💡 TIP: Read our Academy module Subscription Foundations: Optimize Your Subscription Program with Unit Economics for a foundational understanding of subscription retention.

Key Takeaways

• Prevent up to 19% of subscription cancellations with subscription flexibility
• Prevent overstock cancellations (up to 27% of total cancellations, we've found) with SKU swap and order change capabilities.
• Enabling customers on options is just as important as having them. Style your Subscription Manager to highlight alternatives to canceling, and educate your subscribers on subscription flexibility.

Prevent up to 19% of cancellations with subscription flexibility

12 to 19% of varying eCommerce subscription cancellations can be attributed to lack of flexibility. 

A lot of us have been there - you go to change something about your subscription, and it’s taking you a little too long to find the right buttons to select. Did the font on this page get… Smaller? 

Feeling the pressure as you fumble through your subscription settings, the frustration mounts and panic sets in. The simple task of canceling your subscription becomes an elusive challenge, and you question why you signed up in the first place. It's a scenario that turns convenience into a headache.

So maybe every experience isn’t this hyperbolic. But our point still stands: unclear subscription management options can cause negative customer sentiment around subscriptions, impulsivity to cancel, and more very not-fun implications for your business. We’d like to avoid putting your customers into those (somewhat stressful) shoes wherever possible, and let them maintain a positive experience with your brand. 

Recent research at McKinsey has shown that while the conventional acquisition focused tactics of growth are important, customer experience-led growth is a more sustainable and high yielding strategy. And while we may be a little biased, we know that subscriptions are primed to take advantage of this experiential growth in the customer journey. But returning business, even that from subscriptions, can only be counted on from happy customers. So improve your customer sentiment by giving them flexible and easily accessible subscription management options. Let's break that down step by step.

Make it easy and manageable to switch subscription products

Prevent 6% of subscription cancellations with SKU Swap

One of the most common subscription cancel reasons are to switch to a new product or flavor. This is often due to variant or flavor fatigue. General subscription fatigue is when consumers lose interest in maintaining multiple subscriptions across several brands - variant fatigue is a particular type of subscription fatigue where consumers tire of a particular flavor, scent, or variation of a product after using it recurrently. This happens most often with consumables such as food and beverage, but also with items like bath products and makeup. It’s something that almost all consumers will experience in their lives, especially with a recurring order like subscriptions.

On average, a little over 6% of subscription cancellations* are due to subscribers wanting to switch their subscription product or flavor.

So what can we do to prevent those cancellations?

SKU Swap, or Variant Swap, is a must-have subscription management feature that allows customers to swap flavors, sizes, and other variations of products - without canceling their subscription to the original product. This decreases variant fatigue related churn and allows your subscribers to try out other product offerings with ease from the subscriber dashboard.

To set SKU Swap up, your team will need to sort your subscription product catalog into what we call SKU Swap Groups, or groups of variants that can be swapped out for each other. If a product has any variations, these should be included in these SKU swap groups. However, it’s important to know that there is such a thing as too many SKU Swap variants. Our average brand has around 12 SKUs in each SKU Swap group, but the exact number of SKU Swap options will depend on your specific product offerings.

As a general rule of thumb, if the variant would exist as a dropdown option on the product's PDP, we recommend including it in your SKU Swap group. Here's some further insight on product variants for subscriptions.

Peet’s offers customers a comprehensive but not overly lengthy number of variant options within their SKU Swap experience. Customers click into “Change Product” and select their choice from a pop-up range of options with visuals. They’ve chosen to limit their variants to other flavors/roasts of the same product type (in this case, K-Cup Pods of the same size); which is a popular architecture for many hot beverage merchants.

Customers can SKU Swap via their Subscription Manager, or the part of their customer account on your site that lets them manage their ongoing and past subscriptions. Be sure to highlight the option to swap with bolded and color differentiated copy, like in the example below. And another important consideration here is the visualization of your SKU Swap variants. We recommend showing an image preview of all SKU Swap options to allow customers to visualize their new product choice, like the cbdMD's example below:

Another way to make SKU swap an accessible experience is to let subscribers search their swappable options. This works particularly well for brands with larger product catalogs, like coffee and nutraceuticals - but it's a best practice for any industry or company size. Our new subscription manager, now available in open Beta, comes with an intuitive searchable SKU swap experience:

Make it easy to skip, pause, or delay order dates

We've learned that Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV or LTV) is dependent on your business’ Retention and Average Order Value (AOV). This disproves older eCommerce stances that CLTV can only be a static metric. In the younger and evolving world of subscription revenue, it’s a dynamic health indicator of your customer experience and can help you maximize the profitability of individual interactions with customers throughout the subscription journey.

So we follow this simple logic: the better your customer’s experience, the higher their retention. Higher CLTV will follow - with no additional Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Simply, customers will return if they enjoyed their experience with you; and are less likely to return if they did not. This is where ease of subscription management comes into play. 

