You run a membership / subscription based business and one of your members wants to cancel. It happens, but what can you and your team do to improve retention and keep more members with you longer?
First, it helps to understand WHY your members are cancelling.
When you understand that, you can empower your team with beautifully written email templates to save sales, downgrade members, or upgrade members.
And you can leverage powerful FuseDesk Automation to process the membership changes.
Take Bernardo, for example. He and his wife run an online subscription based business and using just this one strategy, they were able to retain over 40% of their cancellation requests.
When a member cancellation request comes in, they reply back with an invitation to view a special video which reminds the member why the got started, covers the most common reasons for cancelling, and suggests users return to the membership area to get the most value out of their membership.
Let’s put this best practice into place for you, too.
Create Your Email Reply Template
First, let’s create your email reply template with a retention offer.
In FuseDesk, head to Email Templates under Templates under Settings and click Add New.
You could offer a downgrade to a more affordable plan, an upgrade to a more valuable plan, or a bonus for keeping their membership.
For example, you could write something like:
Thank you so much for your email, and I’m so sorry to hear that your print subscription might not be a good fit for you anymore.
Sometimes what we’ve found is that when our print edition isn’t in the budget, the digital only version is a more economical fit. If you’d like, we can easily downgrade you to that for only $x/mo (a y% savings!)
Alternatively, if you find that the print edition has too much for you to implement, our weekly coaching program might be a better fit for you where we help you to better interpret what we’re sending and put it into practice right away.
That’s normally $x/mo, but as you’re existing print edition subscriber, we can offer that upgrade to you for only $y/mo (a z% savings!)
Please reply on back and let me know if you’d prefer we complete your full cancellation, downgrade you to the digital only subscription, or upgrade you to our weekly coaching program.
Save your new template.
Now create 3 more templates, one each for the following scenarios:
- Membership Downgrade Confirmation
- Membership Upgrade Confirmation
- Membership Cancellation Confirmation
Create Your Case Tags for Automation
In FuseDesk, head to Case Tags under Settings.
Let’s create 4x Case Tags for your team to use to run these automations:
- Retention Offer
- Retention – Upgrade,
- Retention – Downgrade
- Retention – Cancel
Case Tag Automation for Retention
Now let’s setup each of your Case Tag Automations.
These will allow your team to apply a Case Tag to a case to instantly automate a retention email or process an upgrade, a downgrade, or a cancellation.
Head to Automations under Settings and click Add New.
Enter a Name such as “Retention Offer” and for the When select Case Tag Applied.
Then configure your Automations as follows:
Name: Retention Offer
Conditions:
- Case Tag Applied includes Retention Offer (your new case tag from above)
Actions:
- Reply By Email using the template you created above.
Then create three more, one each for Downgrade, Upgrade, and Cancellation along these lines:
Name: Retention – Upgrade
Conditions:
- Case Tag Applied includes Retention – Upgrade (your new case tag from above)
Actions:
- Apply Infusionsoft Tag to Upgrade their Membership in your Campaign. (You can also use Achieve Infusionsoft Goal)
- Reply By Email using the template you created above.
Your Automation might look something like this:
Empowering Your Team
With these 4 new Case Tags, Email Templates, and Automations in place, your team is ready to rock!
Now when a cancellation request comes in, they simply apply the Retention Offer case tag.
When a member accepts an Upgrade offer, apply the Upgrade Case Tag.
When a member accepts a Downgrade offer, apply the Downgrade Case Tag.
And when a member still wants to cancel, apply the Cancellation Case Tag.
Of course, if you don’t hear back from a customer, policies/law/etc require immediate cancellation, or it’s clear that an upgrade/downgrade wouldn’t be appropriate in the first place, simply apply the cancellation case tag right away.
Leveraging Your Case Tag Metrics
Great! Now your team has been applying these case tags when cancellation requests and confirmations come in. What can you do with the data?
Head to Reports in FuseDesk and select the Case Tag Count report. This will now show you how many cases got each of your case tags over time.
This allows you to see, for example, each month how many retention offers were made, how many upgrades were processed, how many downgrades were processed, and how many cancellation were processed.