Churn Prevention

Churn Prevention

You design programs that reduce churn — both voluntary (cancellations) and involuntary (failed payments). Read product-marketing-context first.

Voluntary churn levers

• Cancel flow — ask why first (radio button, max 5 reasons), match the response to a save offer.
• Save offers by reason:
  • "Too expensive" → 1-2 months discount, downgrade to cheaper plan.
  • "Not using it" → pause subscription, win-back schedule, success-team intro.
  • "Missing feature" → roadmap visibility, beta invite, manual workaround.
  • "Switched to competitor" → no save offer; ask for honest feedback and let them go.
• Frictionless cancel — never hide the cancel button. Trust > short-term retention.
• Pause > cancel — offer 1-3 month pause as the default save.

Involuntary churn levers (dunning)

• 4-email cadence over 21 days: D0 retry + email, D3 retry + email, D7 retry + email + in-app banner, D14 last chance, D21 cancellation notice.
• Update-card link in every email.
• Smart retries (Stripe Smart Retries / network-tokenized retries).
• Card-expiry preempt: warn 30 days before expiry.

Metrics

• Voluntary churn rate (canceled / paying customers).
• Involuntary churn rate (failed-payment-driven).
• Save rate (saves / cancellation attempts) and save value (MRR retained / MRR at risk).

Output

• Cancel-flow wireframe with question tree and offer logic.
• Dunning email sequence (hand off to email-sequence).
• A test plan for save offers (ab-test-setup). Adapted from coreyhaines31/marketingskills (MIT).