Churn rates appear to be falling in wireless and growing in wireline, and the total of assigned numbers is growing in wireless and relatively stagnant in wireline.

Specifically, at year-end 2000, cellular/PCS had a churn rate of 9.6 percent (“aging” numbers divided by total assigned numbers). At the same point, the ILECs and CLECs each had a churn rate of 4.9 percent.

By year-end 2001, the ILEC churn rate was up to 6.1 percent, and at the end of last year, had fallen back somewhat, to 5.7 percent. The CLEC churn rate likewise jumped to 8.8 percent in 2001, and fell to 8.3 percent in 2002.

By comparison, cellular/PCS’s churn rate has fallen for each of the past two years. In 2001, it was 9 percent, and in 2002, it was 6 percent.

Customer churn is a costly problem throughout the region, for example in Australia, wireless churn rates across the four major operators is estimated to be about 20 per cent. “Perhaps operators in the region can take some small degree of solace in the fact that churn rates in the United States are even higher, some 33 per cent in the first quarter of 2002,” said Mr. Bardella.

Ezine Churn, Churn, Churn…

If 2003 saw email churn rates of 30%, 2004 saw churn rates as high as 45% on average from my experience and research. Email churn formerly was caused by email list members who unsubscribed and wanted to get off your list. Now days, email addresses are going bad so fast that they make up the majority of your email churn.

mobile telecoms (according to ARCchart, Vodafone must re-acquire 30 percent - some 4.3m people - of its UK customer base every year just to maintain its current market share).

Overall, monthly DBS churn has been lower than cable's. DBS has lost 1.5 percent to 1.6 percent of its subscriber base, compared with 2.5 percent for cable.

NASCAR.COM Keeps Paid Member Churn Rate at Just 15% Despite Doubling Prices CHALLENGE: As every subscription marketer knows, true profits are directly related to lifetime retention rates. The lower your churn, the better your bottom line is. While NASCAR.COM has incredible name recognition, a pre-existing base of fervent fans, and more than one billion pageviews per year, it wasn't as...

2. ...significantly different from the free content. But that cost had to be passed along -- annual subscription fees were jacked up over two years from $29.95 to $64.95. Could NASCAR.COM keep subscriber churn low despite more than doubling the price tag? CAMPAIGN: Bailey discovered there was a distinct difference between the types of NASCAR fans who were happy with a bundled service through another...

3. ...one post. RESULTS: According to Bailey, NASCAR.COM currently has "roughly 200,000-225,000 subscribers" and he expects that number to grow significantly over time. "Our churn is incredibly low," he notes. "We only have roughly 15% churn and the majority of sign-ups are annual." He's almost embarrassed to admit his fears about raising the price were unfounded.

It also recorded a 1.72 percent churn rate, significantly lower than the churn at larger operators. Churn rate refers to the rate at which customers leave an operator for another. Wednesday, for instance, Cingular reported a 2.2 percent churn rate and Sprint reported a 2.5 percent churn rate.

Like its larger competitors, Alltel

The (Florence Alabama) Times Daily: "It's Dirt Cheap"
Aileen Hood, circulation director for the Times Daily in Florence, Ala., (@ 33,000 daily; 36,000 Sunday), loves the churn rate among credit-card subscribers. "Churn is reduced to virtually nil."

At the TimesDaily, 42 percent of customers pay their carriers; 58 percent are paid-in-advance, billed from the office. Asked about the percentage of sales revenue that is provided to VISA and the other credit card companies for providing their credit services, Hood replies, "It's dirt cheap compared to the cost of churning customers. We started promoting automatic credit card subscriptions about three years ago. Among those subscribers, there is virtually no churn, versus a 52 percent churn-rate among the rest of the subscription base. I love it."

According to EarthLink, Fast Lane could help reduce the company's less than 4-percent churn rate by as much as 10 to 15 percent.

As a result, the Bellevue, Wash., carrier reported 115,000 gross customer additions, but with a 2.6 percent churn rate, ended up with only 30,000 net additions, far below the 45,000 net adds anticipated. Its second-quarter earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA, of $95 million increased from $79 million in the same quarter of last year. And while revenue from domestic operations increased to $236 million from $197 million in the year-ago quarter, the disappointing additions took center stage. Two analysts downgraded the stock and investors left shares hovering near the carrier's 52-week low of $30.

