Churn can literally make or break your community business.
Churn is the silent killer.
Equally, if you crack the code to low churn, your community can experience steady, long-term growth.
How one community leader transformed her churn rate
Inside Learn.Community, one member (let’s call her ‘Jill’) jumped on our weekly office hour call.
Jill runs a community for writers and was concerned about her high churn rate of 18%.
She felt it was really hurting her community’s growth.
Despite the high churn rate, Jill’s community was already generating around $10,000 in monthly revenue. Pretty impressive!
Amazingly, following the call, Jill managed to reduce her community churn from 18% to 8%.
How Jill reduced her community churn rate
Before I share the insane impact that is going to have on her business long-term, let’s look at how she achieved such a dramatic improvement. In Jill’s own words:
- I took a hard look at the kind of writers who were leaving the community as well as reached out to several for feedback. I noticed that we were losing fiction writers so I decided to tweak my website copy to no longer serve fiction writers–only poets and nonfiction writers. Essentially, I niched down again.
- I ran a feedback survey and noted that folks really wanted more accountability and structure for their writing practice so I added 2 generative writing circles monthly with me (low prep time and also meets members’ ask for more accountability/motivation). These are hugely popular.
- I sent each new member a loom welcome video to discuss their goals and gave them a personal tour of the community, highlighting which events might be most important to them.
- I ran a monthly meet + greet after big push on social to connect new members to others. I exported new members from Stripe (last 30 days) and sent them a separate invite to come to this event.
- I ran a low-stakes challenge right after big push on social to incorporate more structure
- I announced that future new members will have a slight increase in price. I’ve now raised the price from $70 month to $80. Announcing a price change once we hit 150 members likely motivates folks to say retain their current membership.
There are a ton of great, actionable takeaways here.
I do many of these things myself at Learn.Community, resulting in a healthy churn rate of around 7%.
How you can improve your community churn rate
If you’re looking to reduce your churn rate, try the following:
- Audit your most loyal members versus those who churn most. Try to build personas around each and attract more of the former via your positioning and marketing.
- Over-deliver as part of your new member onboarding.
- Survey your members, ensure your community is offering what they want the most
- Increase your prices over time, which helps build scarcity (we’ll soon be raising Learn.Community prices from $39 to $49 per month).
The huge impact of reducing churn
Now, here’s where it gets really interesting.
This was part of my reply to Jill when she shared this win. This is using her current numbers, so these are real projections for her community business:
By reducing her churn she stands to earn $35k per month, rather than maxing out at $17k in the original scenario. All whilst not requiring any increase in new members or marketing.
THAT is the crazy power of fixing your churn.
Massive props to Jill! She’s one of the community leaders I’m most inspired by. I know her community has a bright future ahead. She provides a ton of value for her members, and now her numbers are improved, the sky is the limit!
Do you want to level up your community?
Jill pays $39 per month to be part of Learn.Community and the revelations from ONE call stand to make her tens of thousands. When I see our members getting incredible ROI like that, it makes me super happy.
If you’d like help levelling up your community or working through some of your current challenges, come join us. I’d personally love to work with you to get your community on a great trajectory.
