Re-Subscribers: Are Your Customers Coming Back? - Issue 268

How to track, segment, and analyze returning paid users in subscription apps

Welcome to the Data Analysis Journal, a weekly newsletter about data science and analytics.

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Growth leaders are often on the hunt for that one gold formula or a score to evaluate the success of their business, whether it’s a completely useless (and inaccurate) subscription loop calculator or some magic business equation. They need to know where the product sits, rank the app, and measure growth against competitors.

First off, I don’t believe business or product can be distilled into a single formula or bucket. And even if that were possible for some very simple, single-purpose apps (like calculators, converters, compasses, alarms, etc.), I still don’t know what to do with that “75% - above average” score. Drink champagne?

Instead, I use my own set of signals to assess product maturity and how well it delivers value. One of which is re-subscribers.

We already know it’s much harder to retain users than it is to convince them to make a purchase. But bringing users back after they’ve canceled a subscription is even harder.

Once someone has tried your product, there’s not much marketing can do to win them back - if the product didn’t deliver on its promise. Or if it did, but not in the way the user expected. Or maybe it wasn’t worth the price.

To me, the % of re-subscribers tells a lot: how well your product delivers, whether your pricing is justified, and whether there’s room to increase it, or signs that you’re priced too high.

Today, I am back to subscriptions analytics and reporting, focusing on one of the most underrated and overlooked subscription metrics - re-subscribers. Below, I’ll walk you through how to define them, locate and query, segment, and interpret re-subscriber rates and milestones.

Who are the re-subscribers?

Reactivation, winback, resurrection, restoring purchases - every PM or tool have their own term. But to me, these are all variations of re-subscribers.

Re-subscribers are users who previously had a paid subscription, churned, and later came back to start a new paid subscription:

I don’t consider re-subscribers users who started a trial, never converted, then came back 4 months later with a 50% discount and purchased a direct subscription. I personally mark these as Directs, not Re-subscribers.

However, if you use RevenueCat, these will be attributed to converted trials (backdated to when the trial started). If you use ChartMogul for reporting, they’ll be marked as expansion. If you use Chargebee, these subscribers will get bucketed as either new paid subscriptions or recovered grace-period users.