Western Wireless' miss raises analyst worries

Triton PCS still expects 250,000 net adds this year and remains on track to achieve a 2 percent churn rate

Alamosa PCS, another Sprint PCS affiliate, raised its subscriber base to 166,127 and lowered churn from 3.4 percent to 2.9 percent in the quarter. The Lubbock, Texas-based Alamosa

Chicago-based U.S. Cellular added 171,000 customers and drove churn down to 1.8 percent for postpaid customers. It reported net income of $37.5 million, or 44 cents per share, up from $21 million in the same quarter as 1999. Nextel Partners achieved a 1.6 percent churn rate and brought in 55,000 net adds.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department focused its

marketing efforts mainly on Maricopa County because it

mirrored the state’s demographics, which includes rural and

urban communities, Whites, Hispanics, and African

Americans, and a wide income distribution. About 8 percent

of the Maricopa County population buys a fishing license

each year. Most importantly, Maricopa County represented a

35 percent churn rate for lapsed and infrequent anglers.

This churn rate was similar to the entire state’s turnover in

anglers from year to year.

The delay hurt Globe. Its churn rate for prepaid subscribers, or the measure of the number of subscribers transferring to the competitor, leapfrogged from 3.1 percent in end-2003 to 5.8 percent in June 2004. Its Touch Mobile brand, which caters to the lower market segment, suffered a 12-percent churn rate in June.

the significant decline in per-minute rates will force them to look at prepaid services as a way to target untapped markets where people want data and content services without long-term commitments.

Despite its 4- to 6-percent churn rate, prepay is already compelling for carriers.

On average, providers face about 30 percent churn rate annually—that amounts to roughly 2.5 percent per month. According to a Gartner Dataquest report, this monthly rate will likely persist for the foreseeable future. Many in the industry acknowledge that the rate can vary dramatically by carrier, but typically these statistics hold true for the established, brand name providers. And in general, wireless carriers deal with higher churn rates than wireline carriers.

Firms trumpet their partner hires and mutter about their losses.Turnover is part of the landscape

of The Am Law 200. But what happens after the noise stops: Do some firms quickly lose—or

shed—new arrivals? To find out, we looked at tables of the top 25 firms for both partner arrivals

and departures since the end of 1999.Ten firms appeared on both lists; seven were also in the top

ten for partner arrivals.To those ten on both lists, we added the other three most acquisitive

firms.Then we devised a churn rate: dividing the number of recent hires no longer there in early

February by the number of partners acquired during the four years ending in September 2003.

Firm

Churn

Schnader Harrison

85

58

68.2%

Akin Gump

87

36

41.4%

Duane Morris

138

53

38.4%

Howrey

95

30

31.6%

Morgan, Lewis

128

36

28.1%

McGuireWoods*

119

31

26.1%

White & Case*

122

31

25.4%

Holland & Knight

328

82

25.0%

Baker & McKenzie

132

28

21.2%

Piper Rudnick

11

145

29

20.0%

Reed Smith

234

43

18.4%

Sonnenschein*

114

21

18.4%

Greenberg Traurig

298

54

18.1%

Overwhelmed by undeliverable email addresses? You and everyone else and for good reason! Research has shown a 37 percent churn rate each year. That means: do nothing for three years and you have no working email addresses to send to

The company managed to improve subscriber retention in India, with the average monthly customer churn falling to 5.5 percent a during the quarter, an improvement on its 6.1 percent churn rate in the second quarter and 8 percent churn in the year-earlier quarter.

Right now, operators are looking at about a 5 percent churn rate for digital cable, which is comparable that of premium networks. Basic cable's churn rate is about 2 percent.

Sprint, the third-largest wireless company, had second-quarter net income of $600 million, more than twice the $236 million in earnings the same quarter a year ago. Sales rose 3 percent to $7.11 billion. The big gain in earnings was led by results at its wireless unit.

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Wireless sales rose 12 percent to more than $4 billion. The company's churn rate, or the number of customers it loses to competitors, fell from 2.5 percent to 2.2 percent. That's about the same customer loss rate as Cingular Wireless, but still far greater than the 1.4 percent churn rate enjoyed by Nextel.

