Contacts+ Is Using ChartMogul To Cut Churn In Half In 2019

Churn is the business equivalent of a leaky bucketexcept the bucket is your revenue, the leak is your customers,
and the repair manual is usually a mix of spreadsheets, vibes, and someone yelling “It’s probably marketing’s fault.”
In 2019, the team behind Contacts+ decided to do something far less dramatic (and far more effective):
they got serious about data, unified their subscription picture across platforms, and used ChartMogul
to turn “we think we’re losing customers” into “we know exactly who, when, and whyand what to do next.”

This story is a practical blueprint for any subscription business with messy billing systems, fuzzy definitions of churn,
and a lingering suspicion that the numbers are… optimistic. We’ll break down what Contacts+ was up against, what they changed,
and how you can copy the playbookwithout needing a data science team, a cape, or a 47-tab spreadsheet named “FINAL_v9_REALLYFINAL.xlsx.”

What Contacts+ sells (and why churn matters so much)

Contacts+ is an intelligent contact management product geared toward professionals and small teamspeople who want their address books
cleaned up, synchronized across devices, and actually useful (instead of a graveyard of duplicates and “maybe-this-is-the-right-number” entries).
It’s available across platforms and supports subscription plans, including Premium options.

Subscription businesses live and die by retention because revenue is not a one-time “cha-ching.” It’s a monthly (or annual) relationship.
If churn creeps up, growth turns into an expensive treadmill: you run harder, spend more on acquisition, and end up in the same placejust sweatier.
That’s why teams track churn in multiple ways, including:

• Customer churn: how many customers leave in a period.
• Revenue churn: how much recurring revenue you lose from cancellations and downgrades.
• MRR churn: monthly recurring revenue lost in a given time window.
• Gross vs. net churn: whether you look only at losses (gross) or losses minus expansion (net).

The problem is: those definitions are only helpful if your underlying data is correct. And Contacts+ had a very real reason to doubt it.

The real villain: four billing systems and a whole lot of confusion

Contacts+ didn’t just have “a billing setup.” They had multiple billing ecosystemseach with its own rules, identifiers,
reporting quirks, and ways to mislead you at 2 a.m. When a customer pays on one platform, cancels, then re-subscribes on another,
your dashboards can accidentally tell a horror story that didn’t happen.

Why multi-platform subscriptions can create “fake churn”

Imagine a customer starts a subscription via iOS, then later switches to paying through the web. In many systems, that looks like:

• Churn event (iOS subscription ends)
• New customer event (web subscription begins)

But in the real world, it’s the same customer. They didn’t break up with your productthey just changed how they pay.
If you treat that as churn, you’ll overestimate losses, underestimate loyalty, and take “fixes” that aren’t fixes at all.
That’s how teams end up launching big retention projects to solve a reporting artifact. (Aka: doing cardio for no reason.)

“We’re flying in the clouds” is not a KPI

Before ChartMogul, Contacts+ had data and basic dashboards, but not enough confidence in what those numbers truly meant.
When your churn reporting is questionable, every decision feels like flying through fog: you can move the plane, but you can’t see the mountains.
The first step to cutting churn wasn’t an email campaign or a new featureit was getting a clear view of reality.

Why ChartMogul was the unlock: one customer-centric source of truth

ChartMogul is subscription analytics software designed to consolidate recurring revenue data and make it useful:
reporting, segmentation, cohort insights, and customer-level viewsso you can answer the questions that actually matter.
Not “What’s our churn?” but “What’s our churn by platform, by plan, by customer type, and by behavior?”

The “connect Stripe” moment (and the realization that the rest was harder)

Contacts+ started by connecting their web billing (Stripe) and immediately saw cleaner trends and more legible reporting.
But to get the full picture, they needed to bring in Apple and Google subscription dataand that’s where the real work began.

