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 'Retention 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, how to use Retention Management.
Overview
In Appstle Subscriptions, go to More > Retention Management and open the Cancellation tab. There are three ways for customers to cancel:
1. Direct (default option)
2. Custom instructions
3. Retention offers
You can also offer customers a pause before they cancel. See Offering a pause instead of cancelling below.
1. Direct:
With 'Direct', 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: 'Direct' is the default option for new stores. Hence, if you wish to use any of the other options, please make sure to select them and save.
2. Custom 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. Retention offers:
Retention offers 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 choosing a Retention Offer for each reason, if you’d like.
The Retention Offer menu shows the offers you can make. It is to your benefit to align these offers with your list of cancellation reasons. For example, if one of your reasons is that the product is too expensive, consider using the Offer Discount offer. This one will allow you to set a percentage discount to incentivize loyal customers to stay with you. You can set how long discounts and pauses last with Discount Duration and Pause Duration. If no Discount Duration is saved, accepted discounts never end, and a Pause Duration of 0 pauses the subscription until the customer resumes it.
Offering a pause instead of cancelling
Finally, you can give your customers the 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. To do this, use Retention offers and choose Pause Subscription as the offer for a reason.
Pause Duration (Billing Cycles) sets how many billing cycles the pause lasts (5 cycles in the example below). Customers see the default Pause Offer Message with the offer; to use different wording for one reason, fill in its Custom Retention Message.
Suggestions or Support:
If you have any questions or suggestions related to Retention 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.