How Musora combats churn with Customer.io 

Musora is all about making the world a more harmonious place through music. Serving close to 200,000 online learners, the brand offers great teachers, top-quality lessons, and student-centered online communities. Musora’s suite of apps teach students drums (drumeo), piano (pianote), guitar (guitareo), and voice (singeo). 

Its main offering is an annual subscription, which means driving strong retention and reducing churn is key to success. And every student matters: even a half-point reduction in churn rate can make a major impact on revenue over time. So as Musora’s subscriber base expanded, its retention process had to evolve too.

That’s when Musora partnered with Customer.io. With a powerful personalization and segmentation engine at their fingertips, the brand achieved:

• 3.5% increase in win-back conversions
• 35 person-hours saved per week
• 10x more real-time data processed

Early on, Musora handled cancellations manually. A full-time retention specialist emailed each canceled subscriber individually, crafting one-off offers in hopes of retaining the customers. That process had a conversion rate of just 3%.

Even after Musora partially automated the process with another customer engagement tool, campaigns had to be triggered manually. Eventually, as the roster of students grew, so did the volume of cancellation requests; delays made it impossible to send campaigns at the optimal time.

When Musora started using Customer.io, they found an opportunity to revamp their entire reengagement strategy. They pinpointed the exact reasons customers were canceling, created a sophisticated campaign to deliver personalized offers, and automated everything to free up the team’s time. Here’s how they did it in three steps.

Musora started by leveling up data capture at the moment of cancellation. Prompting users to pick from ten different cancellation reasons, it also offered two opportunities to give free-form feedback.

To develop the cancellation reasons list, the team dug through past cancellation emails to learn why people typically canceled. Their research identified about 30 reasons, which the team then narrowed down to ten:

The final screen provides the subscriber an opportunity to give more detailed feedback.

While only five to ten percent of students provided in-depth feedback, those messages were an incredible learning opportunity for the Musora team.

Crafting effective campaigns always begins with a brand’s knowledge about the people it serves. Drawing on the lessons learned from the existing labor-intensive process, the team mapped out potential reengagement options for each cancellation reason:

Using Customer.io’s visual workflow builder, Musora created 10 different personalized paths based on cancellation, catering the offer to each customer according to their cancellation reason.

The resulting campaign distills the marketing team’s hard-won knowledge of all the nuances of how to re-engage students into a fully automated process. For example, students who canceled because the price was too high received discounted plan options. Those who canceled based on lack of usage, in contrast, were offered a free month of service and a free one-on-one lesson.

The final piece of the puzzle was increasing data handling capacity—not just to handle the current number of cancellations, but to continue scaling with Musora’s growth.

Customer.io’s platform brought in 10X more data in real time, allowing the brand to send the right message at the perfect moment.

Musora’s hard work paid off as their re-engagement conversion rate rose to 6.5%. What’s more, the 35 hours a week the team was spending on manual re-engagement tasks can now be spent adding value elsewhere.

Musora’s achievement did more than boost conversion rates and repurpose its talent; it allowed the team to focus on big-picture strategy. That’s the power of clarity with Customer.io.