💡 TIP: This module breaks down the components of a powerful cancellation flow. Read our module on using flexible subscription management to prevent churn to prevent more subscribers from even electing to cancel in the first place.

Key Takeaways

• It should never be difficult to cancel a subscription. Rather, show customers the value of alternatives like skipping or delaying an order.
• When a subscriber cancels their subscription, it's not the end of the road. Cancellations are an opportunity to collect feedback, improve your subscriber experience, and proactively meet their needs in the future.

Introduction

Subscription cancellations are a natural, albeit not so fun, part of the subscription experience. McKinsey reveals that nearly 40% of eCommerce subscribers across all categories have canceled their varying subscriptions - with reasons spanning convenience, price-point, flexibility, and product satisfaction. 

And digging in a little deeper - most consumers who churn “do so quickly;” with more than a third of consumers canceling within their first 3 months, and over half within their first 6.

The good news, however, is that eCommerce subscribers can be “sticky” once they find a service that they like. While there are multiple considerations that go into curating a subscription program that will make your customer base happy, (insider tip: check out some more of our Retention Courses in Academy to set your business up for subscription success here) a solid cancellation experience can actually do a lot at that final point of contact for your subscriber sentiment and long-term retention. So let’s dive in! 🚀

Make it easy, but unappealing, to cancel

As your potential last point of contact with an active subscriber, your cancellation flow should be an easy to navigate, fully incentivized experience. Think of it like a hug goodbye - make it meaningful, authentic, and to avoid coming across overly pushy, try not to linger too long. From the get-go, make it easy but unappealing to cancel.

Display alternative options for subscription management

Nesting your "cancel" option behind an "edit" function reminds subscribers of their other options from the beginning of their cancellation experience, like in Maely's subscription manager below.

Alternatively, you can offer these options after a subscriber selects "cancel" from the subscription manager, like in the example below. Regardless of placement, giving subscribers the ability to self-service pause, skip, or cancel their subscription gives the customer ease of use and agency, and also provides opportunities for you to educate your customers on alternative options to canceling.

Reinforce the value of your product and subscription benefits

Use this opportunity to highlight the main value proposition of your product and remind the customer of the benefits they’ve already realized with you. You should also highlight any subscription benefits you offer; like discounts, free shipping, loyalty points, etc.! This works particularly well for brands offering higher discounts beyond the first order. You can leverage messaging like:

“Are you sure? Canceling will forfeit your exclusive discount of 20% on all recurring subscription orders.”

Here are some subscription-first or subscription-prioritizing brands who leverage their product and subscription benefits in cancellation flows:

Bonafide

Bonafide health, a premier women's wellness brand, suggests alternative options, rewards, and support options to remind subscribers of their choices and discourage outright cancellations.

Loom

Loom, a popular software provider, highlights product features that will become unavailable to the subscriber upon cancellation to drive home value and even incite some FOMO (fear of missing out).

Amazon

Amazon’s Subscribe & Save experience uses a subscriber’s amalgamated savings to appeal to the financially savvy subscriber during cancellation.

Proactively address potential cancellation reasons with personalized CTAs

While similar to suggesting alternative management options, it's even more powerful to speak to a subscriber's potential reason for cancellation. It's proven that personalizing the consumer experience can drive higher conversion and lower churn rates; with 66% of consumers stating that encountering non-personalized content would discourage them from buying. So take your most commonly selected cancellation reasons and proactively prepare personalized options to meet your customer halfway.

Maely's leverages prompts like "Not loving the product?" with CTAs to change or pause the product/order to meet the subscriber's needs.

You can also dynamically adjust CTAs based on cancellation reasons, like in the example below.

UBeauty offers subscribers the option to swap their product if the subscriber selects "I wanted to switch to a different product/flavor" as their cancellation reason; presenting the customer with a viable alternative to canceling.

Offer a one-time discount

As stated above, dynamically adjusting CTAs based on cancellation reasons mitigates churn with a personalized consumer experience. If a subscriber selects "price" as their primary cancellation reason, you can leverage a one-time discount as a cancellation preventative.

Maely's first highlights their subscription benefits, then offers subscribers a one-time discount if selecting "price" as their cancellation reason.

Adhere to FTC guidelines

The FTC has some guidelines around how cancel flows can legally be structured. Be sure to keep in mind that it should be clear and relatively simple for customers to cancel their subscriptions, but that they’re given those alternative options and opportunities to act on beforehand.

Collect data and feedback to inform future cancellation prevention

Cancellation flows are more than just momentary retention tools. They are powerful data collection points that can inform how you make agile adjustments to your subscription program. Understanding why a customer is leaving is the first step to understanding how to meet their needs and provide them with the experience or product they want, preventing long term churn.

You should tailor your cancellation reasons to your customer profiles and product offering. For example, coffee brands will often see cancellations due to flavor fatigue (more on how to prevent those here!) - while nutraceuticals brands may see cancellations due to customers buying from other retailers or wholesale. Regularly update your cancellation reasons based on patterns in support interactions and customer feedback.

And taking that a step further, common cancellation reasons should influence your team's decision making. Take time with your team to regularly evaluate these support interactions and cancellation reason patterns to make meaningful changes to your subscription experience. For example, if multiple customers are canceling their subscription to Product A to switch to Product B, we'd recommend considering adding that Product B to Product A's SKU swap group (more on that here). 

💡TIP: Use cancel reasons to target cohorts of customers for re-engagement further down the line. For example, a customer canceling due to “overstock” would benefit from a reactivation campaign; which we very coincidentally✨ have an Academy module for here! 🤓

Firebelly Tea keeps their cancel flow concise, but asks for further details and feedback surrounding the subscriber's cancellation reason. This lets them see areas of improvement, plan for future re-engagement opportunities, and show their subscribers they care about their experience.

Know when it's time to say goodbye

While retaining your customer is the ideal outcome of a cancel flow, leaving them with a positive management experience is arguably just as important. Subscription cancellation could have nothing to do with your business or product and could be due to other circumstances such as a recent loss, financial hardship, or change in address. This cancellation could be temporary and leaving your subscribers with a positive experience can mean future recommendations or a return to your company if circumstances align.

Avoiding the labyrinth of cancellation

Like we outlined above, it should never be difficult to cancel a subscription. Any overt friction in the subscription management process can lead to a negative association with subscriptions for your customer base, and can even build long term resentment and poor brand sentiment. So the structure of your cancellation flow should be simple to follow, but offer subscribers plenty of incentive (rather than obstruction) to avoid cancellation.

A chance to reunite

In the months following a cancellation, there are plenty of opportunities to re-engage this customer. Especially if the cancellation was due to a reason like overstock or a physical change in address or circumstances, subscribers are likely to be in need of their continuity product again. In our next module, we’ll go through curating a solid reactivation/winback campaign for canceled subscriptions.

📝 Try it now!

Ordergroove sets you up with a default template Cancel Flow, (here’s some more information on that) but many of our early adopters have custom built their own cancellation flows or use one from a 3p provider per their technical environment. 

Work with your Ordergroove CSM to start reducing subscription churn with a tailored cancellation flow.

Suggested Modules

• Here’s why you should care about subscription retention rates, and why subscriptions are valuable for your customer lifetime value. 
• To proactively manage and prevent churn, offer subscribers flexible subscription management options.
• Rewrite Retention Rates with a Subscriber Winback Campaign