You were just about to cancel your Apple TV+ subscription when…

They released a new season of Severance.

Are you gonna miss out on the show everyone’s talking about? Of course not! No, you’re gonna stay a little longer now to keep watching new episodes…and that’s what we call:

✨ Churn Preventing Content ✨ 

The best way to avoid churn is to prevent churn.

Just like Apple, you can prevent a lot of churn by producing good stuff people want to see. You can also prevent it with subscriber communications or with sparkling customer service.

Don’t just market to get upgrades. Put a little effort into what paid subscribers experience too. It will come back to you tenfold in renewals and referrals.

Today, I’ve got three ways to keep more subscribers with you.

3 ways to prevent subscriber cancellations

No churn hack can replace your journalism work. Your best churn prevention is doing the great work your subscribers came to you for.

The second best churn prevention is making subscribers feel valued and engaged in what you’re up to.

That means ensuring they can access all their perks right away, thanking them for their support, showing them where their support goes and reminding them why they started paying before it’s time to renew.

Try one of these easy bake churn prevention recipes to take some action on this!

Method 1: Better paid subscriber onboarding

Everyone knows you need a welcome email but very few of us talk about the paid welcome email.

Make sure you have at least one paid welcome email. “Thank you for becoming a paid subscriber! Here’s what you just got, supported, unlocked….”

You can also turn this into an 2-3 email sequence that ensures your new subscriber is truly deeply welcomed and that they get links to everything they need like latest stories, podcasts, events or any other perks.

Better yet, offer them steps that start building a deeper habit of engaging with your work by bookmarking, commenting, following or replying to you.

⏰ If you have 15 minutes: Check on your existing paid welcome email (that hopefully you already have). Add in a single, simple question for them to reply to.

🕑️ If you have one hour: Add a second welcome email a week after subscribe. Include an action that gets them farther into your work. Ask them to comment on a recent story or tell them which social channel they should follow for live updates.

Method 2: Remind subscribers why they paid BEFORE renewals

As annual renewals come up, you want to ensure your paid subscribers remember why they joined. You might not know that exactly and subscribers have a range of reasons, but hopefully you have insight about a couple motivators you can tease out in an email.

You can also include a line about why you do your work, a line about your future plans or a line about what you do with their money.

⏰ If you have 15 minutes: Enable the annual renewal reminder inside Outpost (customizable) or inside Stripe (not customizable).

🕐️ If you have one hour: Write a better version of your renewal reminder that actually pulls on some heart strings, or better yet, purse strings.

RELATED: 10 motivation messages that convince subscribers to pay you

Method 3: Anticipate failed payment problems

Saved the easiest for last! Prevent involuntary churn—also known as people who didn’t mean to leave—when you anticipate credit cards that are expiring and will fail on renewal. Stripe says this is 25% of cancellations!!!

You can send reminders before their card expires and also you can send notices if they don’t fix it and their payment does fail. People miss most automated emails so this takes a few reminders to get some action on this. Lucky for us, Stripe and Outpost have great automations that are easy to turn on.

⏰ If you have 15 minutes: Head to Stripe and under Prevent Failed Payments, turn on “Send emails about expiring cards.” OR use Outpost’s Failed Payment Recovery Flow, update the subject lines to your liking and turn them on. (For Ghost publishers only)

If you’re using something else, check the settings and documentation for revenue recovery tools and make sure they are enabled.

Our takeaway

Churn is part of every recurring revenue business, but aside from producing great work, there are things we can do to stop it. Or at least, stop some of it.

Your subscribers start paying you for a reason and they stop paying you for a reason. The more you understand those reasons, and message to them, the longer your subscribers will stick with you. (And the less you’ll have to chase down new ones!)

Next week, we’ll get into what to do after subscribers leave. They’re not gone forever!