Add 50% More Customers to Orders 3 and Beyond

​Focus on new customer onboarding
This much neglected part of the customer retention lifecycle is full of opportunities for you to wow your customers and keep them from cancelling after that first order.  Did you know that by simply improving retention from order 1 to order 2, you can change your trendline for future orders exponentially and add huge gains to each revenue cycle?

Is this what your retention data looks like?​
Let’s look at the common retention curve in subscription model businesses:

A pretty dismal story for subscription businesses, right? Wrong! It looks like opportunity - now let’s take a peek at a sample of how that curve might change if you simply get more of your ‘trial’ customers to get a second order.

Instead, you could make it look like this:

Why you should spend time and energy on onboarding (hint: $$$)
Let’s pretend the price of your subscription for consecutive orders is $49.99 / order and you are acquiring 100 new customers per month.  By simply improving first to second order retention by 15%, you’ve now scored yourself $39,000 in additional annual revenue by getting more of your customers to receive 9 orders. But that's a conservative ROI. You can do the math - the number almost doubles to $72K if they stay with your brand even longer - which you can assume they will do. Note your churn rate levels out around order 10.
 
While this gives you a place to focus your retention energies - onboarding doesn’t stop at order 1! So what additional ways to delight your customers between each early order can you deploy to install a sense a value and loyalty to further increase revenue? Cheers to opportunity sleuthing!

A word of caution...Keep it simple...at first. You are running with low staff and a lot of tasks to attack in each order cycle. So, what are some quick wins you can try out right now?

Don’t forget to read our follow-up post “Tangible Quick Wins: 3 Customer Onboarding Tactics That Will Score You Significant Payoff”

For an evaluation of your current new customer onboarding experience and where to focus, fill in our New Customer Insights & Action Plan request. There are often two or three quick wins you can implement within a few weeks to lower churn immediately. Let’s get started finding some revenue opportunities for you.