Nearly one-third of all active churn happens in the first 24 hours – making this period a critical time for subscriber engagement and potentially causing a headache for those involved ion digital customer engagement.

That’s according to the 2022 Subscription Performance Benchmark Report from Piano, which analyses customer behaviour in publisher subscription environments, based on proprietary data from serving hundreds of organisations that garner more than 140 billion collective pageviews every month.

Building on Piano’s 2021 findings, which explored a global surge in subscriptions, the new report looks at current behaviour throughout the customer journey: overcoming registration obstacles; turning registered users into subscribers; engaging active subscribers; and mitigating churn.

“As subscription programs mature, publishers need to adopt more sophisticated tactics in targeting users for both acquisition and retention. When we analyse the customer journey for digital subscriptions, we’re looking at how organisations can drive engagement—and in turn, increase user value—as they move through that funnel,” said Michael Silberman, SVP Strategy at Piano. “The benchmark data we’re releasing this year highlights a few of the opportunities we’ve identified for organisations to propel future subscription growth.”

Takeaways from the report include:

• ‘Sleepers’ comprise more than 40% of subscribers for the average subscription website (defined as active subscribers who haven’t been on the site in the past 30 days)
• Nearly one-third of all active churn happens in the first 24 hours – making this period a critical time for subscriber engagement
• Though they make up 65% of digital audiences today, mobile visitors convert at a much lower rate – 19.7% compared to 42.4% for desktop users

Access to benchmark data and insights about their own audiences allows publishers to optimise the subscriber experience at each step in the customer journey. The findings and recommendations in Piano’s annual Subscription Performance Benchmark Report are designed to help businesses identify areas of opportunity in their efforts to drive subscriber acquisition and retention.

“Analytics data fuels insights to tell organisations how they can make improvements to get better performance,” said Patrick Appel, director of research at Piano. “These businesses aren’t just set-it-and-forget-it businesses. You can’t say you set up some rules and now everything’s going to be perfect. Active management plays a big role for the publishers that have the greatest success. That kind of trajectory is important and is informed by data.”

For more subscriber journey insights, read the full report here.