and copy.

For getting the product right, the initial interviews were also incredibly important. We would have built a completely different product if those calls hadn't happened.

For building the audience, getting involved in places where they already hung out has driven the most website traffic. These are things like podcasts, other Facebook groups, and blogs. While this isn't some magic shortcut, it's significantly easier than building from scratch.

When companies market the sustainability features of their offerings, they often overlook a fundamental truth: Social and environmental benefits have less impact on customers’ decisions than basic product attributes do. With any purchase, consumers are first trying to get a specific job done. Only after they find something that will help them do that job—and only if sustainability is important to them—will they look for a product that in addition confers a social or environmental advantage. No one decides to buy a chocolate bar to, say, improve the working conditions of farmers on the Ivory Coast. People buy chocolate, first and foremost, because they want to indulge in a small pleasure. No one decides to buy an electric car to prevent climate change. People buy cars because they need transportation; reducing their carbon footprint is an ancillary benefit.

When a customer decides to stop shopping with your company, a lot more than one sale is at stake. In most cases, you're missing out on future purchases and opportunities to connect with others through this customer.

Customer churn is a term that translates to the percentage of people who stop using your product compared to new customers during a specific time frame. Most businesses choose to calculate their churn quarterly or annually.

Here's the formula:

(Customers who left/Total new customers) x 100 = churn rate

So, if you lost 250 customers and gained 1000 customers during a year, you'd have a churn rate of 25%. For us, this would be an extremely high rate. In the SaaS world, a 'good' churn rate is between 5-7% annually. The average rate will vary based on your industry.

Regardless of how and when you decide to track this metric, getting your churn rate under control is crucial for the long-term success of your business.