In the world of subscription and usage-based services, customer retention is paramount. Sales, customer success, and marketing teams constantly look for strategies to minimize customer attrition and increase net dollar retention. A powerful tool that has gained prominence is the Churn Risk Score. But what exactly is it, and how can it help predict and prevent churn?

Retention is critical to the success of subscription and usage based businesses. A 1% retention increase has a significantly larger impact than a 1% increase in conversion or top of funnel.

Before diving into retention strategies, it's essential to understand its counterpart, churn.

What is churn?​

Churn is users ceasing to pay for your service, this may be an active choice which is called voluntary churn or something that happens without the user taking an action which is called involuntary churn.

Voluntary churn is users choosing to leave your product and often hold insights into product, onboarding or customer experience issues. Involuntary churn is often related to payment failure either due to insufficient funds, card expiry or other issues that the user didn’t intend to happen.

Understanding churn and retention in monetary terms, especially for companies with subscription or usage based models, can offer actionable insights. Three critical metrics stand out when assessing churn through the lens of revenue: GRR (Gross Revenue Retention), NRR (Net Revenue Retention), and NDR (Net Dollar Retention).

What is Lead Scoring for​

Lead scoring is the process of ranking based on a specific outcome, usually their likelihood to convert into a customer. They may also be ranked on the largest predicted revenue opportunity, best fit for a specific plan or most appropriate for a specific market specific team. Some companies will end up using multiple different scores for these different cases or for different teams.

By effectively scoring leads, businesses can prioritize their resources, engage with the most promising leads and increase their revenue and deal velocity.

During my time building enterprise products, nothing was more valuable than getting feedback from customers and the highest quality feedback consistently comes from sales. I hear the same thing from nearly every product manager I speak with, yet I often see much of that feedback never making it to product teams or not being acted on.

This often leads to the feedback not being passed on by sales and customer success teams or it encourages those teams to go to engineers or others to try to get changes made.

This guide aims to be a guide for sales and customer success on how to make product friends and influence the roadmap to best help your customers. It is written from the perspective of product leaders you are trying to influence.

We detect account sharing as part of finding opportunities for subscription businesses to expand, and for identifying abuse. As part of that we often analyze interesting cases which help inform our machine learned models.

We wanted to share some behind the scenes examples, with the appropriate anonymization and filtering to preserve privacy, of certain ways we visualize account sharing to help in our analysis.

One way we look at analyzing account sharing is over time. Below are a few specific examples showing different cases of account sharing and associated visualizations of them. Each colour represents one unique device using the account.

One account shared across an entire organization​

We can clearly see work days framed with lower usage on Sundays and Saturday evenings. You can also observe very high rates of simultaneous usage between the same types of devices, and that it has consistently been like this for weeks.

According to Iconiq’s Analytics Insights report, expanding existing customers makes up more than 50% of new revenue for large companies and 30-40% for smaller companies.

For many SaaS businesses to grow revenue by expansion they have a choice between moving customers to a more expensive plan or expanding their usage or seats.

Getting more people within a team and more teams across an organization onboard is a great way to do both! You can grow the product's revenue, reduce the likelihood of churn and increase the likelihood of the organization needing to upgrade to a higher tier.

So how do you grow the team or organization size within a product? Three key ways:

1. Be team first
2. Capture and create collaborative intent
3. Remove the blockers for expansion

Yesterday we discovered a site impersonating us (upollo.ai) with an exact copy of our site on the same domain name with a different top level domain (eg. upollo.XX). I have redacted the original domain and will be using the .XX extension in place of the original top level domain (TLD) used by the impersonator.

How we discovered it​

We saw a strange referrer in our analytics that had our company name in it, we didn’t own the domain, we thought maybe someone simply made a typo or it was a domain squatter. To our surprise when we looked at the site we saw our own site staring back at us!

The pages were identical apart, all the links went to our original site, but they had changed our footer.

Strange choice to leave the kangaroo in, but this whole thing was a bit strange.

