What strategies do you typically use to reduce churn?

Stripe does a good really job of contacting folks that have a card that's coming up on it's expiration. That's done wonders out of the box.

Something with my service that I found is that dropping a customer from paid to free doesn't actually make the user aware of being delinquent. The system continues to work as expected, just with a new set of limits around the account.

Actually flagging an account as such and also sending an email alerting of errors they encountered every day has done a really good job of reviving a lot of my older churned customers.

That said, all of this is anecdotal as I don't have any definitive data around it. Personally speaking, I'm still at a point where focusing on product improvement and conversion rate optimization is still taking priority over churn recovery.

Identifying the leading indicator to churn for our product has been the biggest mitigator. It's easier to prevent people from leaving than to try to recover them after they've decided to cancel.

My product is a weight loss coaching service. If a client doesn't make progress every 3 weeks, we know they are at risk and we double down on figuring out what's blocking progress. We jump on phone calls, introduce numbers indicating non-scale progress, etc. to keep the client's momentum up.

As for after they've decided to cancel, they have to message us to cancel - this isn't an inconvenience to them because the entire service is over chat. That naturally means a discussion as to why. This sometimes leads to solutions they are willing to try and therefore not cancel, other times our leading indicator told us they were gonna leave and despite our efforts we couldn't save them, and sometimes because they've "graduated" - can sustain weight loss without a coach - usually observed after they returned from vacation and didn't gain any weight.