The metrics for churn are: 30% is bad, 20% is average - your goal is to keep it under 10%. The best communities have 2-3%.
The biggest thing that reduces churn is annual plans. Annual, on average, reduces churn from 10% to 2%. Billing frequency is directly correlated with churn. The more often you charge, the more often people have the option to leave.
The second biggest thing is onboarding.
A good strategy to keep retention high is bumping up the price after getting some x number of customers. This creates urgency for the people who haven’t yet joined to join - and it helps people stay in the community because they don’t want to leave and then have to pay more if they decide to come back. People won’t leave because they think they’re getting a good deal. If you now have a higher price than what a customer is paying, the cancel page makes use of that. At cancellation the members are reminded that they’ll have to pay more when they come back.
This whole thing doesn’t mean that you continually increase the price into oblivion. It means that you decide your price, on which you’ll end, but when starting out you start with a low price. This gives you natural scarcity for your launch: everyone who joins before a date gets the founders price. It’s a good launch strategy and it’s a good retention strategy.
This runs on the idea of: making back the cost of acquisition of a customer as fast as you can. And it’s why a big head long tail model works great. You get people to join for a high price, so that you cover your CAC, and then you down-sell them to a low ticket ongoing. Sunken cost fallacy comes into play here too, if people have paid 1000$ to get in - the 50$ they pay monthly don’t seem like a big deal, and they’ve already spend 1k so might as well continue paying 50.
Practically for skool it becomes: you get people in for a low-ticket, you get them on an onboarding call and there you sell them the expensive thing. You put the expensive thing in the classroom section as a purchasable - so on the call you share your screen to show them the thing and they can buy it easily because their card is already saved. The whole transaction happens on skool which is nice. If you have a free to paid community structure, you put your expensive thing in your free group and once they buy it you get them on the recurring membership of your paid group.
The people that churn the most often the level 1s who have not made a post, or a comment. Have a process to facilitate and push people to do that as soon as they join.
Look at the people that stayed the longest, and look at the people who churn - what are the differences? What are the patterns that you notice that makes people stay?
If you do onboardings, you’ll notice that the people who don’t get on these calls will most probably churn. The ones that show up, are less likely to churn. If you do Q&A calls, you’ll notice that the people who don’t come, are those who are most likely to churn. Not only are they not getting the ongoing value you provide, but they also feel like they’re missing out because they aren’t showing up. They feel like they are paying for something that they aren’t using. If someone makes a post, and it isn’t responded in 24 hours - they’re most likely to churn.