The hard parts: identifiers, history, and platform limitations

App store subscription ecosystems don’t always hand you a neat universal customer ID you can match across systems.
Contacts+ had to deal with challenges like:

• Bringing in both Apple and Google billing data for completeness.
• Handling limited identifiers that make cross-platform matching difficult.
• Rebuilding older billing history so trends weren’t distorted by “recent-only” imports.

Their approach was deeply practical: use the ChartMogul API to recreate historical App Store billing data via purchase receipts
going back years, import everything, and match payments to customers. They also built a custom pipeline for Google Play data at the time,
so they could unify data across platforms and merge customers who paid through more than one system.

The payoff: they stopped looking at the business through a subscription lens (a pile of separate transactions)
and started seeing it through a customer lens (a single person with a journey).

The “aha” insights: churn wasn’t one thingit was multiple different problems

Once the data was unified, the story of churn changed from “people leave” to “people leave for different reasons, at different times,
under different conditions.” That shift is the whole game.

1) Reactivations weren’t rarethey were a meaningful chunk of the story

One of the biggest revelations for Contacts+ was that churn wasn’t always permanent.
A meaningful portion of churned accounts returned and reactivated within a few months.
That reframes your retention strategy: you’re not only preventing churnyou’re also recovering churn.

This matters because many churn moments aren’t emotional breakups. They’re life events:
job changes, travel, busy seasons, andespecially for subscriptionsexpired payment methods.
In subscription land, that’s called passive (involuntary) churn: customers don’t leave because they hate you;
they leave because their card failed and nobody helped them recover.

2) Passive churn is fixable, but only if you treat it like an operational system

Passive churn is often addressed with dunning: automated retries plus polite reminders that make it easy
for customers to update payment details. Modern platforms also support billing grace periods that can keep access running
while payment recovery attempts happenso you reduce accidental cancellations and avoid a bad user experience.

The Contacts+ lesson: if you’re not separating voluntary churn (someone intentionally cancels) from involuntary churn (payment failure),
you’re mixing two very different fires into one “churn bucket” and wondering why your extinguisher isn’t working.

3) Segmentation exposed where churn actually lived

Contacts+ didn’t try to “reduce churn in general.” They segmented churn:

• By payment platform (web vs. iOS vs. Android)
• By plan type (monthly vs. annual)
• By customer value (higher-LTV vs. quick-churn segments)

When you segment like this, churn stops being a mystery and starts being a map.
You can discover that you’re doing great in one channel but bleeding in another, or that annual subscribers behave radically differently
than monthly subscribers. Contacts+ also identified segments whose lifetime value dramatically outperformed othersan immediate hint
about who to prioritize, what to upsell, and which acquisition sources to double down on.

The 2019 churn-cutting plan: what they did (and why it works)

Their goal was simple to say and hard to do: cut churn by 50% in 2019.
The path there wasn’t a single “one weird trick.” It was a set of coordinated moves built on clearer data.

Step 1: Define churn like an adult (sorry, it had to be said)

Before you reduce churn, you need a definition that matches reality. Even in reputable metrics guides,
churn can be measured multiple ways. For revenue churn, a common formula is:

Gross revenue churn (%) = (Churned MRR ÷ MRR at start of period) × 100

Net churn goes a step further by factoring in expansion revenue (upgrades, add-ons) from existing customers.
The point isn’t to worship one formulait’s to pick the right one for your business model and use it consistently.

Step 2: Fix “measurement churn” first (merging customers across platforms)

Contacts+ had customers moving across billing systems. By consolidating data and merging customer identities,
they reduced false churn signals. This is the unglamorous work that makes every other retention initiative 10x more effective.
Because if you can’t trust the baseline, you can’t trust the improvement.

