This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
All right, all right, welcome back to the podcast. Yesterday, we talked about making a membership site. Today, we're going to talk about how you reduce newsletter churn. And churn is basically the principle of people who subscribe to something, whether it's paid or free, and they drop out like they they joined your free trial, but then they don't actually renew, or they joined the paid version, if that's an option, and they pay for a month or two, but then they stop. So this is a major problem for newsletters. It's a major problem
for any kind of membership site, or really anything where you want to keep people engaged over time, you want to do everything you can to reduce your churn rate. So today, we're going to hear from a listener his name's Quentin in Boston. He's running this subscription newsletter but is struggling with high churn rates. I've had this problem to over the years with different kinds of newsletters, sometimes the turn rate is higher or lower, learned a few things along the way. What can we do to help not just bring in new people but keep the existing subscribers engaged? Because this can be really huge for the right kind
of business or side hustle. So let's talk about a couple things Quentin and anybody else can do in this situation. His question my answer, you know how it goes, it's coming up in just 30 seconds. Hello this is Quentin calling from Boston. I run a subscription based newsletter but I'm struggling with high churn rates. People sign up and then unsubscribe within a few
weeks. What strategies can I use to keep my subscribers engaged and reduce churn? And how can I improve the value and consistency of my content to make sure they stick around? Thanks for taking my question. Either way your goal is to reduce churn. You want to keep people around for as long as
possible and if you focus on this it can be just as effective as focusing on trying to get new people to join your list which is what most creators focus on most of the time. You can actually win the game in a much easier way sometimes depending on the topic, depending on the industry and so on if you focus more on retention than acquisition. So what do you do if you want to reduce churn? First of all understand why subscribers leave. If you've got a really high churn rate understand why people are unsubscribing. Are they giving
you any feedback? What is the data? If you have like a follow-up sequence, if you have like a five message follow-up sequence or could be 10 messages or whatever, where are people unsubscribing from? If you see oh there's this big drop off after message number four well something's not working with message number four for example. Or if you're just doing broadcast messages like you know messages that are not created in advance but that are just going out to whoever subscribed at a time, well when do people unsubscribe from those messages? Like is there some pattern there? Are specific times or days better for
sending emails? You know it's just kind of looking at why people are leaving is the first step and then improving the value of the content. So you might want to segment your audience as part of this. This is a huge thing because not all subscribers are interested in the same topics. This is something that I have struggled with personally because I've got lots of people who are interested in small business and entrepreneurship but I also write about mental health. I have written a lot about travel in the past. I had this quest
of going to every country in the world. So some people are interested in all this stuff but a lot of people are like I just want one part of that. And so segmentation is a way to serve people based on their preferences and send targeted content that resonates with each group and that will then reduce the churn. Last but not least I talk about this all the time but consistency is important. Subscribers should know when to expect your emails. Stick
to that regular schedule. It really builds trust and anticipation and over time continuously improve. You might want to try some A/B testing, testing different subject lines, email formats, content types. The people who really succeed in this world I have noticed over the years they are the ones who are continuously improving in some way or another. They're trying new stuff. They are willing to adjust. They're willing to change. Not just doing the same
thing over and over. So a few tips for you there. Quentin and anybody else I think reducing churn is a very vital goal for so many side hustlers and small business owners. Definitely worth putting in the time for it. If you have a comment or question or a situation, sidehustleschool.com slash questions. New episode every day all completely free. The
archives are completely free on sidehustleschool.com. 2836 of them in fact with a new one added each day. And I hope you'll continue to listen. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
