Customer churn is one of the most worrisome and expensive aspects of running a business. 

To avoid this costly problem, you need to know who your target audience are and what they want from your services. You need to make sure you’re delivering on these needs with every single interaction you have with them. 

This includes everything from advertising campaigns and marketing materials — all the way down to how quickly someone can get support in your store.

In this post, I want to take a closer look at customer churn, why it happens, and what you can do to keep your customers loyal. 

What is Customer Churn? 

Customer churn is the term used to describe customers who stop buying your product or service. It can happen for a variety of reasons, which we’ll talk about later. 

But it’s important to know just how much customer churn is costing you — and the price tag comes in a place you may not expect. 

You see, it actually costs about 5 times more to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an old one. So if all of your efforts are spent trying to simply bring new faces into your business, you’re not getting the most out of your money. 

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That’s not to say you shouldn’t try to win new customers — you absolutely should! But if you don’t follow up with great service and customer-centric marketing efforts, you’re leaving revenue on the table. 

This can be a huge problem for any business, but luckily there are some things you can do to avoid it. 

But to accomplish lower churn, you have to understand why it’s happening in the first place. Let’s look closer. 

Why Does Customer Churn Happen? 

If you’re a business owner, chances are you’ve been there before–you have a customer that was once happy and loyal, but suddenly stopped coming. 

You may not know why this happened either. Maybe they just forgot to come in for a while, or they were out of town. 

But the truth is that most customers churn because of bad service or an unmet need — and this is backed by some fairly expansive studies.

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That’s right — customers leave your business because of bad service more than price competitiveness, convenience, or even quality. 

How you treat your customer is the number one priority for retention, which brings us to our final point: how do you avoid churn?

How Can You Avoid Customer Churn?

To avoid customer churn, you need to be constantly looking at the needs of your customers. 

It’s that simple. 

As I’ve said, customers could leave for any number of reasons, and as a business owner it is up to you to know what these are and how you can fix them.

Some ways that you should look at this is by researching why people might leave for other businesses or if their needs have changed over time. This is where it’s important to engage with customers in a variety of ways — including in person, email, social media, and other avenues. 

Collect their feedback, really listen, and change what you can to improve your service. 

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You can also do other things, like making sure that your services have been updated with new features so they don’t become outdated. 

It’s sometimes the simplest changes that see the best results. Don’t hesitate to converse with customers, experiment on new ways to make them happy, and always prioritize their experience. 

Conclusion

While unavoidable, customer churn is manageable. 

Do what you can to ensure that customers receive the best experience possible when interacting with your business. 

At the same time, see to it that your products and/or services are only getting better with time. 

Chase after customers that don’t want to stay to at least find out why they’re leaving if you can’t keep them around; but never prioritize them over your regular customer base. 

And at the end of the day, focus on optimizing your customer experience for every person who walks through your door. Every new face is a potential lifelong customer, so treat them as such!