Cancellation Flows

It costs five times more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. Cancellation Flows, part of Paddle Retain, presents customers with a dynamic offboarding experience that's designed to save customers and capture valuable insights for your team.

Cancellation Flows is fully customizable, so you can choose the kind of ways you want to rescue customers. Once configured, Cancellation Flows gets to work automatically — no intervention required on your behalf. You can integrate with Paddle Billing in a couple of clicks, with no additional scripts required.

How it works

Voluntary churn happens when customers cancel their subscription in your app. Unlike involuntary churn, like a problem with a payment method, voluntary churn is active — customers are actively choosing to cancel.

Cancellation Flows, part of Paddle Retain, lets you build custom workflows that are designed to save customers from churning at the point of cancellation. Instead of canceling a subscription immediately, Cancellation Flows presents customers with a simple survey that restates your value proposition and makes customers a dynamic offer to stay.

As well as helping to retain customers in the moment, Cancellation Flows also captures valuable feedback into why customers want to cancel. You can use these insights to diagnose the root causes of churn and make tactical changes to prevent it.

Dynamic salvage attempts

Cancellation Flows asks customers what they liked about your app and suggests a salvage attempt based on their answer. Depending on the options that a customer chooses, they can:

If customers don't accept a salvage attempt, you can make a salvage offer — a temporary discount to incentivize them to stick around. You can choose what kind of discount you offer, or turn this off if you don't want to offer a discount.

Automated actions

If you use Paddle Billing, you can plug Cancellation Flows into your frontend to handle the entire cancellation workflow. It automatically takes actions on the related subscription in Paddle Billing for you — including scheduling subscriptions to cancel. There's no need to build logic to handle this yourself.

Customer experience

Retain uses data from thousands of subscription companies to target the right salvage attempt based on the product and user. In general, a cancellation flow has five steps:

1. 

   Cancellation reason

   We ask a customer why they're canceling. This is useful information for your team, helping you diagnose the root cause of churn through cancellations.

2. 

   Satisfaction insight

   We ask customers what they liked about your product. By honing in on the psychological phenomenon of the nostalgia effect, we tee up each customer to be more willing to stick around and accept a salvage attempt.

3. 

   Salvage attempt

   Based on a customer's responses, we offer them a salvage attempt. We direct them to pause their subscription, switch to a lower cost plan, or contact your team to chat.

    

   If you use Calendly, Retain can show a meeting scheduler as part of the flow so customers can schedule a call in a couple of clicks.

4. 

   Salvage offer

   If customers don't accept a salvage attempt, we offer them a temporary discount.

    

   You can choose which discount you offer, or turn this off if you don't want to offer a discount.

5. 

   Feedback and cancel subscription

   If customers don't accept a salvage offer, we give them a way to provide feedback and cancel their subscription.

    

   For Paddle Billing platform users, subscriptions are automatically scheduled to cancel. There's no need to handle this yourself.

In regions that require one-click cancellation, Cancellation Flows automatically includes a link to cancel the subscription on each page of the flow, making sure you're compliant while also gathering insights and helping to reduce churn.

Next steps