Startups Stack Exchange Archive

How do you define when you have “lost” a certain customer if they don’t necessarily close their account?

Take, for example, a company like mailchimp.

Not all their customers are on a monthly plan, a lot of them pay nothing or only pay with email credits for every newsletter they send out to their list(s).

Also, I’m assuming that the normal newsletter sending frequency varies greatly among their customers. There are people who send newsletters weekly, monthly, or even those that only use it to send out announcements about, let’s say, an event that only happens once a year.

Keeping in mind that people don’t usually cancel/delete accounts they don’t need anymore if they don’t pay for having them, how do you measure your retention under these circumstances?

Answer 5492

The search term you’re looking for is customer churn.

You need to define what corresponds to an active user for you. Sometimes it means using your product every day, sometimes it means using it once per quarter or even less.

Note that what you guess can be wrong. So make sure you ask your users how they use your service at some point. Sometimes you’ll get very surprising and revealing answers.


All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.