How to smartly use Appstle's 'Cancellation Management' feature to retain customers

Retaining loyal customers and reducing churn is often the key to success, as it comes with lower cost (retaining customers generally costs lesser than acquiring new customers). This is especially true when it concerns your most loyal customers, who have a recurring relationship with your store, through active subscriptions!

Appstle is one of the very few apps that provides a 'cancelation management' feature, a key functionality, to not only avoid customer churn, but also help you understand the pulse of your customers! This help doc will explain, in detail, the cancelation management feature.

Overview
There are four cancelation management methods available for merchants on Appstle Subscriptions.

1. Cancel Immediately (default option)

2. Provide Cancelation Instructions
3. Customer Retention Flow

4. Pause Option (as a Retention0 Step before Cancelation

1. Cancel immediately:

With 'Cancel Immediately', your customers/shoppers will be able to easily cancel their subscriptions through their customer portals, without any re-routing. While this feature is the easiest for your customers, it does not provide much opportunity for you to engage with them at this critical juncture, and hence not a recommended option!

Note: 'Cancel immediately' is the default option activated on your account. Hence, if you wish to use any of the other management options, please make sure to select them and save.

2. Provide Cancelation Instructions:

With this option, you - the merchant - can control the cancellation process, and share the instructions (through either text or HTML) with your subscribers who wish to cancel their subscriptions. The cancelation instructions can be anything, such as asking them to email you. You can then use the opportunity to understand their cancelation reasons, and decide to offer them a discount, a custom package, or anything else you deem appropriate.

While this option is the most customer engaging for you, it is a relatively lengthy process, and can frustrate some shoppers. Hence, we recommend that you use this tactfully!

3. Customer Retention Flow:

Customer Retention Flow is the method that we recommend the most, as it offers the customers a convenient opportunity to share their cancelation reasons with you.

Research and our own experience with our merchants have shown that this method, which acts as the 'exit interview', often gives valuable insights into both the needs and the mindset of your subscribers. It acts as a free diagnostic, and provides you the opportunity to make any modifications to address the underlying reasons for the cancelation, if required.

When you select this option, you will have the option to create a list of cancellation reasons for your customers to choose from. From your customers' end, they will also get a text box where they can optionally elaborate further on their choice.

Common cancellation reasons can be Too expensive, Won't be around/out of the house/on vacation, Found alternative sources, etc. It may be helpful to include Other as a final option in case customers have other reasons in mind.

You can also take your customer retention a step further by configuring Retention Actions, if you’d like.

This list shows the actions you can take. It is to your benefit to align these actions with your list of cancellation reasons. For example, if one of your reasons is that the product is too expensive, consider using the discount action. This one will allow you to set a percentage discount to incentivize loyal customers to stay with you. You can further customize the discount and pause subscription options with the recurring cycle limit and number of cycles to pause, respectively. If you want either to continue indefinitely upon activation, put 0 into these fields.

4. Pause Option step before Cancelation

Finally, there is Pause Option (as a Retention) Step before Cancellation. You would use this setting if you wished to provide your customers an option to pause their subscription for a few cycles to see if they want to continue in the future or not, as opposed to them canceling their subscriptions outright.

When you select to configure this option, you will receive a field for setting the number of pause duration cycles, which will be based on a customer’s billing cycles, which you can fill out with any numerical value you see fit (5 cycles in the example below). You will also need to provide a message, which you can do in the field just below that.

Suggestions or Support:

If you have any questions or suggestions related to cancelation management, or if you need any other help, please reach out to us at subscription-support@appstle.com or just ping us through the live chat widget on our app. Our 24x7x365 available experts will be happy to assist you further.