In this article, Davide Liverino, B2B marketing leader focused on subscription revenue growth, uncovers how Netflix has used the release dates of the latest Stranger Things episodes as a strategic lock-in for their subscription model.
-> The clever gap between the first and final episodes being released, ensuring subscribers pass a billing cycle whilst waiting
-> Strategic 'pulses' of releases to build buzz around the series, turning audiences into a free marketing army
-> Playing a defensive strategy by releasing these episodes during the "churn danger zone" over the holidays when consumers tend to cut finances

Finally, Davide shares how subscription leaders can put this to practice in their own model

Instead of being a threat, successfully retaining subscribers can often happen thanks to easy-to-cancel user experiences (as well as retaining throughout the user journey of course). As Travis Bernard, Executive Director, Growth Marketing at LA Times put it, "brands focused on long-term growth prioritize trust over short-term barriers". 

Let's dig into the topic.

Over in France, a recent “termination in 3-clicks” law requires that consumers should always be able to end a contract 1) online and 2) in 3-clicks or less.

Other countries are already implementing similar restrictions, or set to do so soon, and publishers are getting worried…

If someone can unsubscribe in just a click or two, what’s going to happen to my retention rates?!

On the contrary, these regulations could be the push that publishers need to put audience needs first, implement retention strategies throughout the user experience (not just as an afterthought) and allow for positive, lasting impressions that leave the door open to potential re-subscription in the future.

> If you’re interested in learning about how publishers have already reacted to these regulations, in France and elsewhere, check out this article

When should you think about retention?

Or rather, when shouldn’t you think about retention…

Retention shouldn’t just be an afterthought at the moment of cancellation, nor as a ‘post-conversion problem’. In fact, many successful digital reader revenue teams are mission-based to avoid siloed acquisition and retention teams, ensuring the former’s KPIs (high conversion rates but little thought for engagement/retention after this moment) don’t create problems for the latter (high churn rates).

Newsletter subscription, free registration, apps, games, or even simple access to content can all have a positive impact on retention even before a reader subscribes. For instance, increasingly more publishers with a registration model are leading new members through a 3-step onboarding journey, just like they do for subscribers, with the goal of boosting engagement and ticking off some of those important actions that lead to long-term loyalty.

South China Morning Post has a 3-step onboarding journey for newly registered members, encouraging them to sign up to one or more newsletters (habit forming) and build a personalized news feed (support engagement, and this is likely a feature that maximized retention).

The point I’m trying to make is that easy-to-cancel laws are not the nail on the coffin for publishers, because it’s simply this single moment that matters for retention. There are so many other opportunities to keep a reader engaged. And perhaps these easy-to-cancel laws are exactly what’s needed to remind us of this fact.

What’s more, with simple, transparent unsubscription journeys, readers won’t lose trust or confidence in a publisher and may even consider coming back, especially if they know that they could choose to leave again easily without having to phone 5 helplines.

Using data to discover which features correlate with high engagement

In order to think about retention even before a subscriber considers cancelling, you need to understand which features or actions correlate with high engagement, and thus retention.

There are generally two key metrics used to evaluate the value of a feature or product in a reader revenue model:

• How popular a product is (proxied by the average proportion of users that use it at least once over a 30-day timeframe)
• How impactful a product is on engagement (proxied by how engaged a user of that product is 30 days after using it)

DER SPIEGEL did a similar analysis, shared in an article on The Audiencers:

1 – Identifying all available platform features, defined as functional elements that enhance user experience. As news constantly changes, editorial content is excluded.

2 – Analyzing consistently available features and highly engaged users (based on engagement score) to ensure reliable data.

3 – Regular usage means engaging with a feature weekly over four weeks.

They also ran guided in-depth interviews to gain insights into which features users are aware of, which they use and how they rate them. 

According to FT Strategies, you can then rank features by how ‘likely’ they are to drive adoption and generate engagement. Below, an example from a Portuguese publisher.

DER SPIEGEL’s version looked like this:

This research can then be used to strategically nudge those with lower usage towards engagement drivers by highlighting them in mailing, on-site, during onboarding, etc.

The example of Financial Times

At FT, data analysis has shown that the following habits have the greatest impact:

• Signing up to the app & receiving push notifications
• Organically following topics on myFT
• Signing up for newsletters
• Engaging with comments
• Reading on a Saturday or Sunday
• Reading the FT across multiple devices
• Viewing graphics / visual journalism

If we take the example of a subscriber building up their myFT, by following topics and saving content, we can see this being nudged throughout the user journey, from early life, in-life, growth and renewal / cancellation.

In the onboarding journey:

I really like these bundles of content (“newsletters, podcasts and more”) that allow for content diversification around a topic that interests the reader, and all in a single click.

Whilst exploring the website (‘Add to my FT’):

On the subscriber account page:

Readers are congratulated for completing this action (excuse the bad screenshot):

And finally it’s included in the cancellation journey for loss aversion:

Reminder of the goals in the cancellation journey: 

TL;DR: to both retain the subscriber whilst not harming potential future re-subscriptions or referrals.

