Offering incentives and discount offers is widely regarded as the most effective tactic in reducing subscriber churn. So we recommend that the first thing that you try is a simple baseline offer to all subscribers wishing to cancel. This will give you a baseline "incentive-return" figure. Once you have this, you have a baseline to work from and are ready to improve on this with tailored offers.
Some examples:
Survey Response | Incentive Offer | Why it works |
Too expensive | Switch Plan | A plan downgrade, may provide adequate value at a better price for the subscriber . |
Delivery issues | Free Period | A free box next week / month may be the one off incentive that turns the short term subscriber into lifetime. |
Product not needed | Pause Period | Market conditions may mean the product has no value to the subscriber, but only for a temporary period. |
Found cheaper elsewhere | % Discount forever | When a similar product is cheaper elsewhere, a simple lifetime discount is a proven method to retain the customer for a longer term. |
Faulty product | One off discount | A specific one off discount equal to the loss in value is likely to address the concern - such as a free meal in a food subscription box. |
Before you begin, have a think about specific offers that you may want to implement and for what subscription plans they are appropriate. We're going to use the example offer "A free meal in a food subscription box", where the cost of a free meal varies based on the frequency of the subscription.
Create a super simple survey to collect feedback
Upzelo includes sample Surveys and Responses out of the box, but you can customise these as you wish. For this example, we'll use an existing Survey "Subscription box template survey", with typical responses. This survey includes a "I had issues with delivery" response which we are going to tailor an automated "Free meal" response. This is going to save the food subscription box support team hundreds of hours dealing with these requests, saving them time to solve more complex issues for customers.
Create some audiences to identify the free meal price
Different frequency subscriptions, will help to identify the fixed free meal price. For example, a weekly delivery plan might have a lower meal price than a bi-weekly delivery plan. To help set the right free meal price within the offer incentive we'll create 3 audiences in Upzelo.
Weekly Meal Plan A
Bi-Weekly Meal Plan A
Monthly Meal Plan A
Create an offer for each "frequency audience"
Inside Actions > Offers, select + Create an offer, and give the offer a name such as "Free weekly meal" and write an appropriate offer introduction. Remember to use your brand's tone of voice effectively here to stand the best chance of changing the customer's mind.
Upzelo includes useful placeholders such as [Plan] and [New price] within this text and you can add line breaks by holding Shift+Return. And don't forget your emoji's - fully supported.
Then you can make the following selections to set the offer:
- Type: Offer a discount
- "Fixed Price"
- Amount = price of a free meal, for the frequency ie. weekly=£3.25, monthly=£5.25.
- "One time discount"
Create flows for your frequency audiences
Inside the Customer Flows area of your account, click + Create Customer Flow. Give your Flow a name such as "Weekly plan tailored" and select one of the audiences created above such as "Weekly Meal Plan A". Now for the exciting bit! Select "Offers based on responses" from the Offer Type step, here you can tailor the Offer incentive easily, or select "No offer" where required. You'll see we've selected "Free weekly meal" below against the delivery issues survey response.
To finish the setup you'll need to pick the Saved / Cancelled messages, and finally Publish your Customer Flow. You'll need to repeat the above for each of the audiences you created earlier if you want to include the additional frequencies.
After you've published your Customer Flows, they'll instantly be live and presented to any customer that matches the audiences we created earlier and tries to cancel via a button or link on your website / platform.