Churn hurts. Every instance of customer churn represents the loss of both past investment and future revenue, which is why marketers lie awake at night trying to find new ways to reduce turnover/attrition/defection or whatever euphemism your industry has coined for it. But don’t feel too bad. Eliminating churn completely is like having a carbon footprint of zero: nice to imagine but not realistic. What really hurts (and what you maybe should feel bad about) is churn that could have been prevented. Stop churn before it starts Your best opportunity to prevent churn is when the customer relationship is at its healthiest. Every email you send is a strategic retention lever—not just the ones you send after you suspect a customer might leave. Once your users give you permission to send, you have the great power to connect with them in whatever manner and at whatever pace you choose. You also have the great responsibility to make sure you’re always delivering value to them through relevant and timely information. To this end, you should be A/B testing key design and editorial elements regularly, but you also need to test and evaluate big picture campaign elements like cadence, frequency, timing, and behavioral triggers, so make sure your individual emails and your overall communication strategy are optimized for maximum performance. (Maximum performance = minimal churn. See our blog post measuring retention) You also need to know when and how to diversify your communication strategy. You will naturally (and correctly) want to focus on optimizing your primary newsletter or email campaign first. If done right, you’ll see rapid improvement, but as the low hanging fruit gets picked over, performance gains will become harder and more incremental. It’s important to realize when you’ve reached the performance limit for a single newsletter or campaign so that you can start segmenting and targeting narrower audiences before their interest plateaus. But, you might be asking, as the hosts of this party, what do we do about the guests who—despite our best efforts at hospitality—seem to be inching (or even running) towards the door? Identifying Churn-Risk Users Most users will slip away quietly, so you need to be alert to the subtle shifts in behavior that may indicate a churn risk, keeping in mind that different users will give different signals. Finding complex relationships in large and incongruous sets of data is difficult to achieve at human scale, which is why most sophisticated marketers turn to vendors who employ advanced machine learning technology to gauge an individual user’s churn risk. These tools analyze user behavior and extract patterns that are likely to precede churn, enabling you to more accurately and effectively engage high-risk users. (The best ones also enable you to rank those users based on how valuable they are likely to be so you can decide who you really want to invest in keeping.) Shannon Johlic Bob Colner

1. Stop the Churn
Email methods that re-engage and win over
your users.
re·ten·tion
rəˈten(t)SH(ə)n/
noun
the continued possession,
use, or control of something.

3. Boomtrain is the intelligence layer that predicts the optimal content for your
emails, website, and mobile app. We help you better communicate with
your customers by delivering 1:1 individualized user experiences that drive
deeper engagement, greater retention, and increased lifetime value.

4. Shannon Johlic
Head of Marketing
Bob Colner
Data Scientist
Presenters:
If you have any questions, please enter them in the chat box.

5. The
Retention
Cliff

6. Questions at the Top of Our Mind:
● How many of your users come back? (basic)
● How are you optimizing their experience?
● When was the last time you tested an hypothesis?
● When was the last time you did a “health check”?
● How do you re-engage users to keep coming back?
● How do you cut through the noise and reach them?
● How are you going to scale your efforts?
Where do we begin?

7. Email:
Strategic
Retention
Lever
Appropriate use of email
promotes long-term relationships

8. Subject Lines | Dayparting | Image Use | CTAs | Format | Goals/Conversions
A/B Test
the
(a very necessary, very time-consuming, very manual process...)

9. Method 1:
A/B Testing (Think Globally)
Subject Lines | Dayparting | Image Use | CTAs | Format | Goals/Conversions
How many of you are currently using A/B testing in your emails?

10. Keep it Clinical:
Follow a strict methodology (no “gut”, just data)
Let’s outline the classic setup for running an experiment:
1. Decide the minimum improvement you care about.
2. Set a relevant sample size to reach in order to gauge efficacy of your experiment.
3. RANDOMLY assign people to the test & the control group. (VERY IMPORTANT)
4. Start your test. DO NOT look at the results until you achieve your defined sample size.
5. Evaluate the results.

11. Where Did I Go Wrong:
Common mistakes in A/B Testing
Just optimizing for conversion
Not taking the time to set goals
Keeping it too simple
Ignoring more advanced metrics
Ignoring mobile vs desktop

12. Test...then test some more:
Until it’s time to take another action
When refining and optimizing your emails with A/B
testing stops showing improvements it’s time to take the
next step...

13. Health Check
the
(an advanced topic...but can be a manual process)

14. Method 2:
The Health Segmentation
Do you know which
users are “@risk” of
churning and which ones
are “healthy”?

15. What’s the difference?
What is a “healthy” and an “@risk” user?
healthy
someone who has a recent
history of frequently
engaging with your brand
@risk
someone who had a history
of frequently engaging with
your brand, but has not
done so in a while. (a lack
of recency)

16. How to ID your “@risk” users:
surface users predicted to churn
Identify users @risk of churning with the 4x4 Rule :
A user who has visited at least 4 times in the last 4 months
but has not returned in the last 4 weeks.
4x4

17. Segment into 2 buckets
...and resurrect the @risk users
@risk Send a ‘churn prevention’ email to provide
a REASON to re-engage.
Consider including:
● limited-time special offers
● discount code
● highlight the best recent content they’re missing
Keep sending the A/B test
optimized email newsletter. (just
keep them happy)
healthy
value

19. Step 1 - IDENTIFY: segment out your @risk users
Step 2 - BUILD: create compelling resurrection email that 1) offers new value
2) highlights best new content they are missing
Step 3: AUTOMATE: make this an ongoing automated on monthly basis
Step 4: PERSONALIZE: individualize the content for audience resurrection
(more on this in section 3)
Where do I begin...
A proven methodology to move from @risk to healthy

20. Machine
leverage
(the power of predictive analytics)
Intelligence

21. Machine Intelligence
scale your ability by removing the manual process
Can you write a million personalized emails with infinite
content combinations that are constantly optimized for
engagement?
...now you can.

22. The Rise of the Machine
...it’s an extension of you...
Predictive Engines power the
delivery of 1:1 individual user
experiences via emails and
onsite to each one of your users

23. Cut through the noise
to deliver RELEVANT messaging
No one likes to be yelled at.
“audiences” and traditional
“segments” become noisy
when we try to communicate.

24. Reach the Mythical Segment of 1
cut through the noise with machine intelligence
Have you met Jane?
(she’s a person, not an audience)
Reach every user on a 1:1 individualized basis by
delivering relevant user experiences…at scale
automated individualization

25. Scaling relevance
at an individual 1:1 level
Have you met Jane?
(she’s a person, not an audience)
Reach every user on a 1:1 individualized basis by
delivering relevant user experiences…at scale
automated individualization

26. Relevance Drives Engagement
...and engagement directly affects your bottom line
How do you monetize your site traffic?
Advertising | Subscriptions | Affiliate | Direct Selling

27. A review...
1) A/B Test (very manual, but very necessary)
2) Health Checks/Segmentations (still manual, but
addresses @risk users fast)
3) Machine Intelligence (automates all of the above,
at scale with 1:1 personalization)

28. Questions?
Questions?

29. shannon@boomtrain.com
Contact us to learn more.