Maybe many subscribers joined because of a single press hit, but aren’t interested in your core product. Or you’re publishing too much and getting ignored. Or you’ve got new competition for eyeballs and attentional minutes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In year 5, your revenues are just $70,523. You’re still gaining 50 new subscribers\/month, but you’re losing more. Over time, churn is the undertow that will become, if it gets too big, a riptide that sucks your business under.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The good news<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nBut wait! What if you can cut churn to 2%\/month, while still winning new 50 subscribers a month thanks to organic sharing and occasional press hits? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe churn drops because you’re regularly publishing exactly what your readers need \u2014 your voice is scintillating, your sources are unique, your commentariat is vibing, you’ve added a new subscriber-only chat, you’re giving subscriber-only discounts on trendy branded swag, you’ve picked fights with the right idiots. And, yes, you’re publishing weekly quizzes that keep 10% of your readers amused, educated, sharing and\/or addicted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
With 2%\/month churn, year 5 revenues will be $167,143… 57% more revenue than if churn is 3%… and 2.4 times more than if churn is 6%. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The value of a subscriber: $467 or $58?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nLet’s come at churn atomically, diving down to the level of a single typical individual subscriber. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s easy to think of each new subscriber as a $7 win. In fact, a new $7\/month subscription might be worth as much as $467, thanks to 1.5% churn and an average lifetime of 5.5 years as a subscriber. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Or that subscriber could be worth just $58, if monthly churn is 12% and the average subscriber sticks around just eight months. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
(Reduce churn to 0.5%\/month and the average subscriber sticks around 17 years and pays you $1,400… A REALLY NICE JOB!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Turning content into connections<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat’s all this mean for your strategy as a publisher? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course it’s tempting to create more content… more exclusive interviews. More hot takes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And obviously, letting your readers network with each other through comments can make a big difference. Podcasts help deepen the brand connection. Subscriber-only chats are important too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But all those strategies require ongoing work, and just 1-10% of subscribers will be consistently moved by a particular strategy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Investing in quizzes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nQuizzes are an essential addition to this bundle, because after an author’s initial investment in creating a quiz, subscribers do all the work… happily! (The New York Times didn’t hire 100 game developers just for giggles\u2014they understand that engagement tools like quizzes are churn-killers.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A quiz provides a uniquely cost-effective opportunity to recycle the work you’ve done during the week, the content you’ve created, the editorial choices you’ve made, the telling details and odd phrases you’ve spotted. It’s an opportunity for a reader to compare herself to peers in each question’s answer-skew and in each post-quiz results histogram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The quiz broadens your relationship with readers \u2014 and their relationships with each other \u2014 across multiple psychological levers: ego (pursuing a perfect score), amusement (making good guesses), and loss aversion (maintaining a streak). 100% velcro for your newsletter! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A quiz gives readers a chance to enjoy, to compete and most importantly, invest more time and energy in your brand. If 100 quiz takers each spend an average of 3 minutes on a single quiz, that’s five hours of reader benefit generated by something that took you 20 minutes to create. And that’s five hours readers have not invested in their relationships with NYTimes.com or CNN or Vox or Heather Cox Richardson. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back to the bucks<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThat’s all subjective. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
To return to the almighty dollar, the original premise of this email, every $7\/month subscriber that a newsletter wins or keeps has a potential $467 payoff if properly nurtured. And every lost subscription is at least $467 that just walked away. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If a quiz taken by 100 readers helps just 10 subscribers stick around six months longer, that’s $420 of value. If 10% of 1,000 quiz takers become more invested in your brand, that’s $4,200. For 20 minutes of work on a quiz that deepens engagement for highly motivated subscribers, that’s an unbeatable ROI and an unrivaled investment in your newsletter’s long term viability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here’s the new calculator<\/a> that illustrates churn’s impact on your long-term revenues. Just change churn or other variables and hit enter. BTW, if you’d like us to analyze your newsletter’s churn using raw data, drop us a line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What’s the difference between a thriving subscription business and one that’s flailing?\u00a0 In one word: unsubscribes. TLDR Based on the subscription-value calculator we built recently , when you compare a newsletter with a 1.5% churn versus a 12% churn, the lifetime value of a subscriber for the average Substack publisher is a whopping $467 vs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[20,6],"class_list":["post-382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsletternomics","tag-churn","tag-substack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quizlab.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quizlab.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quizlab.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quizlab.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quizlab.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/quizlab.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":398,"href":"https:\/\/quizlab.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions\/398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quizlab.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quizlab.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quizlab.ai\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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