Why You Need Cancel Flows: Increase Customer Loyalty, Decrease Churn, and Find New Customer Price Points

While some churn is always inevitable in the SaaS space, there are plenty of ways to increase your retention. And the best tactics don’t even have to involve more work on your end. One of the best ways to reduce churn with minimal manual effort on your part is with personalized cancel flows. Well-designed cancel flows can increase loyalty, decrease churn, and help you find a new price equilibrium.

Let’s talk about exactly what cancel flows are, why you need them, and how you can set up personalized flows effortlessly.

What are cancel flows?

Cancel flows involve an automated series of custom events that a customer completes whenever they begin the cancellation process of a SaaS subscription or product. While it can include an exit survey or churn survey, a cancel flow goes beyond offering a simple survey.

Cancel flows also give your company the potential opportunity to avoid a cancellation by offering compelling alternatives: usage credits, switching to a more favorable tier, discounts, subscription pauses, or a direct line to customer support. As a bonus, your team collects essential data to improve your product and tweak your pricing strategy in the long run.

Why do you need cancel flows?

Cancel flows are absolutely vital for SaaS businesses. Here are a few reasons why you need personalized cancel flows:

Cancel flows provide valuable feedback

Because cancel flows are a natural place for an exit survey, they can be a rich source of information regarding the reasons behind churn. Here’s an example from Slack of what the survey portion of a good cancel flow might look like:

Once you’ve figured out why users are leaving your product, you have the power to correct and adjust moving forward. The feedback collected during cancel flows can be invaluable when it comes to customer service, product updates, and preventing future churn.

It can also provide you valuable data when it comes to pricing. The information gathered from cancel flows could help your business find a new price equilibrium with certain customer cohorts, whether that means creating a new pricing tier or tuning up your pricing strategy in general.

Cancel flows can help decrease churn

Based on the responses to your exit survey, you can also use cancel flows to help decrease churn. For instance, if the user indicates that they’re cancelling because the product is too expensive, you have the perfect opportunity to offer a series of targeted discounts or the option to downgrade to a cheaper plan.

Check out this example from Asana:

Cancel flows can leave the door open

Even if you can’t entice a customer to stay with discounts or the option to downgrade, cancel flows still offer one more opportunity to prevent losing the customer entirely. A final strategy with cancel flows is to offer the option to pause the account, allowing users to take a break from the product without cancelling permanently.

This option can help retain customers who are considering cancelling due to temporary issues, like a limited budget, seasonal slumps, or a company reorg. Here’s a good example from Mailchimp:

How to set up cancel flows

If you want to effortlessly set up a cancel flow that will help you lower cancellations automatically while making customers happier and driving more revenue, then you need Churnkey. When you use our platform, every cancellation attempt becomes an opportunity to craft a better relationship with your customer. And when you do that, you’ll build a bigger subscription business.

In less than an hour, our customer-obsessed team can turn your cancel button into a retention engine. We exist to make your subscription business more money while making customers happier. And we know it works. On average, our customers extend LTV by over 26% and reduce active churn by up to 58%.

Are you ready to use the best cancel flow in the business?

Find out more with a demo or start combating churn now with a free trial!