No matter how much customers love your product, no matter how good your value proposition is, no matter whether your pricing strategy is perfect, customers will cancel at some stage. In a previous blog post, “Why subscribers churn”, we looked through the reasons subscribers churn. As a quick summary, we outlined how Product, Price, Service impact churn rate and what business can be doing to improve across the three dimensions. Ultimately, there’s only so much you can do, churn will always be a reality of the subscription business model. Yet, a failure in your product, value or pricing or service doesn’t necessarily mean that they're lost altogether, thanks to rescue journey, also referred as retention strategies, cancel prevention, cancel save or winback journeys.

But why give yourself and the team more work creating rescue journeys when customers are dead set on leaving? The problem that they may be facing isn’t always down to a failure in your business. Retention journeys are essentially an educational journey. They’re an opportunity to recapture and re-engage customers that didn’t understand the product the first time, or perhaps are on the wrong pricing plan.

A little caveat though, you need to strike a balance between providing enough information and not flooding the journey with steps that further frustrate the customer.

There’s a tonne of bad reputation on review sites to be earnt by making unsubscribing difficult which is why it’s imperative that you don’t make it a labyrinth to unsubscribe. Customers can recognise if the process is long winded and made to keep them jumping through hoops until they decide it's not worth the effort. In fact, you’re making the customer resent you and create bitter memories about your service, even if the problem was originally about your product or price.

Actions speak louder than words, and so for our show and tell today, we’ll share how Adobe Creative Cloud creates engaging and complete retention journeys.

Adobe is a leading software provider of creative studios that operates on a subscription model. It has millions of users around the world, but with that a percentage that will inevitably think about cancelling their packages. The cancellation button was easy to find on the Account page and this initiated the journey. Following on from the previous point of transparency with the process, Adobe presents a progression bar at the top of the page to give the user total clarity about the process and avoid frustration stemming from unwanted surprises.

The first step in the process is the chance to collect feedback. To continue to the next stage, the customer will need to tick a corresponding box as to their reason(s) for cancelling. This is incredibly useful information to fixing issues in your product and avoiding similar cancellations in the future.

The second stage, ‘Details’, showcases the benefits and features that the user will be abandoning when they cancel. At first glance, this might seem like a reminder of the huge array of features Adobe offers, but more importantly it acts as a step to educate customers who might have only been using one application and were unaware of the other benefits.

The next section labelled ‘Offers’ is arguably the main safety net Adobe uses to catch those still on the fence. A set of rescue offers ranging from price reductions, value highlights, and alternative plans are on display. There’s also the option to speak to the Adobe team and potentially barter a custom deal. Lastly, they also offer a help desk which is another chance to aid customers who don’t have an issue with the price or service, instead are finding it difficult to use the product.

Now, it’s difficult to follow up on such a stellar example of a retention journey, but at Limio we aren’t afraid of a little competition.

Limio has been grinding away to offer flexible functionality like that of creating rescue offers instantly with no-code. That means creating all of the above features of an Adobe rescue offer with no technical knowledge needed beforehand. Not only that, but our whole subscription commerce platform is no-code. Which means you can be up and running with beautiful journeys in a matter of hours. Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help your subscription journey.

Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help your subscription journey.