Churn

Churn is the share of customers who leave in a given window: they cancel, stop buying, or go quiet. If you start the month with 100 active customers and 10 drop off (not counting new ones), churn is 10%. Retention is the other side of the same coin.

It is not cart abandonment. Abandonment is one session that never paid. Churn is a relationship that ended. SaaS feels it as canceled subscriptions; a shop feels it as “they used to order every two weeks.” Track it in a CRM and analytics as a KPI next to customer lifetime value. Clumsy onboarding drives early churn: people never get a first win.

A real-life example of churn

A Decatur meal-kit subscriber used to order weekly. After a late delivery and a silent inbox, they cancel. Acquisition ads keep running; the leak is the people you already had. Catch the drop in frequency before the cancel — a reactivation offer beats another Facebook campaign.

Measure who left, why, and when. Then fix the product and the follow-up. How-to: Customer Retention for Small Business and gyms that retain members.