Most email security product and solution vendors rely on on-going subscription fees from their customers for a major part of their revenue. This makes sense, since a good portion of the value proposition involves the on-going service and protection from newly evolving threats on the network.
It is well known that email security is also a very competitive business, with numerous large players having entered the fray through acquisitions and other means, including industry giants such as Cisco (Ironport), Symantec (MessageLabs), Microsoft and Google (Postini). Talk about an impressive list of competitors! Just to add to this misery (if you have to compete with them), it turns out that it is fairly simple from a technical perspective to displace an email security firewall or gateway. Assuming you already have a gateway in place, introduce your new one, try it out, then swap IP addresses with the old one. Presto! You have now been replaced! (Think Toy Story!)
In such an industry environment, what would be a good retention rate for your customers? 70%? 80%? 85%? At our company, we have been able to reach industry-shattering retention rates well above 92%! When you factor in that there is close to 5% rate of loss from companies going out of business, getting acquired, changing of the IT admin who has a prior relationship with another vendor, etc., it is clear that you have to be pretty special to maintain above 90%.
So how do we do it? Well, first off we focus on our specific customer segment needs, who are predominantly SMBs and smaller Service Providers. The product has to just work, with very high catch rates and low false positives, and be very configurable and customizable, in order to be able to meet the specific individual needs of each customer. From a service perspective we make sure that our support technicians are experts not only in email security but in network and system administration as well. Our team just love to fix any email or security issue they might find on your system, then spend a few more minutes helping out with that DB problem you just couldn’t get resolved and happened to bring up. On rare occasions where an issue exceeds a support technicians’ expertise, our team of developers are ready and willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with support and help out. There are not many software companies where a customer can speak to the actual developer who worked on that feature! And just for good measure, from time to time, we will send over someone (virtually of course) to check how the system is performing. They will not leave it until it sings! (we call this a ‘sanity check’)
But in all this nothing gives me more satisfaction than winning back a customer. Yes, I admit, we do lose some customers each year. There are the inevitable reasons I mentioned earlier, although sometimes customers will try out the competition, looking for lower pricing (and yes often getting it) or better performance on filtering, or maybe for that extra little sexy feature. So, what happens in most cases? Within a few months of the unfortunate switchover, we get a call from the admin. Turns out the performance promised, or even reported in some ‘unbiased’ test, was not quite achieved on the actual system. Even worse, the expected savings did not materialize, because the admin spends much more time managing their user complaints, while spending an inordinate amount of time playing phone labyrinth (much worse than phone tag), trying to locate the appropriate support technician for the particular issue, or trying to break into the non-standard platform on which many vendors solutions are based. In another case we observed, a well-known email hosting provider started jacking up prices soon after signing a large number of new customers by significantly under-cutting the competition. (all’s fair!)
The words the admin shares with us are usually along the lines of ‘I never realized how well your system actually worked!’, or ‘Nobody ever came close to having the knowledge of email security your team has’. Of course we jump in with both feet, no hard feelings, no playing hard to get, and we help our old customer and exclaim ‘Welcome Back, Dear Customer!’.
Thank goodness it’s so simple to do those switchovers! 
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