How to Reduce Churn Fast: 5 Retention Tactics for OTT Platforms
Struggling with subscriber churn? These quick-win tactics can help you boost retention and protect revenue, starting today.
Subscriber churn is an expensive problem. Whether it’s a user actively cancelling or a payment silently failing in the background, every lost subscriber impacts your growth, ARPU, and acquisition ROI.
Before diving into these five proven tactics, download our free 7-Step Streaming Churn Self-Assessment to see where your current strategy stands and where you can improve.
Not all churn is inevitable. At Magine Pro, we’ve built smart tools and features into our platform to help streaming operators tackle both voluntary and involuntary churn without heavy lifting. Here are five high-impact retention tactics you can activate today:
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Send Card Expiry Reminders
Involuntary churn from expired payment methods is one of the most easily avoided revenue drains. Magine Pro’s built-in card expiry notifications automatically send timely reminders to users across devices.
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Curate an Engaging Content Experience
If your catalogue feels stale or generic, users are more likely to lose interest. Use metadata, fresh artwork and custom content rows to highlight fresh, relevant recommendations. Magine Pro lets operators curate collections by genre, mood, artist, or even seasonal events, directly from the CMS, no developer needed.
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Automate Dunning Flows
When a payment fails, the follow-up process is critical. Our dunning automation tools give users more chances to resolve issues without leaving the service. Magine Pro customers who use dunning flows typically recover over half of failed payment attempts.
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Run Win-Back Campaigns
Some churn is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be permanent. Run win-back campaigns that offer time-limited discounts or highlight new content drops. You can trigger these from your CRM or marketing tools connected via the Magine Pro Console.
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Turn Reactivated Users into Long-Term Subscribers
Winning back a churned user is just the start—the real value lies in keeping them around. Track reactivation trends over time and identify what keeps returning users engaged. Use these insights to reinforce your messaging, fine-tune offers, and build long-term loyalty with smart, automated follow-ups.
Ready to See Where You’re Losing Subscribers?
To help you evaluate your current approach, we’ve created a free 7-Step Streaming Churn Self-Assessment. Download it here and find out where your service currently stands.
Need help improving retention? Speak to our team to explore what’s possible.
Why Retaining Streaming Subscribers Is More Cost-Effective Than Acquiring New Ones
Subscriber churn is one of the most persistent and frustrating challenges for streaming services. You work hard to acquire users through marketing campaigns, trials, partnerships, and then just as quickly, they disappear. But here’s the thing: retaining your existing subscribers is almost always more cost-effective than acquiring new ones.
Before you invest more into lead gen and acquisition, ask yourself: What if improving your churn rate could give you better ROI, faster?
To help you benchmark your current strategy and identify areas for improvement, we created the 7-Step Streaming Churn Self-Assessment, a free checklist and infographic that covers all the key areas from engagement and payments to win-back campaigns. Download the checklist & infographic to see where you’re loosing subscribers, and how to fix it.
The Hidden Cost of Subscriber Churn
Did you know it can cost up to 5x more to acquire a new subscriber than to retain an existing one? But churn doesn’t just mean lost revenue; it increases your customer acquisition costs (CAC), impacts brand perception, and can stall your growth trajectory.
And while voluntary churn (users actively cancelling) is easy to spot, involuntary churn is often more damaging, as failed payments, expired cards, and billing errors silently erode your subscriber base. If you’re not actively addressing both, you leave money on the table.
Why Retention Is a Smarter Growth Strategy
Keeping subscribers engaged and loyal doesn’t just protect your revenue, it multiplies it:
- According to Bain & Company, improving retention by just 5% can increase profits by 25–95%.
- Happy, loyal users are more likely to refer others, reducing your acquisition costs
- Engaged subscribers are more open to upselling opportunities (premium plans, paid content, etc.)
Retention isn’t just a back-end KPI. It’s a front-line business growth lever. At Magine Pro we’ve seen simple card expiry reminders that auto alert users before their card expired help our customers see an 18% reduction in involuntary churn. Other retention-focused tools we offer within our platform have also driven strong results – see the infographic checklist for more..
