Customers having to go out of their way to get their hands on your product may be a key reason they churn. A customer may prefer Hanes T-shirts, but if they live around the corner from a store that sells Fruit of the Loom T-shirts, they are more likely to pick up that up instead, or grab an Amazon Basics T-shirt that arrives the next day. A PWC survey found that efficiency and convenience were the two biggest drivers of customer behavior. If your product is not easy and convenient for consumers to purchase, you’re inviting churn.

To prevent customer churn, make sure your product is easily accessible and frictionless for consumers. If you sell through retailers, analyze what stores your customers frequent and ensure your product remains on those shelves. If you sell your products through your website, think about offering free shipping or quick delivery options. Make it easy for customers to save products they like in a cart or wishlist that they can access the next time they visit your website.

For everyday items or consumables, many customers consume without putting much thought or effort into choosing a brand. If they don’t feel a tug of loyalty to your brand, they may make a switch without even realizing it. What drives a busy parent rushing through the grocery store to grab the box of Wheat Thins over the box of Triscuits? According to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, as much as 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious and automatic. Those subconscious choices are tied to emotion, and it is that emotional connection that drives consumer decisions. In other words, if you fail to inspire brand loyalty, you run the risk of losing customers.

To make your customers loyal to your brand, therefore, infuse passion or emotion into your branding and marketing campaigns. It doesn’t need to be through a multi-million dollar, tear-jerking Superbowl ad - acts as simple as sharing the story of how and why you started your brand, customer testimonials, or stories of how your brand benefits a community or ecosystem can be incredibly powerful. Tap into emotions like excitement or nostalgia so that your customers associate with that emotion and feel that tug of loyalty when they see your product.

If customers have a poor experience with your brand, they are likely to stop purchasing and switch to another brand. One survey found that in the U.S. 56% of customers would forego a brand after several bad experiences, and 20% would call it quits after only one. Furthermore, customer service plays an outsized role - 96% of customers will leave a brand if they have a poor customer service experience. For example, if a skincare brand starts to cut spend in product development and consumers begin noticing these differences, the brand may begin to see dips in purchases; this may be exacerbated if the brand fails to respond to the feedback effectively.

To prevent customer churn, invest in the quality or experience that customers have with your product. Ensure your branding honestly conveys the quality of your goods, and if customers have a poor experience, address the issues transparently and head-on.

If your brand or product is built off of a current trend or fad, you may see significant churn when that trend or fad evaporates. A company selling home fitness equipment during the height of the at-home-COVID-workout trend might have seen customers churn when the world opened up again and people reactivated their gym memberships. For example, Peloton earnings quadrupled between 2019 and 2021, but since then they have seen higher churn rates and revenue declines.

These situations can be bucketed into three types of fair-weathered events:

• Fads, which tend to be very short, itemized obsessions (e.g., Peloton workout bikes)

• Trends, which tend to be longer term events with broader parameters and themes out of which fads stem (e.g., at-home fitness)

• Circumstances, which tend to be the external events creating a change in the life of customers (e.g., the COVID pandemic)

If your customer base is driven by such moments in time, whether it’s a fad, a trend, or a circumstance, make sure to stay on top of the shifting trends – set up a contingency plan or explore adjacent products or revenue streams to diversify in case those moments pass.

Laine helps you track customer churn – our LTV and retention pages show how many of your customers you are retaining and how much those retained customers spend each month. If you start seeing a dip in your retention rates, it might be time to investigate which of the above factors you might have been hit by.