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