What Causes Viewers to Churn?
Understanding churn is the first step toward solving it. Common culprits include:
- Content fatigue: Viewers run out of things to watch or don’t see enough fresh, personalised recommendations
- Poor user experience: Clunky navigation, slow loading, or inconsistent app performance
- Payment failure: Involuntary churn from expired or declined payment methods
- Low engagement: Users forget the service exists if there are no timely nudges, updates, or perks
Churn is often a combination of several small friction points that build up over time. The first step to solving it? Understanding what’s causing it.
Take the Self-Assessment
Use our 7-step checklist to evaluate how well your platform is set up to keep users around. From onboarding to billing to re-engagement, it’s designed to help you spot the gaps and take action fast.
Whether you’re an AVOD service, SVOD operator, or somewhere in between, this guide will help you pinpoint what’s working and what needs attention. Download here.
Want to learn more about Magine Pro’s retention tools and how our platform can support your growth? Speak to a member of our team to explore how we can help reduce churn and book a personalised demo.
CHECKLIST: How to Reduce Churn and Boost Retention for Your OTT Streaming Service
If you’re operating an OTT or streaming service, subscriber churn is one of your most critical metrics and one of your biggest threats to growth. But here’s the good news: much of it is preventable.
At Magine Pro, we’ve created a free 7-step retention checklist and infographic to help streaming platforms identify where they’re at risk of losing subscribers and take action to keep them engaged.
Why Retention Matters More Than Ever
Acquiring new subscribers is expensive, often up to 5x more than retaining an existing one. Yet many services still focus most of their energy on acquisition, while overlooking the low-hanging fruit: smarter retention.
Churn doesn’t just affect revenue. It impacts your customer lifetime value (LTV), marketing ROI, and future growth potential. For OTT and niche streaming services especially, even a small improvement in retention can translate into a major performance gain.
What You’ll Find in the Checklist
This guide gives you a simple, actionable way to assess your current retention efforts, backed by anonymised performance insights from real Magine Pro customers.
Here’s what you’ll get:
✅ A 7-step self-assessment to evaluate your OTT churn strategy
✅ Aggregated delta improvements across features like dunning flows, win-back campaigns, and card expiry reminders
✅ Practical retention tactics you can implement today
✅ Key benchmarks and tips to strengthen subscriber loyalty and reduce involuntary churn
Whether you’re losing users to failed payments, low engagement, or a lack of reactivation strategy, this checklist will help you understand where you’re losing revenue and how to get it back.
Start Reducing Churn Today
If you’re ready to stop churn before it impacts your bottom line, this guide is for you. Download the free checklist now and see how your strategy stacks up.
Interested in improving your service’s retention performance? Get in touch with a member of our team to discuss how you can reduce churn and grow subscriber value. With deep experience in the B2C streaming market, we’re here to help you build a stronger, more sustainable OTT business.
Contact us to learn more, or follow us on LinkedIn for the latest product updates, feature launches, and streaming insights.
The Future of Data-Driven Streaming: Overlooked Metrics That Could Unlock OTT Growth
With fierce competition driving annual churn rates as high as 47%, the streaming industry cannot afford to overlook any data-driven insights that could move the needle towards profitability. Success depends on understanding the metrics that power audience engagement, optimise content strategy, and drive revenue growth. While many OTT services rely on standard data points, some critical statistics remain overlooked. Could they provide the competitive edge that’s needed in a crowded market?
In this article, I’ll explore the key analytics every streaming service should monitor, highlight some underutilised data points that can transform decision-making, and explain why a flexible platform for data exports is essential for scaling your service.
Key Metrics Every Streaming Service Monitors
To start, let’s review the foundational statistics that most OTT services already track. These form the backbone of operational and strategic decisions:
1. Audience. Examples include:
- Daily and Monthly Active Users (DAU/MAU): Track the size and consistency of your audience over time. This helps identify growth trends and gauge user loyalty.
