Before I took over full ownership of the renewals revenue number, no one on the marketing side had built a rigorous model of the funnel behind it. Success was measured purely on the rate at which eligible campaigns renewed. In 2023, I was asked to explain the relationship between our renewal rate and the actual renewal number, and to quantify what we should expect in the next calendar year.
I started by analyzing what actually predicted whether a campaign would renew. I identified appropriate cohorts and used historical renewal rates for each of those segments as the foundation for the forecasting model.
From there, the model accounted for the full complexity of the business: how many campaigns sat in the renewal base, when each was next due, which renewal cohort it belonged to, and when in the calendar year that revenue would land. For non-annual campaigns, I calculated how many additional times each would renew within the forecast period and adjusted the rate accordingly at each occurrence. Because the model was built ahead of the fiscal year, I also had to project campaigns renewing before the model's Jan. 1 start date into their post-renewal segment, and layer in a seasonally adjusted forecast of new auto-renewing sales between then and the forecast period, using our existing sales forecast as an input.
Summing all of it produced a monthly renewal forecast for the year, on top of which I built a daily pacing model — accounting for business days, holidays, and days-per-month variance — to track performance against target in real time.