Step 3: Build platform-and-plan segments that turn churn into actionable queues

Segmentation let the team identify which platforms and plans needed attention. This is where tools like cohort analysis also shine:
cohorts help you see when users drop off and what changes after onboarding, pricing shifts, or product updates.
When you pair cohort analysis with segmentation, you can pinpoint:

• Where early churn spikes happen (first week? first billing cycle?)
• Which behaviors correlate with long-term retention
• Which acquisition sources produce high churn vs. high LTV

Step 4: Treat reactivation like a first-class growth channel

Reactivation isn’t just a “nice surprise.” If a meaningful share of churned users come back, you can build systems
to speed that up and increase the win-back rate:

• Drip email campaigns to nudge re-subscription
• In-app reminders that reduce friction to recover access
• Clear value messaging that reminds users why they subscribed in the first place

Importantly, app store subscription ecosystems may treat re-subscriptions differently depending on timing.
There are policies and lifecycle concepts like billing retry and grace periodsand retention windowsthat can affect both the user experience
and how subscription status is handled. For teams selling across Apple and Google, understanding these lifecycle rules is not legal trivia;
it directly impacts how you time win-back messaging and recovery flows.

Step 5: Reduce friction by steering the right customers toward annual plans

Monthly subscriptions create more “decision moments.” Every renewal is a chance for someone to reconsider.
Annual plans reduce those moments and can improve retentionespecially for customers who already see strong value.
The smart move is not forcing annual on everyone; it’s targeting it:

• Offer annual after a customer hits a usage milestone (“You’re clearly a power user… want to save 2 months?”)
• Bundle premium features that reinforce long-term value (sync, enrichment, business-card workflows)
• Use segmentation to identify which users are most likely to stick (and which need more onboarding first)

How to copy this playbook if you’re not Contacts+

You don’t need four billing systems to benefit from this approach. You just need one common problem:
“We have data, but it’s not telling us the truth fast enough to act.”

1) Consolidate revenue data into one place

Whether you use ChartMogul or another analytics stack, the principle is the same:
unify recurring revenue streams so you can see customers across products, channels, and payment methods.
If you sell on web and in-app, you must plan for identity resolution (how you know it’s the same person).

2) Separate churn types before you brainstorm solutions

Create buckets like:

• Voluntary churn: explicit cancellation, dissatisfaction, lack of perceived value.
• Involuntary churn: payment failures, billing issues, store lifecycle quirks.
• Measurement churn: false churn caused by migrations, duplicates, mis-attribution.

Each bucket has different fixes. Voluntary churn might need product value and onboarding.
Involuntary churn needs billing recovery and smarter retries. Measurement churn needs data modeling and customer merging.

3) Segment by the levers you can actually pull

Useful segments aren’t “people who churn.” They’re:

• Monthly vs. annual
• High-LTV vs. low-LTV
• Web vs. iOS vs. Android
• New customers vs. long-tenured customers
• Customers who used key features vs. customers who never activated them

This is where product analytics methods like cohort retention analysis help you see the timeline of churn
and identify which behaviors correlate with staying. If you can point to “people who do X in week one are 3x more likely to renew,”
you’ve just found a growth lever that doesn’t require buying more ads.

4) Build a win-back engine that respects the customer (and doesn’t sound desperate)

A win-back campaign doesn’t have to be “PLEASE COME BACK WE MISS YOU.” (Unless your brand voice is melodrama, in which case: live your truth.)
Good win-back messaging is:

• Specific: remind them what they were doing (not just “We have features!”).
• Helpful: make it easy to restore access, update payment, or pick a better plan.
• Timed: send it when reactivation is most likely, not six months later when they’ve emotionally moved on.

You can test sequences (one email vs. three), timing (7 days vs. 30 days), and incentives (none vs. a small discount).
The point is to treat win-back like product work: hypothesize, test, learn, iterate.

What “cut churn in half” really means in practice

Halving churn isn’t magic. It’s compound improvement:

• Reduce involuntary churn with better billing recovery.
• Reduce early churn with sharper onboarding and activation.
• Reduce “fake churn” with better identity matching and reporting.
• Recover churn faster with win-back and reactivation systems.
• Shift the mix toward higher-retention plans and segments.

