How Cleeng’s SRM® Model Redefines Subscriber Retention

When it comes to combating subscriber churn, nurturing long-term relationships is the key. Today, we sat down with Gilles Domartini, CEO and Founder of Cleeng, a subscriber retention management (SRM®) company to discuss strategies that can strengthen the subscriber engagement lifecycle and activate personalized, real-time approaches that can convert passive users into loyal subscribers.

1. You’ve described Cleeng as a “Subscriber Retention Management” company. How does that differ from traditional subscription platforms?

A Subscriber Retention Management (SRM®) system takes a more strategic approach to keeping subscribers engaged, reducing churn, and maximizing lifetime value. Our SRM® suite helps traditional subscription services optimize retention by leveraging data-driven insights, ensuring payment reliability, and providing robust customer support.

For example, our customers include traditional subscription platforms such as Univision, Volleyball World and Newsmax. By leveraging Cleeng, Newsmax gained over 150,000 paying subscribers within the first month and retained over 85% of those subscribers as part of the launch of Newsmax+, their OTT service that provides access to Newsmax for those without traditional cable subscriptions.

2. Can you share an example of how a small change in personalization led to a big impact on engagement or retention?

One example that comes to mind is our most recent work with Skyship Entertainment and how a simple change of streamlining their billing process to meet the demand for multi-channel offerings, led to impactful subscriber growth.

Skyship Entertainment is the company behind Super Simple Songs, one of the world’s most trusted educational brands for preschoolers, with 47 million Youtube subscribers. With an audience spanning millions of families worldwide, they wanted to scale their reach even further and offer a more premium, ad-free experience that children could use independently, with content parents could trust.

Specifically, parents wanted the ease and freedom to subscribe once and access the service across multiple devices, whether on iOS, Android, or Amazon tablets. By leveraging our multichannel billing solution, they were able to create a unified multi-channel experience, without making the experience complex for subscribers.

Over the past year alone, the platform’s subscriber base has grown by more than 140%, driven organically, by improving the onboarding flow, having seamless cross-device access, and increasing awareness through YouTube.

3. What’s one underrated metric companies should track more closely when it comes to churn prevention?

One underrated metric that companies should pay closer attention to is Time-to-Convert: the duration between when a user signs up and when they actually start a paid subscription.

While it happens at the very beginning of the customer journey, it can be a strong indicator of future churn risk. A long time-to-convert often signals friction in the onboarding process, a lack of perceived value early on, or hesitancy to commit. These are factors that can lead to weaker engagement and, ultimately, higher churn. Tracking this metric can help teams identify and address conversion bottlenecks before they turn into retention problems.

Yet, there are many more KPIs to succeed, like winback rate, cancellation rate, upgrade/downgrade, LTV. That’s the benefit of having a platform like Cleeng that helps you easily monitor those.

4. What are some UX mistakes you see platforms make that unintentionally drive users to churn?

One of the most common UX mistakes I see is not being transparent enough about trial periods and billing. When users aren’t sure when they’ll be charged or how to cancel, it creates mistrust and often leads to churn right after a free trial ends. A 65%+ conversion from free to paid is typically a good benchmark.

Another issue is making it difficult for subscribers to access their content across devices. If logging in or switching between devices isn’t seamless, users get frustrated and may give up on the service altogether. Nowadays, the web only accounts for 40% of connections (may vary substantially), and the vast majority of people connect on multiple devices.

But perhaps the most overlooked mistake is failing to support users when a payment fails. It represents between 30% to 50% of all churn. Many people churn involuntarily because their payment didn’t go through, not because they wanted to leave. If the platform doesn’t make it easy to resolve payment issues, you lose customers who actually intended to stay. Focusing on transparency, smooth access, and proactive payment support can make a real difference in keeping subscribers engaged.

5. How do you identify the “right moment” to deliver a specific message to a subscriber?

With D2C subscription models, brands are able to collect a significant amount of data from its subscribers, however the challenge that many of them face is efficiently extracting insights from the data and leveraging them to make impactful decisions. These data-driven decisions are crucial to identify that “right moment” to deliver messages to subscribers in order to stay competitive, maximize customer lifetime value.

Advanced AI tools can be beneficial to help streamline this process. With our ChurnIQ AI-ssistant, we help brands get precise answers from their data without the need for deep analytic expertise, which can be both costly and time consuming. Brands can leverage AI-ssistant by asking simple prompts, which will then quickly generate data visualizations, and uncover hidden trends and patterns from their subscriber dataset. These insights can then be used to send those specific messages, uplevel retention strategies, adapt to evolving customer needs and enhance user experiences.

6. If you could give one piece of advice to D2C leaders trying to improve retention, what would it be?

If I could offer one piece of advice to D2C leaders focused on improving retention, it would be to treat retention as a core discipline, not just a byproduct of great content. Retention success requires more than reactive strategies; it depends on having the right infrastructure to support seamless subscriber experiences across billing, offers, payments, customer care, and data analytics.

Too often, platforms rely on fragmented tools or internal builds that are hard to scale or adapt to changing needs. Instead, it's worth investing in solutions that are purpose-built for subscriber businesses. These should offer automation, actionable insights, and the flexibility to support multiple models such as subscriptions, pay-per-view, or seasonal passes.

What sets the most resilient platforms apart is their ability to respond quickly to churn signals, optimize the right levers, and experiment without being held back by complex systems or limited resources. In a competitive and fast-moving landscape, adaptability and operational precision are essential for long-term retention and growth.

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