Tracking and Reducing Customer Churn: A Key Indicator of SaaS Growth and Sustainability

Welcome to the latest edition of Expanding Revenue, your weekly newsletter for the top resources on customer success, retention, and revenue.

This week, we've selected five must-read articles that cover a range of topics, from customer onboarding best practices to strategies for reducing customer churn and hitting revenue targets.

In this edition, we bring you the latest insights on customer retention from CEOs, tips for building a stellar customer success team, and a guide to avoiding mistakes in customer health scoring.

So whether you're looking to improve your customer onboarding process, boost retention, or hit your revenue targets, you'll find valuable insights and practical tips in these top five articles.

The Expanding Revenue Daily Newsletter of Curated Resources

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From the 25 resources we shared throughout the week in our curated daily list, 5 pieces of content stood out as the most popular to our readers.

Let's dive in and take a look at this week's top five!

1. 13 New Customer Onboarding Best Practices | HubSpot

For our most popular resource this week, we're excited to share with you a must-read article from HubSpot on the importance of customer onboarding best practices.

If you're looking to retain more customers and increase their lifetime value, this article is for you. In it, the author covers the benefits of following customer onboarding best practices and offers 13 proven strategies that you can implement to create a seamless and engaging onboarding experience for your customers.

Don't miss out on these valuable insights - read the full article here.

2. Customer Retention: CEOs Share Strategies | Chief Executive

Coming in at number 2 from the folks at Chief Executive are some amazing insights gleaned from several executives who spoke about the current economic situation.

CEOs have focused on suppliers, employees, price increases, and digital transformation but have neglected existing customers.

Now, amid an uncertain economy, more companies are focusing on retaining existing customers, which has become the biggest priority for 41% of CEOs polled by Chief Executive in July.

Acquiring a new customer can cost up to six or eight times the cost of retaining an existing one. Retaining customers also results in them spending 30% more and trying new or adjacent products and services 50% more often.

Retaining customers has become easier with the use of digital technology, such as apps and loyalty programs.

Read the full article here to learn more.

3. Want to Build a Stellar Customer Success Team? Salesloft’s VP Has Some Tips | Hypepotamus

This week's third most popular revenue, retention, and success resource offered some great tips from Natasha Evans, Salesloft’s VP of Global Enterprise Customer Success.

Sales teams are turning to B2B customer success teams to help them automate and streamline their business processes.

To engage with their clients, these teams need to focus on building relationships and driving home the value of their products. This can be done by providing direct customer access, creating high-value, high-impact touch points, and offering a mix of in-person and remote events to connect with clients.

Even small companies can implement these strategies through scalable methods such as webinars, workshops, and office hours.

Read more about Natasha's insights here.

4. Avoidable Mistakes in Customer Health Scoring | Gain, Grow, Retain

This article from the folks at Gain, Grow, Retain is coming in at number four on the all important topic of Customer Health Scoring.

According to this article, when building or updating a customer health score, it is important to avoid relying too much on manual health indicators, as they can be subjective and difficult to manage.

Instead, usage data is a better indicator of product adoption and can be more easily scaled.

It is also important to be aware of measure sprawl, where too many metrics are being tracked, and to avoid equating login rates with usage rates.

Finally, not all alterable signals should be considered health measures, as some may be for the customer's benefit rather than indicating a risk.

Read more about how to avoid mistakes with customer health scores here.

5. Reducing Customer Churn: Everything You Need to Know | Parative

Rounding out our list in the number five spot this week is an article from the Parative blog that goes deep and wide on Customer Churn.

Customer churn is the rate at which a company loses customers over a given period of time. This can be calculated in different ways, such as the number of customers lost during a specific period or the value of recurring business lost during a specific period.

The basic calculation for customer churn rate is:

number of churned customers / total number of customers.

Most companies track this over a span of time, typically monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Reducing customer churn is important because it is a key indicator of a company's growth and sustainability.

Causes of customer churn can vary, but common reasons include poor product functionality and inadequate customer support.

Read all about Customer Churn here.