Episode 71 - Building Your 90 day Retention Sprint

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Welcome to episode 71 of the Retention Blueprint!
In episode 70, I covered how retention impacts compound and how improving retention 5-10% can drive 25%+ improvements in profit. If you missed it its here:
When retention compounds, it creates a flywheel effect that boosts efficiency across the business.
You keep the revenue you would have lost
Cost to serve reduces
Acquisition efficiency improves
Referral and upsell grow
However, improving retention can often be perceived as a meaty challenge.
One that takes time to improve.
But the fact is, in any business, there are quick wins that can drive rapid returns.
By focusing on customer retention moments of truth and conducting iterative experimentation, brands can move the retention needle rapidly, sometimes in as little as 90 days.
So in this episode, we dive into:
How to prioritise customer retention moments of truth
How to build a 90-day sprint plan that targets the highest-leverage moments of truth
A measurement framework linking actions → churn reduction → margin lift
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📰 Top Story: 90-Day Sprint Plan To Reduce Churn Fast
Often, when brands think about reducing churn, they think about predictive models.
But the truth is that often more value is derived from descriptive data than predictive analytics.
And often, descriptive analytics can be much quicker to produce.
This 90-day sprint plan breaks down the steps to identify opportunities and then prioritise interventions at customer retention moments of truth.
Weeks 1-2 - Base Metrics
Ensure you're measuring churn correctly by splitting early-life churn (first 30, 60, 90 days) from in-life churn. Track retention curves, average order value, tier profiles, and order frequency across your customer base.
Conduct revenue decile analysis - Group customers into 10% buckets by revenue to understand whether top performers drive value through higher tier subscriptions, longer tenure, add-on purchases, higher order frequency, or larger order values.
Weeks 3-4 - Deeper Cohort Understanding
Perform cohort decomposition & movement analysis - Compare different cohorts (by acquisition time, channel, or interest area) over time to reveal differences in bolt-on/add-on purchase behaviour, and how seasonality, price changes, or market dynamics affect retention curves, revenue and tenure.
Identify churn early warning signals - Analyse historical customer events that occurred before churn to find
Behavioural indicators (usage drops, reduced purchase frequency, decreased feature engagement)
Service signals (repeated contacts, low NPS scores)
Communication signals (declining email engagement, unsubscribes)
Account management signals (downgrades, delayed payments, competitor inquiries).
Determine which of these signals has the most significant impact by cohort. I provided more detail on churn early warning signals in episode 41.
Identify early-life retention signals - Analyse which actions in the first 30, 60, and 90 days drive long-term tenure, such as frequency of product use, achieving specific results, using particular features, or tier or bolt-on choice.
Build Your Intervention Testing Plan (Weeks 5-6)
Create a signal hierarchy - rank early warning signals and early life retention signals against potential execution strategies. Some may require simple tests, such as pricing tweaks, customer care policies at key moments, acquisition tactics, or behavioural science execution in onboarding. In contrast, others may be more complex, such as foundational product changes.
Rank execution strategies by impact and actionability using a 2 x 2 framework. It is critical that you have the right product, CRM marketing, technology, and data folk in one room and do this together, fast, over 1 day. Multiple meetings and iterations will slow you down.

Focus on the interventions in the top right: those with the most significant impact and that are the easiest to execute. These will be the focus for testing in the remaining 6 weeks of the sprint. For each prioritised intervention strategy, build a simple one-page project charter that clearly articulates the required steps. If you get the right folk in the room initially, including time for preparation, workshop delivery, and planning, you will be able to build your entire intervention testing plan within 2 weeks, including documenting all project charters for prioritised initiatives.
Test & Scale (Weeks 7-12)
Design multi-experience controlled experiments - Build integrated tests across CRM, product, and service touchpoints simultaneously with the same hold-out (control) and treatment groups. Use your CDP to sync customer IDs across systems and tools like Optimizely or Adobe Target for front-end experience management. This approach drives bigger impact faster and achieves higher statistical confidence than siloed testing. If you cant do this for tooling or other reasons, conduct classic single touchpoint experiments.
Set appropriate confidence thresholds - Use 80% statistical confidence (not 95%) for what Amazon call Type 2 experiments (easily reversible changes like CRM journeys, onboarding flows, cancel experiences, pricing tests). This accelerates testing velocity and prevents analysis paralysis, especially for smaller audience segments where 95% confidence requires unrealistically large effect sizes.
Track signal frequency reduction, not just churn reduction: monitor whether your interventions actually reduce the occurrence of early warning signals across your customer base, not just churn rates. Reduced signal frequency is a leading indicator of improved retention.
Validate results with target shuffling - Before rolling out successful experiments, use target shuffling (scrambling outcomes hundreds of times) to confirm results are genuine and not due to random chance. If your test pattern significantly outperforms scrambled versions, the impact is real.
See episode 19 for more details on how to fast-track experimentation and episode 62 for more information on how to build multi-dimensional controlled experiments.
Final thoughts
Retention-led growth doesn't require years of effort or massive investments.
With a focused 90-day sprint, you can deliver measurable impact by concentrating on what matters most to churn reduction, the moments that matter most to your customers.
By following this structured approach, starting with foundational metrics, deepening your cohort understanding, prioritising high-impact interventions, and running disciplined experiments, you will create a systematic path to retention improvement.
The key is moving fast without cutting corners.
Get the right cross-functional team in the room, make decisions quickly, and have a bias toward action over perfection.
If you execute this plan with discipline, you're highly likely to see measurable reductions in both churn warning signals and actual churn rates within the 90-day window. And you'll have built the analytical foundation, cross-functional collaboration habits, and testing infrastructure that set you up for sustained retention-led growth in 2026 and beyond.
Until next week,
Tom
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