- Device Usage: Understand how users access your service—whether via mobile, smart TVs, or desktops—to optimise experiences for the most popular platforms.
2. Engagement. Examples include:
- Hours Watched per User per Day/Time of Day: Understand how engaged your audience is and which content drives the most consumption. Essential for giving users the right content recommendations at the right time.
- Completion Rates: Measure the percentage of content viewed to determine if your audience finishes episodes or movies. This is particularly vital for identifying binge-worthy content and optimising recommendations.
3. Funnel. Examples include:
- Trial-to-Subscriber Conversion Rate: Analyse how many free-trial users convert into paying subscribers.
- Churn Rate: Track the percentage of subscribers who leave your service to refine retention strategies.
4. Quality of Service (QoS) & Quality of Experience (QoE). Examples include:
- Buffering Percentage: Identify issues impacting playback performance.
- Video Startup Time: Ensure your service meets customer expectations for seamless streaming.
- Playback success/Failure: Get early warning of issues that are preventing users from enjoying the content they’ve chosen. This is commonly monitored along with the rate of exits before the video starts (EBVS).
These data points are all critical for day-to-day operations but often represent only the tip of the iceberg.
Neglected Metrics That Could Transform OTT Growth
Here are some commonly overlooked areas to analyse. You may find they offer insights that unlock new opportunities for growth and innovation:
- Behavioural Profiling Through User Profiles
The ability to segment the user experience for different people within a single household account has grown in popularity in line with the growth of both personalised recommendations and the viewing of OTT content on the big screen. Of course, it’s not used by everyone – our experience suggests fewer than 40% of accounts have profiles enabled – but OTT service providers can still make great use of the data these profiles offer. Analysing individual viewing habits more effectively is essential to offering personalised recommendations that are proven to increase engagement and user satisfaction. If you’re still measuring usage only at the household level, you’re missing out. - Catalogue Rotation and Content Discovery
Many streaming services find that 90% of views come from just 10% of their catalogue. While it’s good to know your top performers so you can promote them to more users, it’s important to also track the underutilised content. This data is useful for influencing your future licensing and in-house production decisions, but there’s more that you can do than just drop the poorly performing content. Perhaps the problem isn’t the content but the way you’re promoting it? New graphics or enhanced metadata could be what’s needed to make these unsung gems come to life. You could also consider giving some of the lower-performing assets a boost with some homepage promotion? Or make use of a feature like Magine Pro’s “random” setting which shuffles all the selected assets in a specific collection every 24 hours to keep rails looking fresh. These measures could improve your return on investment for content you’ve already invested in. - Recovered Customers
Most OTT services rightly place massive priority on their churn rate but how closely are you watching the saved subscriptions – those that were on the verge of cancelling but were recovered via promotional offers or reactivation campaigns? Tracking this data can provide a wealth of insights into what is driving the effectiveness of retention strategies and identify opportunities to refine outreach efforts. To really make the best of this data, you’ll need to ensure your user flows capture user feedback on why they’re planning to cancel as well as the measure that persuaded them to stay. - Return on Investment (ROI) by Content Group
Measuring hours watched per content item is valuable. But the true insight comes from correlating that data directly with the relative cost of licensing or producing the content. If cheaper content is driving half as many viewing hours as a flagship drama show, but costs a third as much to make or license, then it could actually be considered your star performer. Getting streaming data and rights data together in one platform drives smarter acquisition decisions. This can help prioritise investments that maximise viewer engagement and revenue.
The Value of Data Exports and Custom Dashboards
If you’re the size of Disney+ or Netflix, you’re almost certainly monitoring all these metrics and more already. For smaller streaming services, however, it’s much harder to be across all the data and take appropriate action. To act on these types of insights, it’s essential to have the right business intelligence tools.
The standard analytics dashboard offered in most streaming platforms can provide an overview, but for truly data-driven growth, you need the ability to customise your analysis and develop your own dashboards.