Making it easy to skip or pause a subscription discourages outright cancellations - and makes it easy for customers to take any action on their subscription. This goes a long way for positive brand sentiment. Death Wish Coffee boldly displays the following options, but doesn't hide the option to cancel - they just make it the second visual option. This is to encourage customers with reasons like overstock or upcoming travel/moving to pause or skip their next order rather than outright cancel as the default. 

Prevent "overstocked" cancellations by giving products the right frequencies

Overstock accounted for 27% of 2023 eCommerce subscription cancellations.* Assigning the right order frequencies on a per-product basis can prevent overstock from becoming a problem in the first place; and makes managing this subscription easy by default. Depending on your subscription product's general rate of consumption, assign the right frequency on a per-product basis.

Ordergroove lets you set product-specific frequencies natively. We also recommend displaying a specific default frequency on a per-product basis, as this can proactively reduce subscription overstock anxiety.

Educate customers on subscription management options

We've talked about styling your enrollment offer to educate subscribers on management options like skipping or pausing an order in one of our enrollment courses. As a reminder, these are integral functions of a convenient and desirable subscription experience - up to 12% of eCommerce subscribers felt comfortable initiating subscriptions due to their flexibility to cancel. It's important to know that this "flexibility to cancel" really distills down to a consumer's agency over their subscription management. Customers want to know they can opt out or change their subscription details on demand.

Once customers are aware of these options, you need to make it clear where and how they can do this.

First, style your subscription management options to be clear and accessible. You can do this in a couple of different ways.

Simplify your subscription management flow with progressive disclosure

Ordergroove brand Maelys nests subscription management options behind an "edit" functionality; only revealing them when the customer clicks into the component. This avoids displaying the "cancel" component directly on the subscription manager, and instead offers subscribers alternative order management opportunities quite literally above the cancellation option. This is a tactic called progressive disclosure, which keeps the user experience simple but still within your subscriber's agency. This comes out of the box on our new Subscription Manager, now available in open Beta.

Size and color differentiate preferable management options

We recommend bolding and/or color differentiating actionable buttons (Skip Order, Send Now, etc.), and making the copy size clear enough to be noticeable. Emphasize the options to delay or skip their next order to discourage cancellations where possible. We recommend making the “cancel” option a little less noticeable (here the copy for "cancel" is smaller), but still make it easy to locate and act on. We’ll talk more about mitigating cancellations in a bit.

Bold and color differentiate actionable text to emphasize subscriber options. 

Market subscription flexibility (SKU swap, order date changes) to your subscribers

You can have the most flexible subscriptions ever, but still see pesky variant fatigue or overstock related churn if your subscribers don't know about their subscription management options. Subscriber education is just as important as the flexible subscription options we enable our brands to offer. So let's break this down.

Email and SMS

We'll break down full program marketing best practices for email and SMS in this module, but a key factor for program marketing success is to market your subscription management options and flexibility. We've seen brands implement SKU swappability for program flexibility, but subscribers continue to cancel to switch to another product or flavor because they simply aren't aware of this new option. You can market these advantages to one-time purchasers for general program awareness, like Stumptown's email below:

Or target your current subscribers by referencing an active subscription product of theirs, like our SMS and email examples here:

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Subscription Landing Page

Here's our full module on building an awesome program landing page. The key takeaway for subscriber enablement here is emphasizing all your subscription management options immediately on this page.

Include flexible order change options and product swappability as two of your main callouts on your program landing page, like in Tula's program overview below:

Take ease a step further with 1-click actions 

A recent Cornell study found that utilizing a 1-click checkout increased a customer’s total CLTV by around 28%. This is because 70% of shoppers will leave a site if the checkout experience is too complicated. People value easy, simple experiences.

To optimize subscription management for ultimate convenience, we also recommend you use 1-click actions in subscription notifications to pause, skip, or delay - letting subscribers manage their order without friction. Here's our full module on boosting AOV and retention with 1-click actions via your Order Reminder notification.

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While giving subscribers the ultimate flexibility to manage their subscriptions is one of the most effective churn-mitigation tactics, you'll have the inevitable instances where churn may still be more likely. So in our next module, we'll break down another way to communicate your value to customers before they cancel: a subscription cancellation flow.

📝 Try it now!

• Set up SKU Swap and give your subscribers flexibility with their subscriptions.

• Style the subscription management experience to be easily navigable and actionable. Talk to your Ordergroove CSM about the new Subscription Manager 2.0 template (now in open Beta) and upcoming features like advanced cancel flows and cross-sell from the Subscription Manager.

• Set product-specific frequencies up to proactively anticipate your subscriber's rate of consumption and avoid overstock situations.

• Set up subscription education flows and 1-click actions to streamline subscription management with our Klaviyo and Attentive integrations.

Suggested Modules:

• Subscription Foundations: Optimize Your Subscription Program with Unit Economics
• Prevent Churn with a Persuasive Cancellation Flow

*In a 2023-24 YoY analysis of all Ordergroove merchants’ cancellation reasons excluding customer write-in, which is custom-tracked on a per-merchant basis.