When Your Subscribers Actually Cancel Their Subscription (And What To Send)

Hey it's Max from The Inbox Newsletter.

I've audited a lot of 8-figure+ subscription brands this year, and right now it's basically the wild wild west lol.

Specifically around customer churn…

Every brand does something different, but almost none of it is grounded in actual data.

That’s why today I’m walking through a quick break down of when subscribers actually cancel, and the emails you should be sending to make sure your subscribers actually stick around.

Let's get into it!

The Days-Until-Churn Chart

Before you create a single onboarding email, you need to know when your subscribers actually cancel.,,

We pulled this data through WellTV (our custom retention analytics platform exclusive to our clients) across all of our subscription brands, and the chart looked roughly the same across the board…

There are four spikes in every subscription brand's chart and each one tells you something specific about what your subscriber is doing at that exact moment.

Day 0 is your first medium-sized cancellation spike (usually it’s a bit higher than the example image), and it comes from deal-seekers who signed up for the intro subscription offer but then cancelled almost immediately.

Most of these you can't save because they were never going to stick around in the first place, BUT the ones who genuinely signed up need something that makes them feel confident about their order…

Which is why the email firing (Your Order Confirmation) has to do the heavy lifting.

It’s one of the highest-open emails in your entire account and it fires the exact second your subscriber buys.

Rebuild it in Klaviyo with a warm welcome, subscription benefits, a dynamic order block, and some early 90-day timeline messaging to start setting expectations.

It’ll look much better than a basic Shopify receipt.

Days 1-7 are the quietest window of churn your entire onboarding period.

The product hasn't been delivered yet, there's excitement in the air, and nobody is going to cancel a subscription for something they haven't even tried.

So use this time period to go hard on education because people won't cancel.

The second somebody gets the product, they're much more likely to cancel from an email, so I'd rather get all my onboarding education before delivery rather than after.

Days 7-27 are where the biggest prolonged cancellation period happens.

Now, the product has landed in the customer's hands and they're actively judging and deciding whether it's worth sticking with or not.

This is a very sensitive period where you want to back off with your messaging and trust that your onboarding emails before delivery and your product are good enough to get people through.

I recommend another tips email when the order's delivered, and then maybe one other email as a one-week or two-week check-in.

Other than that, send no other emails until the billing reminder and order confirmation emails…

Days 27-30 is when the billing reminders and rebills go out, presenting the customer with the actual cost of the subscription and a clean path to cancel.

This is easily the biggest churn spike of the whole cycle…

On day 27, the billing reminder goes out telling people, "Hey, you're about to get rebuilt." This billing reminder email is incredibly important to optimize, or else people will just see that and cancel. We've seen updates and A/B tests we make to this email reduce day 27 churn by 30% to 50%

On day 30, the customers charged again, and they received that scary Shopify receipt email saying, "Thanks for your purchase. Here's how much you spent." That's the biggest churn spike. Most brands do nothing with this. Instead, I recommend turning off your Shopify transaction email and building a custom order that turns it into a fun thing talking about the great decision and benefits the customer is getting

It's incredibly important to optimize your messaging around these four spike periods.

It's also incredibly important to track this and know when and where people are churning so you can address it.

If you want to see this for your own brand, WellTV is our own analytics platform that tracks deeper subscription data (like the days-until-churn chart) for every brand we manage.

Book a call with us here if you want an audit with it!

Email Inspiration Of The Day

Brand:
Loam

Email Design:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iUAhXjNaKWJMzI4otrjuxrvZ37TG-84H/view?usp=drive_link

Notes:
Love copy maxxing on a subscription push like this.

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

Cheers,

Max Sturtevant

P.S
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