That’s why we’ve architected the Magine Pro OTT platform so it’s easy to integrate user data with tools you already use, like Tableau or Power BI, empowering your team to make smarter decisions. By creating custom dashboards, you can align your analysis with your specific business goals. For example, tracking engagement trends by region can inform localised content strategies.
Ready to take your streaming data to the next level?
The metrics you monitor today shape the future of your OTT service. By keeping track of some of the commonly neglected data points as well as the foundational ones, you can create a more engaging, efficient, and profitable platform.
Don’t let overlooked metrics hold back your OTT growth. Contact Magine Pro today to see how our flexible tools can help you unlock your platform’s full potential.
Enhancing SaaS Retention: Dunning Strategies to Minimise Passive Churn
In the video streaming subscription business, retaining customers is as crucial as acquiring new ones. Passive churn, often caused by failed payment methods, can silently erode your customer base. Addressing this issue with effective dunning strategies can significantly enhance retention rates and boost your bottom line. This blog post explores passive churn optimisation, focusing on dunning retry strategies, the user journey, email communication, and key metrics.
Understanding Passive Churn
Passive churn occurs when customers unintentionally stop using a service, often due to payment failures. Unlike active churn, where users voluntarily cancel their subscriptions, passive churn is usually a result of mainly insufficient funds or expired credit cards. Addressing passive churn can save a substantial portion of revenue without the need for aggressive marketing or customer acquisition efforts.
Dunning Retry Strategies
Dunning refers to the process of retrying failed payments and communicating with customers to resolve payment issues. Effective dunning strategies can reduce passive churn by up to 30%. Here’s how to implement them:
- Retry Logic:
- Immediate Retry: Attempt to charge the card immediately after the first failure.
- Subsequent Retries: Schedule multiple retries over a period
- Communications:
- Pre-Dunning Emails: Notify users before their payment method expires.
- Post-Failure Emails: Send a series of emails after a payment fails, starting with a gentle reminder and escalating to more urgent language.
- Payment Success Notification: Confirm successful payments after retries.
The User Journey
Optimizing the user journey during the dunning process involves clear communication and a seamless experience:
- Transparent Communication: Clearly explain the issue and the steps needed to resolve it.
- Self-Service Options: Provide easy access to update payment information through a user-friendly portal.
- Support Access: Offer quick access to customer support for users who encounter difficulties.
Effective Email Content
Email communication is crucial in dunning processes. Here are tips for crafting effective emails:
- Personalisation: Address users by their names and mention specific subscription details.
- Clarity: Use simple and direct language to explain the issue.
- Call-to-Action: Include a prominent link or button to update payment information.
- Frequency: Start with gentle reminders and gradually increase the urgency.
- Segmentation: Tailor messages based on user behaviour and engagement.
Email Set-Up
To ensure your emails are delivered and not marked as spam:
- DKIM and SPF: Implement DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to authenticate your emails.
- Monitor Bounce Rates: Regularly clean your email list to remove invalid addresses and reduce bounce rates.
- Track Open and Click Rates: Use analytics to measure the effectiveness of your emails and adjust strategies accordingly.
Statistics and Impact
Applying these dunning strategies can have a significant impact on your SaaS business. Here are some key statistics and metrics to consider:
- Reduction in Passive Churn: Companies can see a 10-30% reduction in passive churn by implementing effective dunning strategies.
- Recovery Rate: Track the percentage of accounts successfully recovered through dunning efforts.
- Retry Success Rate: Measure the success rate of payment retries to optimise retry schedules.
- Email Engagement: Monitor open and click-through rates of dunning emails to gauge their effectiveness.
Optimising passive churn through strategic dunning retry processes is essential for maintaining a healthy subscription service. By focusing on transparent communication, personalised email content, and effective email setup, businesses can significantly reduce passive churn and improve retention rates. Magine Pro provides a set of tools, that allow for configurable retry strategies, and fully customisable dunning emails to manage your brand and user call to action.
