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How to build a Cancellation Prevention experience for stores on the Pro plan

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Cancellation Prevention allows you to create unique win back and churn mitigation strategies to prevent customer churn. 

This guide explains how to set up a Cancellation Prevention experience for stores on the Pro plan. See How to build a Cancellation Prevention experience for stores on the Starter plan if you are not on the Pro or Custom plan. 

Platform:
  • Shopify Checkout Integration
  • Migrated Shopify Checkout Integration

Before you start

See Getting started with Cancellation Prevention for a list of key features, and use cases.

How it works

Use Recharge’s Cancellation Prevention feature to build an automated cancellation process, allowing you to gather customer cancellation insights, and provide customers with incentives to prevent them from churning.

Step 1 - Select the Cancellation Prevention template

Choose the Cancellation Prevention template in the Recharge merchant portal:

  1. Click Churn tools in the merchant portal and select Cancellation Prevention.
  2. Click Create from template and choose one of the following templates:
    • Basic cancellation experience: Gather customer feedback on why they want to cancel without offering incentives to retain their subscription.
    • Enhanced cancellation experience: Provide tailored incentives based on customers' specific cancellation reasons to encourage them to continue their subscriptions.
    • A/B test cancellation experience: Build two experiences to gather data-driven insights and determine the most effective cancellation experience.
    • A/B test cancellation experience with suggested offers: Build two experiences that offer different incentives to understand what motivates customers to stay subscribed.
    • Cancellation experience with rewards reminders: Remind customers about any unused rewards they will lose if they cancel their subscription.
    • Cancellation experience with rewards reminders and suggested offers: Provide customers with offers to prevent them from cancelling, and remind them of any unused rewards they may lose if they cancel.
  3. Click Get started to open the template.

Cancellation Prevention experiences trigger automatically when customers start the cancellation process.

Step 2 - Review the cancellation survey node

Click on the cancellation survey node to review the standard configuration for the cancellation survey answers and any applicable incentives attached.

Click the pencil icon to edit the incentive attached to a specific survey response to update the offer, or click the trash can icon to delete the survey answer. See Offer types for more information.

The cancellation node differs depending on the type of experience you’re building:

Template

Notes
Basic cancellation experience

By default, the cancellation survey node in the basic cancellation experience template does not incentivize customers to stay subscribed, regardless of their survey answers.

You can keep this as is, or edit the survey answers individually. For example, you may want to provide an offer for one or two survey answers, but limit the amount of incentives you provide overall.
Basic cancellation experience with suggested offers

By default, this preconfigured node is set to offer customers incentives depending on the survey answer to prevent them from churning.

You can keep the pre-configured incentives as is, or edit the incentives associated with each survey answer individually.

A/B test cancellation experience and A/B test cancellation experience with suggested offers

The A/B test cancellation experience template contains two cancellation nodes, each with survey answers pre-configured to not offer customers any incentives.

The A/B test cancellation experience with suggested offers template contains two cancellation nodes, each with survey answers pre-configured to offer customers any incentives.

To understand your customers better, update the survey answers in one path, but not the other. You can later view your store data to determine what suggested offers are more likely to keep customers subscribed.

Cancellation experience with rewards reminders and Cancellation experience with rewards reminders and suggested offers

The cancellation node on the Cancellation experience with rewards reminders template does not incentivize customers if they try to cancel their subscriptions.

The cancellation node on the Cancellation experience with rewards reminders and suggested offers template does incentivize customers to encourage them to remain subscribed.

You can keep these nodes as is, or edit the survey answers individually depending on your business needs.

The landing page for these nodes also includes two sections by default:

  • A free gift reminder to let customers know they will not receive their upcoming free gift if they cancel their subscription
  • A credits balance reminder to let customers know the amount of credits they’ll lose if they cancel their subscription

Follow the instructions in Step 3 to update the landing page depending on your Rewards offerings.
Tip: Use the shuffle survey answers for customers setting to help avoid bias where customers automatically select the first option shown to them. When this is selected, the response options will display in a different order each time.

Optional - Add gaming prevention

Set time limits on monetary offers to prevent customers from taking advantage of incentives offered through your Cancellation Prevention experiences.

For example, present customers with a fallback offer, such as the option to skip their next upcoming order, if they've previously received a monetary offer.

Enter a time limit in the Gaming prevention textbox to prevent customers from abusing the system. 

Optional - Add a custom answer

Click Add an answer on the cancellation survey node to add a Custom answer and set an offer for your custom response.

Optional - Copy and paste the Cancellation survey node

To make it easier for you to implement the same strategies on different branches, you can apply the following actions to the Cancellation survey node:

  • Copy this node’s configuration: Copy the node’s setup completely, including the cancellation reasons, any offers configured, and the site builder
  • Apply this node’s configuration to all nodes of this type: Apply the node configuration to all other cancellation survey nodes in the template
  • Paste copied node configuration: Paste the copied node configuration from one cancellation survey node to another on the template

Click on the vertical dot menu to access the actions and update the Cancellation Prevention template.

Tip: See How to translate your Cancellation Prevention strategy for instructions on translating different sections of your strategy.