From today we are rolling out the first and only Segment destination that enriches every Identify event with firmographic data at unlimited scale, entirely for free.

You've probably stumbled upon a bunch of public email addresses like Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook in your signups or leads. It's tempting to dismiss these addresses, thinking they have no real value. But wait! This assumption could cost you golden opportunities. We'll show you why tossing public emails aside is a big mistake and how to unlock their surprising potential.

Tackling password sharing was one of two major initiatives mentioned in Netflix’s earnings announcement yesterday, along with Netflix’s new ad-supported tier.

As part of their shareholders letter and earnings call, a number of data points around password sharing came up that would be very interesting to anyone running a subscription business.

One of the biggest challenges of running a subscription-based business is getting your pricing right. You need to keep your monthly fee at a price point that will make it attractive to new customers but you also need to ensure that you’re making enough profit over time. Even if you manage to hit the perfect pricing sweet spot, expenses increase over time slowly eating into your profit margin.

Ways to get your users to promote your app

You hope your app will benefit from great word-of-mouth – but that’s not happening organically, yet. While a company’s current users are some of the best people to promote their service, they often need a bit of help or a nudge or two to do it.

That means you need to create a community strategy to transform your users into advocates. Don’t worry – it’s easier than it sounds. We’ll walk you through the best ways to turn your existing customers into a powerful engine for customer acquisition.

Who hasn’t excitedly signed up for a free trial believing that a new program or service might just change your life – and then forgot all about it? Life happens. Changes in priorities happen. Enticing weekend plans or urgent work deadlines happen. There are a number of potential reasons your users are abandoning your free trials that have absolutely nothing to do with your product. And there are some that also have to do with obstacles in your onboarding process.

So, what can you do about it? You can monitor their onboarding journey and reach out at the right times to get them back on the path to becoming happy, paying customers.

What does that look like? We’ll show you.

When it comes to growing your ARR, it truly is an uphill battle.

First, you have to outshine your competitors. That takes a well-designed product, a killer marketing strategy, and the ability to ship new features faster than other companies in your niche. Next, you have to add consistent value for your users if you want your product to be sticky enough that they’ll stay around month after month. Executing all those things well can feel overwhelming.

Imagine this: you have a great product that your customers subscribe to and use A LOT. You've vaguely heard of account sharing (you know someone that shares their Netflix account...), but you're not sure if it's happening to you. You like the idea of converting more users, but it's hard to justify doing anything about it when you don't really know if account sharing is even happening on your site, let alone much of it.

Believe it or not, but this is exactly why you should use Upollo: we show you exactly how many people are sharing accounts, and we do this completely free of charge. We believe in transparency: we want you to understand the scope of the problem, and once you do, we want to give you the tools to address it.

So how can you find out if any of your customers are sharing their account with others? Simply follow the steps below.

Nearly every product starts with a sign up page and they have a huge impact on revenue, a 10% drop in people signing up successfully is a 10% drop in revenue.

We have collected some data backed falsehoods that we have come across for sign up pages.

When building a signup page for your website or app, you are usually thinking about how to get people in. But it’s just as important to keep malicious users out, which can greatly improve your conversion to paid accounts.

We've raised a A$4.15M early-seed round to rapidly accelerate the growth of every subscription business in the world.​

You’ve just had a customer sign up for your product - great!

While all customers are great, you may want to pay special attention to customers that you think are going to buy more of your product, upgrade to your premium offerings, and/or refer you to everyone they know. Ideally, you should engage with these high priority customers to ensure their experience is smooth and they are happy with your product. But how do you know who is high priority? Your customers won’t tell you this on sign-up - but Upollo will, AND we’ll do it for free.

Sometimes people do things that they shouldn't. They dye their hair an unflattering color. Get an embarrassing tattoo. Sign-up for 10 free trials. Account share with their 15 closest friends.

At Upollo, we think there are two types of bad actors: professional fraudsters and everyday people who see an opportunity to save a bit of money and take it.