The Contacts+ story is powerful because it shows the order of operations:
clarity first, then segmentation, then targeted action. Not the other way around.
By the first half of 2019, the team reported substantial progress toward their churn reduction goal and used the momentum to deepen
their understanding of who their best customers wereso retention work also strengthened acquisition and positioning.

Experiences From the Trenches (500+ Words): What Teams Learn When They Try to Halve Churn

When companies set a goal like “cut churn in half,” the first emotion is usually ambition… followed closely by “Wait, which churn?”
And that’s not sarcasmit’s a genuine turning point. In many subscription teams, the most valuable “experience” is discovering that churn
isn’t a single enemy. It’s a whole cast of characters wearing the same costume.

Experience #1: The ‘Churn’ number is often a mash-up of multiple stories.
Teams typically start with a dashboard headline: churn is up. Then they scramble: more emails, more discounts, more pop-ups.
But once they segment churn (by platform, plan, tenure, acquisition source), they usually find at least one surprise.
A “churn spike” may actually be customers switching payment rails, a reporting change, or cancellations concentrated in one plan tier.
The experience feels like turning on the lights in a messy garage. The mess was always thereyou just couldn’t see it.

Experience #2: Passive churn is the “silent majority” you can actually fix.
A lot of teams assume churn is emotional: “They didn’t like us.” In practice, a chunky portion can be mechanical:
cards expire, banks decline, app store billing retries fail, a renewal notification gets buried under 900 other notifications,
and suddenly the customer is “gone.” The experience many teams report is almost embarrassing: the customer didn’t want to leave.
They just needed a nudge and a frictionless way to update payment. Once you build a dunning flow and pair it with clean messaging
(“Looks like your payment didn’t go throughwant to fix it in 20 seconds?”), retention improves without changing the product at all.

Experience #3: Win-back works better when it’s framed as help, not hype.
A classic mistake is writing win-back emails like a billboard: “NEW FEATURES! BIG UPDATE! COME BACK!”
What tends to work better is context and continuity: “We noticed you stopped syncing your contactsdo you still want your address book
unified across devices?” Or “Your business-card scans are still here if you want to pick up where you left off.”
It’s the difference between shouting across a room and tapping someone on the shoulder. Contacts+ leaned into reactivation logic
and timing because they learned that some customers naturally returnso the job becomes making that return quicker and easier.

Experience #4: Annual plans are not a cure-all, but they’re a powerful retention lever when earned.
Teams often discover that annual subscribers aren’t just “people who chose annual.” They’re people who got value early,
trusted the product, and decided they weren’t going anywhere. The experience lesson is that pushing annual too early can backfire,
while offering annual at the right moment (after a meaningful activation milestone) can lock in retention and reduce churn volatility.
You don’t want annual to feel like a trap; you want it to feel like a smart commitment.

Experience #5: The biggest retention wins come from operational discipline, not heroics.
The teams that make real progress usually stop relying on last-minute save attempts and start building repeatable systems:
a weekly churn review by segment, a monthly cohort analysis, a defined set of “retention alerts,” and a small backlog of experiments
(onboarding tweaks, pricing tests, lifecycle messaging). It’s less exciting than a “growth hack,” but it worksbecause churn reduction
is usually about compounding small improvements, not landing one giant punch.

The overarching experience is this: when you move from guessing to knowing, churn becomes manageable.
Contacts+ didn’t magically convince everyone to stay. They built clarity across messy billing systems, treated reactivation as real growth,
and targeted the churn they could actually influence. That’s how “cut churn in half” stops being a motivational poster and becomes an operating plan.

Conclusion

Contacts+ didn’t reduce churn by “trying harder.” They reduced churn by seeing the truth: unified billing data, customer-level reporting,
segmented churn drivers, and built practical systems for reactivation and recovery. The takeaway isn’t that ChartMogul is a magic wand
it’s that clean subscription analytics makes churn solvable. Once you can trust what you’re looking at, you can finally stop flying in the clouds
and start steering with confidence.