Recipes for Churnkey Cancel Flows

Whether you're setting up your first cancel flow or refining existing ones, this guide offers practical strategies to improve your approach. Use these ideas as a starting point and adapt them to your specific needs.

Segmentation Strategies

Segmentation allows you to target specific customer groups with tailored cancel flows. You can easily create flows based on criteria such as:

• Billing Intervals: Differentiate between annual and monthly plans.
• Subscription Plans: Customize for trial versus active subscriptions, or based on pricing tiers.
• Account Age: Adjust based on how long a customer has been with you.
• And More

1. Annual vs Monthly Plan

• Annual subscribers: These customers are generally more committed but sensitive to long-term value. You can offer loyalty discounts on renewals and emphasize the yearly value in your messaging.
• Monthly subscribers: Often more price-sensitive, these customers might appreciate an offer to switch to an annual plan at a lower cost or different pause durations. You might want to highlight flexibility and short-term benefits in your communication.

2. Early vs Late Churners

• Early Churners: Users who churn within the first month may not have fully experienced your product's value. You can offer extended trials, or suggest hidden plans or pauses.
• Late Churners: Users who churn after six months might feel a loss of value over time. Highlight long-term benefits and offer loyalty discounts, pauses, or upgrades at their current price. Offer a personalized consultation to optimize their usage.

3. Grandfathered Customers

Grandfathered customers retain original pricing plans even after new pricing is introduced. With Churnkey, segment these customers and show them the discounts they'd lose if they cancel. For more customization, pass custom variables.

4. Enterprise Customers

Gather more feedback or show specific messages (e.g., notice periods) to enterprise customers. You can also turn off follow-up questions and redirect them to a different page.

5. Customers on Different Pricing Tiers

Segment customers by pricing tier (e.g., Basic vs. Pro). Pro users might receive more generous offers, as they have a deeper integration and reliance on your service. On the other hand, users on cheaper tiers could be offered free upgrades to higher tiers. You can use different MCQ selectors, e.g., "Didn't use enough" for the Basic plan, and customize offers accordingly.

6. Past-Due Subscriber

These users have missed payments. Churnkey will auto-display a pause wall, but you could also customize this audience's flow with different messaging.

7. Localized Cancel Flow

Have users in different countries and want to serve up a more localized cancel flow? You can set the country while segmenting and create unique flows for any of your top localized countries. If you want to pass custom variables to Churnkey and segment based on language, you could also do that. You could also split them by currency used instead of location.

8. Free Trial Segments

Create segments for your trialing customers and gather qualitative feedback from them as they cancel or retain. Take it a step further to create segments for annual vs monthly trialing customers.

9. Discounted vs Non-Discounted Customers

You could segment flows based on customers with a different discount code. Be cautious about offering larger discounts than what high-discount customers already have. For customers with low or no discounts, you could offer a significant first-time discount (e.g., 20-30% off for 3-6 months).

10. Key Health Indicator

If you work on a credits based system or measure customer engagement in any way, you can pass this information into Churnkey using Custom Attributes. For example, you could put customers that have high health scores or have leveraged a lot of usage with your platform, they could see a different cancel flow with personalized offers and messaging.

11. Team Offboarding

If team size decreases due to members leaving, Churnkey allows you to prompt users to fill the vacated seats with new team members, maintaining the original team size. This minimizes contraction revenue. To orchestrate this, create a segment of users with admin licenses and multiple team seats.

A/B Testing

A/B Testing allows you to test different segmented cancel flows against each other to determine the most effective setup. You can test:

• Different discounts
• Different pause lengths
• Test a longer vs short flow with fewer options to choose from
• Test different messaging angles

A/B tests are easy to deploy from within Churnkey and don't require any intervention from data or engineering teams. We handle experimentation for you, deterministically randomizing cancel flow sessions based on customer ID. Learn more how to set up your first test.

Types Of Offers

1. Offer To Meet

A live conversation allows you to understand and address the customer's specific issues or pain points that automated flows might miss. This could be a good offer for those that select "technical issues" as their reason for churning.

To use this, simply select Churnkey's "Redirect to a page" and embed a calendly, savvycal or cal.com link. You could even offer a phone number and use tel: code.

2. Switch Plans / Hidden Plans

Hidden plans offer an enticing option for users considering cancellation.

Create plans not publicly available, offering unique value to specific user segments:

• Reduced-feature plans at a lower price point
• Seasonal plans for intermittent users
• Hybrid plans combining features from different tiers

Present the most relevant hidden plan based on customer data:

• For low usage, offer a "lite" plan with core features at a reduced price
• For cost concerns, introduce a longer billing cycle with a discount

3. Offer Credits, Instead of Discounts

Instead of offering a discount, you could offer x% more usage of our app. We have quite a few companies that use a credit based system for pricing and they will use Churnkey to let cancelling customers accept free credits instead of discounts. Learn more about further customization here.

4. Term Optimization

Term optimization pushes people out of short-term plans and into longer-term ones. You can do a simpler version of this with with a plan change offer.

5. Redirect To A Page

You can redirect users to help center, developer docs, or to a subscriber community.

6. Trial Extension

With Churnkey, you can offer users a trial extension automatically. The length of the extension should be strategic:

• For original trials under 14 days: Consider offering a full reset, giving users another complete trial period.
• For trials of 30 days or more: Offer about half of the original trial length. This provides additional time without devaluing your service.

Remember, the goal is to give users enough extra time to experience your product's value, potentially converting them into paying customers. Read more.

7. Use Personalized, Targeted Discounts

While offering discounts might seem counterintuitive for increasing revenue, strategic discounting can actually boost customer lifetime value. The key is to use discounts to encourage customers to spend more on your product over time.

Here's an effective approach:

1. Tie your discount offers to specific pricing tiers.
2. For a customer nearing the end of their free trial on a lower-tier plan, offer them an upgrade to a higher tier at a discounted rate.

For example:

• Customer selects a $25/month plan during their 30-day free trial.
• Near the trial's end, offer them the next tier up ($75/month) at a discounted rate of $50/month.

You can offer this discount for a limited time or as an ongoing rate until they change plans or cancel. This approach not only increases immediate revenue but also provides an incentive for customers to stay subscribed longer.

8. Pauses

A pause is always better than a cancellation. If they’re an existing customer, you can offer to temporarily pause their subscription. In a study by MarketingCharts, 51.8% of participants said they would be very or extremely likely to pause a subscription if the option was available. 

You can offer a pause to everyone or only to users that choose a specific reason like "I don't need it right now / I will be back".

Conclusion

With Churnkey, you can implement all these strategies from Day 1, ensuring your test ideas are future-proofed. Churnkey offers a low floor and high ceiling as a product. Begin with our standard template, which outperforms custom-coded solutions, and gradually introduce more complex offers and tests.