Step 3 - Build the onsite experience

Customers see a specific page when they attempt to cancel their subscription, which displays the cancellation survey answers, and any available incentives. Recharge provides an easy-to-use Site Builder so you can control how your offer page looks, plus customize content to fit your brand.

Select Customize onsite experience on the cancellation node to navigate to the Site Builder.

Step 4 - Save and activate the experience

Save and activate the experience after confirming everything is configured correctly:

  1. Click Save, then Confirm: save changes.
  2. Click Activate when ready to go live with your experience.
  3. Select Confirm: activate flow.
  4. Run through the cancellation steps in your customer portal to test the flow.
Tip: You can deactivate an experience at any time, but an experience cannot be edited once activated.

Offer types

There are several survey offer types for you to use when curating the Cancellation survey, allowing you to provide customers with multiple options to meet their unique needs.

Offer types include:

  • No Offer: An offer is not provided when the customer selects this cancellation option.
  • Discount: Provide a one-time fixed price or percentage discount on the customer’s upcoming order.
  • Discount Code: Search your store’s discount codes to present to the customer. This response can be used to offer multi-order discounts.
  • Skip: Allow customers to skip their upcoming orders.
  • Swap: Allows customers to swap their current product for a different product, and limit available swap options to specific collections. Alternatively, you can let customers swap to a different variant of the same product. 
    • If a customer attempts to swap to a product with a frequency that is not offered on the original subscribed product, Recharge displays the one-time product price on the product selection page. Once the customer selects a frequency, Recharge updates the pricing to reflect the appropriate subscription pricing.
  • Delay (pause): Allow customers to delay their upcoming order by assigned intervals (Days, Weeks, Months).
  • Free gift: Provide a free gift offer to retain customers by adding value to their subscriptions, increasing product awareness, and creating opportunities for future upsells or cross-sells.
Note: If your store doesn’t allow swaps and/or skips in the customer portal settings, any reasons configured with skip or swap offers are not displayed to the customer in the cancellation prevention survey.

Combined offer types

Combining multiple offers can better address customer concerns and enhance retention efforts.
Currently, the following combined offer types are available:

  • Delay and discount
  • Delay and free gift
  • Delay and swap

Fallback offers

Note: Fallback offers are currently in Early Adopter status. Contact the Recharge Support team to have this feature enabled, or if you're using Recharge Pro, you can reach out to your Account Manager.

Fallback offers are presented to customers who proceed to cancel their subscription, after being presented the first offer. Specify which offer to show first and if that offer is declined, choose which offer to show second.

Click +Add a fallback offer after configuring your first offer to specify which offer will be shown if the first offer is declined.

For example, if a customer selects "I already have more than I need", you can provide an initial offer of delaying the subscription, and if the customer declines they will be shown a second offer to delay and receive a discount on the upcoming order.

Considerations

Consider the following when building Cancellation Prevention experiences:

Consideration

Notes
Optional survey answers

Customer survey reasons are optional. 

By clicking the "Next" button, shoppers are able to skip the cancellation survey and go straight to cancelling. In addition, the label for the "Next" button is modifiable and can be updated by the merchant at any time. 

While we believe this functionality aligns with the FTC's Click to Cancel rule, Recharge does not provide legal advice to customers regarding regulatory compliance. 

If you have additional questions pertaining to regulatory compliance, we recommend that you seek legal counsel.
Discounts Discounts from Cancellation Prevention experiences applied to orders are stacked with discounts from Rewards experiences, plus subscribe and save discounts and Tiered Discounts.
Discount offers Discount offers (not discount codes) are removed if the customer updates their next charge date.
Prepaid subscriptions
  • Cancellation reasons with swap and skip offers will not be displayed to customers trying to cancel a prepaid subscription.
  • Prepaid subscriptions are incompatible with swaps. Configuring a cancellation reason with a swap offer causes the swap to fail.
Multi-currency
  • Cancellation Prevention experiences that offer fixed-amount discounts do not run for multi-currency customers if the currency setting to convert fixed-price discounts to customer's currency is disabled.
  • Fixed-discount experiences run for all customers and addresses if the current setting to convert fixed-price discounts is enabled.
  • The discount amount is auto-converted to customers' currencies for multi-currency customers.
Customer portal themes
Translations You can translate your Cancellation Prevention strategy into a different language to match your brand. See How to translate your Cancellation Prevention strategy for more information.
Updating existing experiences You cannot update an experience after activating it. If you need to make changes to the experience, you must:
  1. Duplicate the experience
  2. Make your changes
  3. Activate the new experience
  4. Deactivate the original experience
Changes to your Recharge plan Merchants on the Pro and Custom plans have access to an advanced Cancellation Prevention experience, including enhanced nodes, analytics, and insights. Downgrading to the Starter plan affects access in the following ways:
  • Any active experiences created while on the Pro or Custom plan remain functional
  • Once on the Starter plan, you cannot duplicate or reactivate a deactivated experience you created while on the Pro or Custom plan

Resources

See the following resources below for additional information:

Getting started guides

How to guides

FAQ

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