Cancel Flow Best Practices: Getting The Most Out of Cancel Flows

Ready to turn potential cancellations into opportunities? Whether you’re a retention rookie or a seasoned pro, there’s something for everyone here. Let’s dive into some strategies and tips that will help you boost your retention revenue and reduce churn.?

Cancel Flow Creation

The Primary Retention Flow

We want to start with creating a catch-all cancel flow before we move on to Segments. The Primary Retention Flow will serve as a backstop for any customers that don’t match a specific audience.?

1. Use initial offer step

This feature displays an offer of your choosing before launching the full Cancel Survey, and we find that it’s effective in two ways. First, it’s essential for interrupting the cancel flow behavior and helping the customer realize the possibility of another arrangement besides cancelling. Second, it’s effective for increasing survey and feedback responses by better capturing user attention and focus.?

2. Limit survey options

Too many choices can overwhelm customers and cause them to select an arbitrary reason. Keeping the number of options simple is critical to ensuring the corresponding offer will counter the customer’s churn intent.?

We highly encourage using the freeform feedback step to make sure any and all specific sentiments are captured, including anything that doesn’t fall under your main survey options. Our powerful A/B testing tools can also help zero in on what users engage better with.?

3. Always enable freeform feedback

Capture specific customer sentiment and feedback, and navigate granularly using our powerful AI sentiment tools. We strongly recommend making freeform feedback required* for at least the first couple of months — our clients tend to gain a lot of insight with this initial sentiment reading. You can always make it optional later.?

*You can set a very low minimum character count (i.e. 5) to reduce any concern about perceived friction within the cancel experience.

4. Use “Other” cancel reason sparingly

Instead, we recommend using freeform feedback. While “Other” can be valuable in some cases, it can skew your cancellation reasons if used too often.?

5. Use neutral language

Use neutral language, and anchor on customers personal preference — something they’re experiencing vs an issue with the product or service. Examples include providing “Doesn’t Fit My Budget” as an option instead of “Too Expensive” or “Taking a Break” rather than “No Longer Needed”.?

6. Giant walls of text hurt save rates

Be succinct, clear, and human with your copywriting.?

7. Set survey questions to randomize

This helps offset any skewed metrics from customers choosing a random survey response.

8. Add in a Logo or set your design to Dynamic

Your cancel flows should be eye-catching and on-brand.?

9. Last, but not least…

Always enable the “Cancellation Confirmation” step. Use it to list out what your customers will lose when they leave. For even better performance, consider inserting custom attributes to make it more personalized.?

??Hot tip: One of our podcast platform customers saw a 6% increase in save rate by using this step to remind customers about their number of monthly active listeners.

Crafting Offers

Our goal is to find the sweet spot between preserving revenue and reducing churn. We want to aim to maximize the save rate while not giving away too much revenue.?

Match cancel reason with appropriate offer

Always try to counter the cancel reason with an appropriate offer to negate churn intent. For instance, if the user selects “Budgetary Reasons”, you could offer a discount or “hidden plan”. If the user selects “Lack of Use”, then that’s a good opportunity to offer a pause option or trial extension.?

Discounts

We’ve found that discounts need to be compelling. 30% for three months seems to be a minimum starting point — anything less will have a very low save rate. This will vary depending on your type of business and product, so once you have a month or two of data, we encourage you to play around! Our A/B Testing tool lets you easily set up, run, and analyze experiments.

Pauses

The offered pause duration should be two months max — after two months, many forget they’re paused and may dispute charges. Picking the longest pause period usually results in forgoing revenue longer than needed.?

Bear in mind that some seasonal businesses may be the exception to this rule. In this case, offering longer pauses may make sense.

Change plan or use “hidden plan”

We’ve found that offering a plan change or hidden plan is highly effective, and we strongly recommend using these as an offer type. A “hidden plan” refers to a subscription plan that’s not available on your marketing site. For example, you could offer a low-cost plan that limits functionality but preserves user data.

Trial extensions

We’ve found that trial extensions perform very well for those clients that offer a trial period. Be sure to set up a separate cancel flow segment for trialing customers. We typically recommend an extension of 14 days, but it’s helpful to use our A/B testing to confirm.?

Segmentation

Segmentation is important because different customer segments respond to different offers. For instance, early churners typically need a more generous discount because they’ve yet to fully activate. If you have annual plan customers, then they would need to receive an appropriate discount or hidden plan. And trialing customers would need to be offered a trial extension offer.?