How to Avoid Post-Holiday SMS Subscriber Churn

Keeping your newly acquired SMS subscribers and customers all year long with Voyage  

It’s hard not to love the holiday season – especially surrounded by twinkling lights, brisk winds, warm drinks, and family and friends. Gift-giving is a fixture of this time of year, which means the holiday season is also the highest acquisition season for eCommerce brands. 

Amid all the cookie baking, party attending, and gift-giving, customers sign up for sales and promotions at increased rates. 

But brands often feel the post-holiday subscriber attrition blues if they haven’t prepared the correct segmentation and campaigns to keep new subscribers hooked. Brands have a massive opportunity to expand their consumer base and develop loyal customers after the holidays – so don’t let your newly acquired subscribers spoil like that forgotten eggnog in the back of your fridge. 

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Post-Holiday Customer and SMS Trends

Brands that retain new subscribers after the holiday season can do so by being prepared. It’s important to focus on retention tactics and build out customer journeys ahead of the new year. 

There are key steps eCommerce brands can take to continue growing new subscriber lists far after the holiday season ends. However, it takes planning to avoid the post-holiday slump.

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What is eCommerce Churn?

For eCommerce brands, churn can refer to a few different behaviors. 

The definition of customer churn is when a customer takes their business elsewhere. Churn is also used to describe subscriber turnover and attrition, especially pertaining to SMS and marketing channels. When these subscribers opt out, eCommerce brands lose the opportunity to grow customer lifetime value. 

SMS churn has varying degrees, including:

Voluntary churn

• This includes unsubscribes, hard bounces, and complaints. 
• Voluntarily opt-out (unsubscribe, complaints) or not (hard bounces), will no longer receive your emails.

Involuntary attrition

• Inactive/unengaged dormant SMS subscribers (who haven’t clicked in a certain timeframe).
• This category can also be used for lapsed/dormant/unengaged customers (haven’t purchased in a certain timeframe).  

There is natural attrition that happens with marketing channels, but it is vital to understand your churn risk to avoid post-holiday retention drops and maintain healthy subscriber and customer growth throughout the year.

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SMS customer and subscriber metrics that may indicate risk or churn.

Your brand’s specific customer behavior benchmarks help you know how often to engage and when to push harder, including outlining dormant subscribers and dormant customers.

By having a solid grasp on your customers, eCommerce brands can undergo effective winback campaigns to reward loyal customers or bring in new ones. But, what works for some brands may not be the best for your company.  

For example, primarily as a gift-giving website, Birthdate.co has unique product frequency expectations. As CEO Ajay Mehta describes:

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“If you buy something as a gift for someone and you have a great experience, it might not be you coming back in the next 30 days to buy another gift [...] However, we do then on the flip side have like sort of an element of virality, where you buy a gift for someone in your life, one of our birthday books, they love it and they think, ‘oh, my cousin’s birthday is coming up, let me get them a birthday book or something else from this brand that I know makes great gifts.’”

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By understanding your key customer base, and knowing their churn rate, eCommerce brands can avoid common customer loss pitfalls.  

But what is the difference between customer churn rate and unsubscribe rate? In short, customer churn rate describes the number of subscribers who are voluntarily opting out and involuntarily leaving your overall SMS text program. As an overall metric to track across collective campaigns, churn rate can be calculated by taking all voluntary and involuntary opt-outs and dividing it by the total number of subscribers. 

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Another key definition for brands to know is opt-out rates. Opt-out rates (OOR) is the percentage of recipients who, for one reason or another, have opted out of a campaign. For eCommerce brands, it’s important to measure opt-out rates on a campaign by campaign basis. Higher or lower rates on specific campaigns can be indicative of content quality or drip workflow touchpoint.

And knowing the difference between customer churn rate vs retention rate is vital. Customer retention rate describes the percentage of existing customers who remain customers after a given period. Customer retention rate can help brands better understand what keeps customers with your company, and can also signal opportunities to improve customer service.

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Net win-back score helps brands measure how likely your customers are to do business with you again after they leave. This forward-looking metric can help businesses address the reasons customers leave and earn more business from repeat buyers. 

When customers choose to opt-out of SMS message programs, it’s important to try and obtain information from them on why they’re choosing to leave. By asking, ‘on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to return as a customer?’ 

Based on the numbers customers choose, they can be classified into three groups: unlikely, passive and likely. Customers who choose 0–3 fall into the ‘unlikely’ category. Those who answer 4–6 are ‘passive,’ and those who answer 7–10 are ‘likely’ to purchase through you again. After this data is collected, brands can calculate net win-back scores. 

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Amplify SMS Subscriber Retention with Voyage SMS

As experts in SMS acquisition and customer lifetime value (CLTV), Voyage can help your brand attract and delight SMS subscribers and convert them into brand loyalists.

The faster brands build their SMS subscriber list, the quicker the path to delighting customers and building brand loyalty. SMS is an incredible marketing channel that allows brands to foster thoughtful, authentic interactions with customers and build community. By using SMS list growth best practices: utilizing modals, keywords, cross-channel promotion, opt-ins and more, brands can achieve sustainable and continuous customer engagement and ROI.

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“The CLTV side has never been more important. When you can prove that revenue over time, not the one-month period but over six months, you will see a repeat in your customers, you will see an increase in CLTV.” -  Rev Reddy, Voyage SMS CEO

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Making all customers feel special – whether they’re routinely buying products for themselves or making one-time gift purchases – is the best way to increase customer loyalty. Personalizing these touch points, in addition to building relationships, taking feedback and focusing on more frequent and larger orders helps maximize CLTV.

Also, utilizing segmentation emphasis and personalizing customer experience helps brands continue to retain and grow loyal customer bases. 

Utilizing SMS for winback campaigns has proven successful when utilized effectively. Voyage helps grow SMS subscribers through email and social channels, personalizing content to fit customers and engaging in human-to-human personalization. 

When undergoing winback campaigns, personalizing and tailoring content to consumers showcases the investments brands are making into their client base, building loyalty and further cases for increased purchasing power.

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Winback SMS strategies through Voyage have never made it easier for brands to avoid post-holiday churn and retain consumers far after the season is over. So sit back, relax, and enjoy that holiday eggnog – you’ve earned it. Request a demo from Voyage today!

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