The rate at which customers stop using a product or cancel a subscription over a given period, typically expressed as a percentage of the customer base lost.
Why it matters
Churn directly works against growth — every new customer acquired has to first replace the ones lost to churn before net growth occurs, which is why reducing churn is often as valuable to a business as acquiring new customers.
In a sentence
"We cut monthly churn from 4% to 2.5% by improving onboarding, which had a bigger impact on our growth trajectory than any single new acquisition channel."
Related terms
- Antonyms: Retention (customers staying, the inverse of churning).
- Often confused with: NRR (churn is one input into NRR, but NRR also accounts for the offsetting effect of expansion and upsell revenue from customers who don't churn).
- Synonyms: Attrition.