Imagine a customer who uses your product nearly every day and is willing to jump through frustrating hoops to use it. Or another customer who evangelised your product to people they know, and onboarded them as users too. Sounds great, right?

These types of users sound like the best customers you could have, but most companies see these users as unconvertible at best or bad and unwanted users at worst. Why? Because users who signup for free trials repeatedly or account share are behaving like imaginary customers above.

But are they really bad or just misunderstood? Are they truly unconvertible? Let's take a look at some of the hard data and real world examples.

Auth0 is a helpful tool for managing authentication on your website.

However whilst Auth0 will let people login to accounts for your site it can't tell you much about the the people behind those accounts. It can't tell you if Alice creates a new account every month for to get a free trial every month without ever paying. It also won't help you discover that Bob and Dave have one account that they pay for but share the password to avoid paying for two accounts.

What if everyone currently using your service through someone else's account, suddenly got their own paid account tomorrow? Or what if your corporate customers paid for all the seats they're using rather than sharing passwords?

Would your website crash trying to process all the credit cards? And would that add tens of thousands of dollars in ARR to your books? Or even billions?

Here's the thing: Just like death and taxes, account sharing happens. Some of it is hard to stop. But there are key things you can do to reduce it -- and increase your revenue.

In a perfect world, referral programs work seamlessly. You create a deal to tempt your users to refer their friends or professional contacts, and then magically gain additional users and sales. Often at a much lower customer acquisition cost than you pay via other marketing and sales channels.

But the world isn't perfect. Just ask one retailer who instituted a give $10, get $10 referral program and had current customers self-refer to the tune of a loss of over $1 million in one day.

Ever think about making a new account to catch the last episode of a show after your free trial has run out?

Well you aren't alone.

Signing up multiple times to get repeated free trials is one example of what we call multi-accounting. You can learn more about how users are taking advantage of your free trials in our article; "How your one week free trial is being used for three months".

While your user growth and funnel metrics may look good if every user creates multiple accounts for repeat free trials; multi-accounting can be damaging to your business. There can be substantial financial cost, degraded user experience or compliance implications associated with this behaviour. It can also impact your ability to accurately measure life time value (LTV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC) and make informed decisions about your user acquisition spend.

If you could increase the conversion rate of your free trials by 10%, how much of a difference would that make? For most companies, even a 5% boost in their trial-to-paid conversion rate would transform their business.

The problem is figuring out how to do that. What defaults should you use? How should you design your trials? There are so many small decisions that can make a big impact.

To help, we created a cheat sheet on how to offer an effective free trial so you don't have to A/B test until you're sick of hearing the first two letters of the alphabet.

Since free trials have existed, people have been trying to use them to get services for free. Outside of Twitter most people don't talk about how they misuse free trials, so let's dive into the most common ways people try to get multiple free trials.

Having an online business can be very rewarding, you can help people all around the world. It’s not always easy though, you need to accept credit card payments which sometimes lead to chargebacks which hurt your revenue, take up time and also impact your reputation with your payment processor.

Account sharing is giving someone access to an account that they are not the owner of, often by sharing login credentials.

Common examples of account sharing are families sharing a Netflix or streaming service account and entire businesses sharing access to a business email or productivity tool

Firebase Auth is a great tool to add account management to your app or service. It takes care of the myriad of ways people like to login.

However, Firebase can't tell you anything about the people behind those accounts. It can't tell you if Bob creates a new account every month so he can get the free trial again and again. It also can’t tell you that Peter and Patsy have created one account and share the password so they only have to pay once.

Human generosity is amazing to witness, and we are taught to share from our early childhood. So it is no wonder that behind a single-user paid account you will often find a couple, a group of friends or even an office full of colleagues!

Everyone loves getting something for nothing, which is why free credits or 30 day trials are so effective at bringing in customers. However, the love of something free can entice users to simply sign up again rather than become a paying customer.