ChurnBuster.io is an automated service that integrates with Stripe and manages the problems that come along with recurring payments, namely expiring credit cards and failed payments.
The founder, Andrew Culver, is a former Senior Software Developer at Brennan Dunn’s agency, We Are Titans, and now is a consultant working with early stage startups as a “drop-in CTO.”
The idea for Churn Buster had been in his head for quite some time, but Andrew first broke ground on the project on July 30, 2013. It entered Beta on October 1, 2013 and by September of the next year it had grown to $37,800 in annual run rate.
Running the business doesn’t leave much time for marketing, especially when consulting as a main source of income and putting family above everything else. Because of that, Churn Buster has mainly grown by word-of-mouth so far.
So how can Andrew grow Churn Buster without sacrificing work/life balance?
Right now he has an informative landing page that does a pretty good job of selling the service.
- Clearly states the problem—“You’re losing too much money to failed payments and expired cards”
- Positions Churn Buster as the solution
- Addresses objections with the copy, FAQ, and specific testimonials
It could be a bit more benefit focused, and I think being clearer about exactly how it works at the start would be helpful, but overall the landing page does its job well.
The main calls-to-action lead directly to a pricing grid, showing plans from $50 to $500/month. While it is a free trial, a credit card is required to sign up and seeing those price points right away sets a high bar to clear in order to get a new user onboard.
Until this point, most of Churn Buster’s growth has come from word of mouth, so the average visitor to the site won’t need much persuasion because somebody they trust has vouched for it. But if Andrew decides to grow beyond word of mouth, he will need to warm his leads in order convince them to hand over their credit card.
How can he do this?
A lifecycle mini-course and Facebook ad campaign provide just the combo Churn Buster needs to fuel its growth.
The model is simple. Create something that educates your customers on a topic they care about, get them into your funnel, and use Facebook to retarget the ones you missed.
And what do Churn Buster’s customers care about? Reducing churn.
Andrew could create a mini-course educating SaaS business owners on how they can reduce churn, and give them advice they can act on right away.
Topics could include:
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Use a defined onboarding process to help users get value fast
He already does this very well at Churn Buster, so he has plenty of experience to draw on - Have multiple contact options to allow customers to choose how they want to contact you
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Interviewing churned customers
Simple tactic from Patrick McKenzie's Appointment Reminder: Require comment box to be filled out on cancellation page -
Track usage to predict churn and reach out proactively
Discuss the important metrics to track and signs to look out for - And finally, automating failed payment reminders
On the last subject, many people will assume that failed payments don’t have a significant impact on their bottom line, or that a simple email reminder is enough. Andrew has testimonial after testimonial showing that couldn’t be further from the truth.
By using all of that data, he can show readers that the problem of failed payments is huge, and whatever they are doing now is not enough.
Enter Churn Buster.
Most of the solutions to the other topics require a significant investment of time from the business owner. And as many of us know, time is far too limited when there is a business to run. But Churn Buster solves the problem of failed payments with ease.
Andrew could take one of his testimonials, build it into a bigger case study, use that for one of the emails, and at the end have a call to action for the free 30-day trial.
In the last email of the series, he should follow up on what has been taught and make the problem relevant to the reader. Including a simple calculator to approximate how much revenue a business is losing to failed payments is a great way to drive home the point that the reader is losing money by not acting.
Ending the email with something like this: “Signup now for our free 30-day trial and if Churn Buster doesn’t more than pay for itself, just cancel and pay nothing. No hard feelings. Don’t have the time to get started? I will personally help setup your account, show you around and answer any questions you may have. So what are you waiting for? Let Churn Buster put that money back into your pocket. ”
After seeing how much money they are losing, how easy it is to get started, and how little risk there is, they would be crazy not to sign up.
That solves the problem of getting people over the initial hurdle of handing out their credit card, but how could Andrew grow Churn Buster beyond his initial audience?
4 Areas of Growth
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Opt-In for email course on landing page
This is one is pretty straight forward. After the email course is created, there needs to be a way to put it in front of visitors. Pop-up light boxes may not win a lot of love in the design category, but they reliably drive a huge number of email opt-ins. For something less intrusive, tools like Hello Bar are very effective as well.
Regardless of the method, there needs to be a way to pitch the value of the email course to the reader and give them an easy way to opt-in.
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Blog Retargeting Loop
With the exception of the status update back in September of 2014, the Churn Buster blog has been quiet.
That needs to change.
