Startup Glossary: Churn Rate

Customer churn, also known as customer turnover, is the rate at which you lose clients over a given period. The churn rate is a terrifying metric. Also, it’s a really significant one.

Your revenue will suffer if you don’t know how many clients are leaving your company, and you won’t be able to devise improvement programs to lower the turnover rate.

What is Churn Rate?

To define churn rate, you can have a look at the churn rate meaning: The yearly percentage rate at which customers cancel a service or workers quit their jobs.

For subscription-based enterprises like SaaS, churn rate is critical. There is no way to break even your average customer acquisition cost (CAC) no matter how much money you make every month.

Using a CRM, you may see how many people have left your company. Depending on the program you’re selling, you may also be able to see how many subscribers you had at the beginning and conclusion of a given time period.

How to Calculate Churn Rate?

Select a certain time frame, divide the total number of subscribers lost by the total number of subscribers gained, and then multiply the result to get the churn rate.

For instance, if you gained 100 new customers in a quarter but lost 12, your churn rate would be (12/100) x 100, or 12 per cent. This is the churn rate formula.

By dividing the total number of subscribers at the beginning of a period by the number of members lost over that period, you can also get the churn rate.

Now, you got the idea of how to calculate the churn rate.

Also, you can use this churn rate calculator

How Much is a Good Churn Rate?

The ideal churn rate would be zero, which would mean that a company is not losing any subscribers, but this is never the case in practice. There will always be reasons why a company loses customers.

In this situation, it’s critical to evaluate the business’ churn rate in relation to the typical churn rate for its sector, taking into account the company’s age. The only method to determine if a churn rate is good or bad is to compare it to that of the business as compared to that of the industry. Each industry has a unique business model, which leads to a range of acceptable turnover rates.

This may be a good answer to “what is a good churn rate?”

Examples of Churn Rate

Here, you may find examples of the average churn rate by industry.

Churn Rate in the Telecommunications Sector

In the telecom sector, the churn rate is a particularly useful metric. Internet service providers, cable or satellite television providers, and telephone service providers are all included (landline and wireless service providers).

The churn rate aids a business in assessing how it compares to its rivals because most customers have a variety of options. If one in every 20 customers of a high-speed internet service cancelled their subscriptions within a year, the provider’s yearly churn rate would be 5%.

Rate of Employment Churn

The churn rate can be used to analyse a firm’s hiring and retention practices, and it can be used to assess employee turnover inside a company. This can be especially useful if an organisation has a low rate of overall staff retention.

Statistics that are broken down by department might show which specific divisions have higher turnover rates than the industry average or more frequent departures from the company. This can assist in determining whether the salary is adequate, the calibre of the supervisors in that department, as well as the amount of work that each employee is expected to do.

​​Churn Rate in Saas

According to research conducted by Recurly, the median customer churn rate for the SaaS sector is 4.79 per cent and can be used as a benchmark. This indicates that for every 100 clients on average, a SaaS provider loses 5 customers.

According to the same study, B2B SaaS companies had a median churn rate of 4.67 per cent, which is lower than B2C SaaS companies’ average churn rate of 5.06 per cent. Therefore, when comparing your rate, you want to pick the average rate that suits the kind of SaaS business you are.

Churn Rate vs Retention Rate

Let’s have a closer look at the churn rate vs retention rate.

Retention rate is the percentage of clients who keep coming back to your business. Customers that have stayed with your company for a long period are referred to as “retainers.” A company’s retention rate will be lower if it has a high churn rate.

Over a certain period, your retention rate is a measure of how many consumers you’ve managed to hold onto. During a given period, your user churn rate (also known as attrition rate) measures the number of consumers who have either cancelled or unsubscribed from your service.

That means if the percentage of customers you keep is 90%, your turnover rate is 10%.

Conclusion

In this post, we walked through the subject of churn rate and also check out these suggestions on how to work out churn rate: Customers will discontinue doing business with you if they are not satisfied. It’s that easy. Having a lot of clients who leave is bad for your business. To retain consumers, you must handle customer churn.

In the long run, the loss of customers can have a major impact on your bottom line. Despite this, more than two-thirds of organisations do not have a plan in place to keep customers loyal.

Keeping clients is more important now that we know you can’t afford to lose them. Customers must be able to see why they should stay with you rather than go elsewhere.

To avoid customer churn, you need to be proactive in your efforts to ensure clients are aware of and utilise the benefits of your goods.

82% of organisations say that retention is cheaper than acquisition, and even a 2% improvement in retention can cut expenses by as much as 10%. To keep yourself motivated, just remember that.

It’s also vital to keep in mind that churn isn’t caused by a bad product, but rather by bad customer service!

Keeping clients isn’t a mystery. It all comes down to figuring out what’s causing customers to leave and then taking action. Improve your customer service and show your consumers the benefits of sticking with you rather than going with your competition by communicating with them and involving them in your products.