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Interested in diving deeper into reducing churn? Download our latest white paper, ‘The Profit Playbook,’ for valuable insights into strategies that reduce churn and ensure long-term revenue maximisation. Additionally, explore ‘The Essentials of OTT Monetisation,’ our e-guide that delves into the intricacies of subscription, transactional, and advertising models.
If you’d like to discuss monetisation models further or explore the capabilities of Magine Pro’s advanced billing engine and dunning feature, connect with our experienced team. Visit our blog for more resources and explore our entire collection of white papers available for download. Stay updated with the latest news, events, partnerships, and product announcements by subscribing to the Magine Pro e-newsletter.
Takeaways from CES 2024 for video service providers
The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2024) always grabs global headlines with eye-catching new gadgets and ever-expanding TV screen sizes. This year was no different, with acres of coverage for LG and Samsung’s new transparent TV screens, the latest virtual reality concepts, and robots that will make you anything from a cocktail to a stir-fry.
But, like the bright lights and razzmatazz of the host city, Las Vegas, the show-floor glitz of CES 2024 is largely a temporary distraction for the video entertainment industry. Behind the scenes, there are serious conversations about the future of streaming. So what were video service providers really talking about at CES 2024?
Magine Pro’s Sales Director, Neil Fender, at CES 2024.
Interest in AI is becoming more targeted
Just as we saw at IBC and NAB in 2023, Artificial Intelligence (AI) continued to be a major buzzword. Our CEO, Matthew Wilkinson, touched on this important topic in his recent blog on Large Language Models and Generative AI. But the partners and customers (both current and future) that I spoke to in Las Vegas are increasingly focused on the practicalities of deploying this constantly evolving technology. They’ve gone beyond wondering how AI might revolutionise the industry in the future, to looking at very specific use cases that will advance their short-term goals, not just their longer-term planning.
With consumers around the world becoming increasingly cost-conscious, churn is a massive area of focus for every streaming service, no matter what combination of business models they’re using. The video services I spoke to are looking for a strong and immediate return on investment for any foray into AI. In particular, they want it to keep consumers engaged so they’re less likely to look elsewhere for content. The benefits of offering personalized content recommendations are the most often-cited strategy for growing engagement, so it was a pleasure to be able to talk about the AI-powered recommendation capabilities in Magine Pro’s end-to-end OTT streaming platform .
I was also happy to talk through some of the tactics that have paid dividends for our existing customers when tackling churn. For example, the “dunning” functionality in our advanced billing engine enables them to systematically communicate with consumers whose payment methods have expired or failed. This proactive strategy prevents passive involuntary churn, minimising customer loss and ensuring a positive user experience. Another proactive approach is to automate “win-back” strategies. This means offering targeted discounts to certain users who have recently churned, or shown signs of being a flight-risk, to help keep them on-board.
We’ll have more about these tactics in our upcoming e-guide on advanced OTT monetization strategies. Register now to be among the first to get the guide, which will also explain some of the reasons we champion hybrid monetization models.
No moving out of the FAST-lane
I don’t think anyone was surprised to find that FAST – another of the biggest streaming trends of 2023 – was still a hot topic at CES. The low barriers to entry mean that FAST channels continue to be the most popular route into the streaming market for content owners, particularly in the US market.
The FAST trend I heard most about at CES, however, was those who’ve dipped a toe into streaming with FAST channels via aggregation platforms like Roku, Amazon, LG, and Samsung and now want their own suite of streaming apps to build a direct relationship with consumers. We had some excellent conversations at CES with technology partners and customers about how we can help them make that ambition a reality with the Magine Pro OTT platform because it’s quick and easy to launch, but also customizable so it can grow with their business.
Want to know more?
If you weren’t able to make it to CES 2024, you can book a meeting with our team to talk about how AI recommendations could improve your engagement, or how Magine Pro can elevate your content distribution and monetization strategies.