How I Reduced Churn From 37% -> 6% in 2 Months

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Aug 20 in Other

Since we're still early here with Skool, most of us go through phases with the company as it grows.

For the past few months, one of those major pushes has been churn.

Email notifications changed, the exit video was added and everyone had the sudden awakening that it didn't matter how many people joined their community if they kept leaving lol

After the Skool Games Mastermind in June myself and many others set out on a mission to kill churn the right way. Here's a breakdown of what I did, the results, and how you can do it too.

Phase 1: Understanding what my churn was to start with

This was of course a slightly inflated number since I (like everyone else) went ham to win the Skool games. Lot's of wild promotions and promises that are tough to fulfill. That being said, my churn was 37% the month after the games. This means that 37% of the people who joined in May left in June. No bueno.

** For reference, <20% churn is considered decent and <10% churn is considered GOOD

Phase 2: Prioritizing my game plan for getting back on track

This started with fundamentals. Would I even want to stay in my community? I needed to make my product better FAST. Luckily

@Alex Hormozi

and

@Sam Ovens

gave us a multitude of ways to improve.

These included:

Onboarding calls - Connect with new members ASAP to show them you care, provide guidance and make them feel a part of the team. These are best done in groups of 5-6.
Understanding your members - Looking at the data for my current community to determine who my ideal customer was and begin tailoring more towards them specifically.
Increasing engagement - There are many ways to do this, enough so that people have communities for it. I'll share how I solved it.
Clear roadmap - You have to define what success looks like and eliminate distractions.
Amazon Prime Effect - Give so many different separate value adds that it is illogical to leave
Live calls - At the end of the day the world is shifting to interaction over courses. Run with it

Now that I had, for the first time, clear direction of what success looked like I needed to prioritize what activities could be implemented the quickest that would leave me with the highest ROI.

Phase 3: Implementation

Here's what I did:

Immediately added onboarding calls for my paid community. I heard this and realized I was just dumb and totally didn't think of it. In my calls, I ask each member of the small group individually why they are there, give them 3 clear action steps and send them on their way. This was a massive reason why my churn dropped, people felt heard.
Went head first into engagement. I realized days where I posted saw a 5-10x increase in engagement so I just posted value daily. I also created an internal games that incentivized activity and accountability for each member. The goal: Get them to like each other more than they like me so they stay for that and not just me. This worked way better than expected (I'll do a full post just on my games soon)
I eliminated extra calls and just narrowed it down to access to me. I made it clear to everyone why I did that and showed them how they could replace time on calls with actual action taking. They very much appreciated the shift
I added gamification to my levels. This has become common knowledge it seems, but I didn't have this. Maybe I'll do a full post on this too, but free membership, private 1-on-1s with me and personalized badges for profile pictures were the main driver. Humans are competitive, so let them compete for both of your benefit.

Phase 4: Results

After recently reviewing the data, here's what we saw:

June: 37% Churn

July: 17% Churn

August: 6% Churn

Sometimes I at least tend to overcomplicate things. But success on Skool has a lot to do with just sticking to the game plan that works. I'm a firm believer in replicating before I iterate, and that is exactly what I have been doing.

Wise words from

and more played a huge roll in identifying my next best steps. I have yet to add in software, specialists, and many other things but I have been focused on finding the next most important thing to tackle and it has worked for me.

If you are struggling with churn or maybe even just want to ensure you don't in the future, maybe this road map will help :)

Cheers to you all✊🏼

- Ryan

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