One of the main challenges we face at Stampen Media is how to get our subscribers to stay longer.

We want our customers to discover and engage with everything we have to offer so they will feel the value it adds to their lives is worth paying for.

To decrease churn rates, we decided to form a cross-functional team to look at retention opportunities for our e-paper.  

Results

The group focused on sales, campaigns, content, and communication and we were able draw several conclusions.

We saw that we were able to decrease churn by, for example:

• Increasing the relevancy and frequency of onboarding flows during the first 90 days. 
• Increasing the number of topic-specific editorial newsletters.
• Going from a reactive to a proactive campaign extension with a step-up product.

 Whilst the first two points are fairly well-known and best practice, the success rate we saw with the latter was beyond our expectations.

How we did it

Our telemarketing team called our site customers one month before their campaigns were due to end and offered them an upgrade to the e-paper product at an attractive price.

Because the e-paper is a more premium product, we managed to increase average revenue per user (ARPU) on these customers both in the short term and in the long term. Why? Because the customers also ended up churning at a lower rate than regular site customers.

Another example of the initiatives to reduce churn on our e-paper customers was to create a churn calendar. The churn calendar highlights periods where we know our churn risk is high — for example, at the end of a big campaign.

During these periods, we took several actions to retain the customers — on top of the automatic communication that already went out as part of onboarding. 

We know that higher engagement means lower churn, but it also means our customers like our product. Apart from reducing churn numbers, these initiatives also increased our NPS for the e-paper.

So all in all, happier customers are staying longer and are increasing revenue for Stampen Media. 

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