The Cancel Flow That Saves Subscribers From Churning

Hey it’s Max from The Inbox Newsletter.

Most subscription brands have a cancel flow…

But very few have a good one.

We recently rebuilt a client's cancel flow from scratch and their save rate went from 3% to 10%.

That means for every 100 people who hit the cancel button, we're now saving 10 of them instead of 3. On a subscription brand doing any real volume... that's a lot of monthly revenue retained.

Here's how we did it 👇️ 

The Default Cancel Experience

Most brands use the default cancel flow from their subscription platform.

The customer clicks cancel, sees 'are you sure?', clicks yes, and they're done. The whole thing takes 5 seconds and gives the customer zero reason to stay.

That's what this client had and it was saving 3% of people, basically letting everyone walk out the door!

What We Built Instead

Instead of a simple "are you sure?" we built a splash page when somebody cancels that does three things:

→ Asks WHY they're canceling (too expensive, too much product, didn't like the taste, etc.)

→ Based on their answer, serves them a specific offer to stay (skip a month, swap products, get a discount on their next order)

→ Makes it feel like a conversation instead of a cancel button

That’s 3% to 10%.

That's almost 4x more subscribers staying every single month. Over a year that compounds into serious revenue you would have just let walk out the door.

Mixed with other initiatives, you can see the impact in revenue we’ve been able to have here on returning customer revenue.

That spike in returning customer revenue lines up with when the new cancel flow went live.

We pull all of our subscription and retention data through Hiro Analytics across our 100+ clients.

If you do not use Hiro Analytics then you are missing out on some amazing insights.

Check them out here.

Why It Works

The key is matching the save offer to the cancel reason.

Someone canceling because it's too expensive needs a completely different save offer than someone canceling because they have too much product piling up.

A discount fixes one… A frequency adjustment fixes the other.

If you're a subscription brand and you haven't rebuilt your cancel flow yet... do it. It's one of the easiest ways to save customers you were about to lose.

Want us to build this out for your brand? Book a call with us here.

Email Inspiration Of The Day

Brand:
Ion Layer

Email Design:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/174ID3V_LgzZWjYp4W5Hx4d6kPOk6yogf/view?usp=drive_link

Notes:
Ion Layer made the obvious selling angle (weight loss) just the headline and built the whole email around the deeper science of health and metabolic optimization. Smart positioning in a saturated category where every other GLP-1 brand is competing on the same weight loss claims.

Reply to this email if you have any questions or further content you want covered.

Cheers,

Max Sturtevant

P.S
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