Overview

Our client has a hugely successful subscription business. With a mature business of this kind there are (broadly) three marketing goals:

1. Keep attracting new subscribers

2. Grow the average revenue per subscriber

3. Maximise retention (i.e. minimise the number of people who leave)

Shift was tasked with exploring the third point because the company was considering making some significant changes and wanted to be certain their insight base was as solid as possible.

Approach

The client had a wealth of insights from exit surveys. However, they had become aware of our founder’s work on research and post-rationalisation (see Consumer.ology, Nicholas Brealey Publishing) and realised they might not be getting an accurate picture.

Aware of the risks of asking people to post-rationalise their decision to leave, we took a different approach. We recruited people who had ended their subscriptions but concealed this topic amongst a host of other financial decisions and lifestyle choices. Using our ReTrack™ interviewing technique, we relived the events around the time when we knew the subscription had ended.

This included their use of our client’s service prior to them leaving and the decision to leave but, crucially, did not make this an overt focal point for respondents. We also retraced their experience from the outset of their subscription to understand how their feelings about it had changed over time.

Output

We concluded that the evidence from the exit interviews was almost entirely misleading. Where customers had justified their decision to leave by drawing on negative associations with the company’s service, we established that leaving was the result of a sequence of events:

• Their pleasure from the service had been eroded by their inability to manage the choice on offer.

• The breadth of choice made it hard to attract attention to new content, so habitual and default use of the service made it feel less exhilarating than it had.

• Importantly, a tangential trigger had caused the customer to focus on the cost of the subscription, leading to the decision to end their subscription.

• And the perspective we provided on how subscribers behaved on their platform provided clues about when and how to communicate with them.

On the basis of our insights the company changed its strategy with significant success. It put more focus on using technology to help customers manage choice, changed its marketing to convey more of the new content that was available, and increased efforts to flag and attract viewers to the new content it was creating.