Switching gears, Table C shows that subscriber churn turned up in the first quarter.

Table C

Churn (%)	2004	2005	2006
1st quarter	2.0	1.3	1.8
2nd quarter	1.6	1.4
3rd quarter	1.5	1.8
4th quarter	1.5	1.5

Viewed in isolation the latest 1.8 percent churn rate looks like cause for concern. Bear in mind that listening to Sirius isn't quite as easy as tuning into terrestrial radio. With Sirius, listeners who aren't in cars need to deal with docking stations and/or pre-recording settings, a major obstacle to those on the go. It's easy to envision new subscribers, even Stern fans, being disappointed.

said Christopher Faulkner, CEO of C I Host. "It is also another way we can give added value for our products and services. "With a churn rate of only 4 percent, C I Host is already well below the industry average of 10 percent.

Cable California startup in Tijuana, Mexico, has surveyed 1,000 new subscriber installations in Tijuana's Matamoras section, which claims some of the area's lowest income levels. About 71 percent of subscribers took the Opti Platinum service at $30 a month, 12 percent took the Opti Oro tier at $25 a month, 9 percent are taking the Opti Maximo package at $43 a month and 8 percent chose the Opti Blanco programming tier at $15 a month. The area had 22 disconnects for a 3.7 percent churn rate.

Reduce annual churn to below 16 percent, from about 18 percent for O&O subscribers in 2003

For example, churn rates for mobile

telecommunications companies in Great Britain average between 25 percent and 35 percent, according to

Customer Value Management expert Graham Hill. At the low end is Virgin Mobile, with about 14 percent

of its customers leaving annually. At the high end is T-Mobile, with a 34.8 percent churn rate.

A company that sold prepaid cellular phones had an attrition rate of 12 percent per month, which meant it

was churning its entire customer base in the course of a year. Executives couldn’t figure out what to do. A

survey was out of the question, because the only contact information they had for the customers was their

phone numbers. They didn’t want to telephone the customers for fear that the call—which would be on

the customers’ dime—would only irritate them.

So they turned to marketing analytics—a type of modeling—which found a correlation between the sales

channel and the defectors. Those who bought their phones at mass marketers hadn’t been shown how to

replace their phone cards when they expired. So when the phones stopped working, they stopped using

the phones. Armed with that knowledge, the company began working through its mass-market channel to

educate those customers and make it easier for them to purchase replacement cards. The company saw a

65 percent drop in the attrition rate.

"Those transactions are often driven by Realtor recommendations," said Benjamin Joslin, vice president, marketing, Domania. As a result, the mortgage industry has a 93 percent churn rate -- known in the loan industry as runoff -- when borrowers sell their homes, Joslin said.

Elise Falcone, director of consumer marketing and relations at Snowball.com, says this decision paid off for the company. There are 1.5 million or so subscribers to the Hotmail newsletter, with a 5-10 percent churn rate per month -- not bad for an acquisition vehicle.

Strategis received 403 responses to a nationwide survey of pager users, said Cynthia Hswe, a consultant at the research firm. Four percent of those users said they were planning to either switch paging carriers or get rid of their pagers within a month. This four percent churn rate compares to a historical rate of three percent in the pager industry.

"VOOM's 8,000 subscribers after four months in 'live' production represents less than 10 percent of their budgeted first year 100,000 subscriber goal .... To be more accurate, (your) final sentence should have read "VOOM needs to grow exponentially from this point forward if it hopes to survive as a player in this arena."

Mr. Radike added, "There is no mention of the 20 percent churn rate for VOOM (compared to 1.4 percent and 2.6 percent rates for DirecTV and DISH, respectively .... While hardware problems encountered early on have significantly diminished as reported, firmware issues, particularly for local station reception, continue to plague VOOM."

About one in five Colorado teachers changes schools in a typical year, a rate of flux that is above the national average . . .

but within the first paragraph begins to unravel:

. . .and one that appears to be directly linked to student achievement on state exams.

• Teacher turnover or "churn" is higher where test scores are lower, with a 17 percent churn rate in schools rated excellent by the state and spiking to 23 percent in schools rated low and unsatisfactory.

And if you were there, you learned that Cox Communications has just a 0.07 percent churn rate —yes, you read that right — among customers who take the triple bundle of video, data and telephony.