It’s important to define the user categories first
- Active user: User who read an article is active user or opening an app is itself active user?
- Inactive user: If the user did not visit for 30 days or 15 days?
- Renewed user: User who renewed their subscription within 15 days of their subscription expiry date.
- Winback user: User who renewed their subscription after 15 days of their subscription expiry date.
Below are some of the key metrics that should help in identifying the health of your subscription business, in my expereince without strong retention any subscription business is bound to fail.
- Acquisition: Are we able to optimize funnel and grow users at a healthy ARPU
- Onboarding: Do new users experience value? – Newsletter, Podcast, etc
- Engagement: Do users continue to find value? – Coming back D3, D7, D30
- FT to Paid: Do users decide to pay? – FT to Paid conversion %
- Retention & Renewals: Do users continue to pay? – Paid renewals and Winbacks
1. Acquisition: Are we able to optimize funnel and grow users at a healthy ARPU
- Meter paywall/Premium article stoppage to conversion
- Planpage to Signup to Conversion
- MoM growth %
- ARPU
- Organic to Paid acquisition %
- New users, FT to Paid, Paid renewals contribution to daily paid users
2. Onboarding: Do new users experience value? – Newsletter, Podcast, etc
- The below are applicable to both paid and FT
- Subscriber to Newsletter sign up
- Subscriber to App download/usage
- D3, D7 are users using Newsletter/coming back to site and reading articles
3. Engagement: Do users continue to find value? – Coming back D3, D7, D30
- Total active days in a month
- FT – D7,D10, D14 cohort based retention %
- Paid – D30, D45, D60, D90 cohort based retention %
- Inactive users for cohort based retention %
- Stickiness (DAU/MAU) Ratio which helps us to measure the Engagement Level of users
- App Installs Vs Uninstalls
4. FT to Paid: Do users decide to pay? – FT to Paid conversion %
- FT to paid cohort conversion % (Jan FT users FT to paid conversion %)
- Median time to convert from FT to Paid
- Monthly and Annual plan split %
5. Retention & Renewals: Do users continue to pay? – Paid renewals and Winbacks
- Annual/Monthly retention %
- Expiring users for that Month (Planwise Expiring users)
- Daily Renewals (Resusbcription)
- Winback – % of churned users who resubscribe
- Recurring vs Non Recurring renewal %
Reference Materials:
https://twitter.com/lennysan/status/1343730958013501441
https://a16z.com/2018/08/06/power-user-curve-l30-l7/
https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/p/the-most-important-consumer-subscription
https://nbt.substack.com/p/10-factors-to-consider-when-evaluating
https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/p/what-is-good-retention-issue-29