I would start by creating a blog post making the case for the huge cost of failed payments. This shouldn’t be a sales pitch. Instead, it needs to drive home just how much money businesses are losing by not systemizing the way they handle failed payments. Include case studies that use charts to show the dramatic impact having a process in place can have. Explain why card account updaters and simple emails aren’t enough. Finally outline the process that people can use to do this themselves.
This is basically an extended version of the final email from the mini-course.
Make sure to include Facebook’s retargeting pixel. This is key, and I will explain why in just a minute.
Finally, share the article on twitter, to the mailing list, and on relevant social bookmarking sites like Hacker News and Inbound.org.
The goal is to put the content in front of as many people as possible, and get as many of them as he can into his email course funnel. Brennan Dunn does this superbly, but still only gets 10% of traffic onto his mailing list. If you just stop there, you are wasting 90% of your traffic.
By setting up the retargeting pixel, Andrew can use Facebook ads to target people who read the blog post but didn’t sign up for his mailing list. This is a powerful tool that lets you leverage your great content to get as many people as possible into your funnel that you otherwise would have missed.
These readers have already shown interest in reducing churn, so showing them ads for Churn Buster’s email course will be highly relevant to them and result in a great ROI.
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Reactivating cold email list
Besides the common social bookmarking sites like Hacker News, Reddit, Inbound.org, and GrowthHacker.com, Andrew has a great untapped resource he could market to; his launch email list.
In his post from September, Andrew said he hadn’t reached out to the list of emails he collected prior to his launch. This is not uncommon. You know you should collect emails before launching, but often don’t have a strategy for staying in contact with them. Then, after a while you realize they probably forgot who you are and decide not to contact them at all.
Facebook helps solve all of this with a great feature called “custom audiences.”
Custom audiences allow you to upload a list of phone numbers or email addresses, have Facebook match that list against their database, and then serve highly targeted ads to that group of people.
All he would need to do is use Facebook Ads to promote the new blog post to this list, and then the retargeting loop takes over.
Churn Buster’s launch list is filled with people who have expressed interest in their product already, so they would likely find a blog post showing them how to help solve their churn problems invaluable. Facebook lets them do this easily.
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Proactively reaching out to SaaS businesses built on Stripe
Brennan Dunn recently published The Complete Guide to Finding and Selling Ecommerce Clients and the advice fits perfectly for what Andrew is doing with Churnbuster.io. This is a summary of the article as it applies to Churn Buster, but I strongly recommend checking out the original article linked above.
Here is the basic strategy:
Hire a virtual assistant to use a site like NerdyData.com to identify businesses that use Stripe. Then have them go through that list and identify the SaaS businesses, and find the most relevant contact information [ideally the founder for smaller businesses].
With the list in hand, Andrew should contact each founder with a compact, actionable pitch that does four things:
- Shows you’ve done your research on their business
- Identifies the issues holding them back
- Explains that the issues can be solved
- Gives specific examples of the bottom line impact that can come from solving these issues
The goal at this point is to setup a call with a decision maker at the company and find out as much as possible about their business. Using this information, he should contextualize all of his advice around the potential ROI they could see in their business.
When the cost of the problem is clear, it is time to pitch Churn Buster. Just like in the email course, Andrew would lay out the steps that they could follow to do this on their own and then present the alternative of letting Churn Buster deal with all of that for them.
“At a cost of only $X [whatever plan their business qualifies for], you could potentially recover $25*X per month. All while you sleep. We are so confident we can help businesses make more money that we offer a 30-day free trial. If it doesn’t improve your bottom line, don’t pay us anything. I will even personally help you get setup and answer any questions you have. When is a good time to schedule a call and get you started?”
This is a bit more work than the typical sales process for most SaaS companies, but with plans ranging from $50 to $500/month, the lifetime value of a customer easily justifies spending a few hours with each qualified lead.
The Power of Lifecycle Emails and Facebook Retargeting
Your sales page is the place where you want to show your visitors that you understand your problem, your product is the solution, and you are trustworthy, ultimately leading to a trial signup or sale.
For most of your visitors though, that won’t be enough.
Combining the power of an educational email course with a Facebook retargeting loop lets you leverage your content to make sure you capture as large a share of your audience as possible.
It doesn’t need to be complex to be effective. What matters is that you follow the basic principles; create something that educates your customers on a topic they care about, get them into your funnel, and use Facebook to retarget the ones you missed.
Need help getting started? I offer a free 2-week course showing you how to create your own email mini-course which will give you a great head start.
If you already have the content in place, but want to start experimenting with a Facebook retargeting loop, then check out Perry Marshall’s book, The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising: Second Edition. I can’t recommend it enough.
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