> Create a fair amount of friction to prompt reconsideration
> Not be too obstructive to cause frustration
> Highlight the value loss
> Understand why they’re leaving to be able to…
> …offer relevant alternatives
> Encourage them to commit for a longer duration
> Ensure they’re confident in the fact that they’ve cancelled but can come back if they want to

For Romain Lhote of L'Équipe, personalized offers, messaging and showcasing relevant usage stats (such as number of articles read) during cancellation proved highly effective.

> More benchmarks on the topic in this dedicated article.

What other strategies should you try to keep readers from visiting the cancellation page?

> Understand the conversion killers and address them

It’s not enough to understand why someone wants to use your product. You also need to know why not?

At Freeletics, they realized early on that many people don’t have much space to train at home. So they developed special workouts that can work in small spaces. Other users have neighbors who complain about the noise, so they need quiet workouts.

Applying this to the media industry, EL PAIS has addressed the “Lack of time” restraint and created an “Exprès” feature, offering readers a curated update on the most important news stories of the day in 7 headlines, explained in 7 minutes.

FT Edit was launched with a similar goal, also providing a lower-cost subscription offer.

> Lock-in effects

This refers to the idea of making it a hassle to switch between products or cancel a subscription. But, be warned, it’s a careful balance – if you overdo it, customers will feel trapped and frustrated, thus damaging the brand. Or, in the worst case, you end up creating dark patterns that really aren’t recommended (slash are illegal).

But there are little innovative tricks to keep your customers loyal…

For example: personalization

Spotify is the prime example here. The app knows your music tastes from the last 10 years and uses this data to recommend new music and create tailored playlists. Spotify itself says that its promise is not just access to music, but more importantly discovery. Switching to Apple Music means the app has to get to know me all over again before it can make recommendations on a comparable level.

A second lock-in example: price guarantee

Average monthly spend is increasing rapidly as prices soar. This makes old contracts all the more valuable. This can be the flat lease from the 90s or, as with the Washington Post, a price guarantee for the next 50 years. For the Watergate anniversary, they offered a subscription for $50 per year with a price guarantee until 2072 – which, importantly, expires if you cancel or pause the subscription.

> The brilliant Lennart Schneider shares 9 lock-in effects in his article on The Audiencers

> Habit forming

Subscription models live off habits. Just look at the success of newsletters in retaining subscribers, or the buzz around Wordle, returning to complete the game on a daily basis.

But hardly anyone is as good at forming habits as Duolingo.

A large part of this success is thanks to streaks, a feature where users are rewarded for completing an exercise a day.

But this strategy wasn’t built overnight – the team have run over 600 tests on optimizing streaks. In Lenny Rachitsky‘s podcast, Jackson Shuttleworth (Group PM, Retention Team) reveals what they’ve learned through testing:

Find a goal that people want to achieve

Streaks don’t work for every digital offering. They’re designed to build habits that users are proud of and that are difficult to achieve.

E.g. at beehiiv: “I would like to write a newsletter every week”

Remember that streaks rely on two psychological effects:

> Loss aversion: psychologically, it’s worse for people to lose something than never to have had it.
> Sunk costs: the more time, money or work we’ve already invested, the more likely we are to hold on to things

That’s why the perceived value of your Streak increases with each passing day. And so does the effect on retention.

Find the right balance between ambition and flexibility

Jackson sees a great danger in streaks becoming too easily accessible and therefore worthless. At the same time, retention drops abruptly if a streak is lost.

Hence why they introduced “streak freezes”. If you take a day off, you can still continue your streak.

> Have a flick through my LinkedIn post on the topic for more recommendations from Lenny.

> And if all else fails, you always have the grace period and post-cancellation

Prioritizing former subscribers in your strategy, especially reaching out to them within the first few days after they cancel, is crucial. At L’Équipe:

• 70% of re-subscribers re-engage within seven days of cancellation.Former subscribers acquired during promotions are particularly responsive to targeted relaunches with attractive pricing.
• On average, former subscribers are 18 times more likely to re-subscribe than members, while members are 18 times more likely to subscribe than anonymous users.

It’s for this reason that they target subscribers during their grace period and immediately post-loss of access.

For instance, a banner warns churned users that they soon won’t have access to this content:

Or a pop-up with a message from the Editor-in-chief sharing what’s coming up at L’Équipe:

How do we (try to) measure and track user engagement ?

I’d already heard about RFV (Recency, Frequency, Volume) as an indicator from the Financial Times, and our version synthesizes subscriber and member activity, considering regularity and consumption.

Given L’Équipe’s years-long focus on a membership-driven strategy, we now have over 2 million active monthly members and subscribers, along with a significant amount of behavioral data for analysis.

The most complex phase of implementing this project wasn’t developing the formula but rather the iterative testing phase. This allowed us to refine the metric, replacing “Recency” with “Regularity.”

One of the initial conclusions (unsurprisingly!) was a clear correlation between customer lifetime value and engagement level.

The more we increase customer engagement levels, the more subscriber lifetime extends and the more members convert to subscribers

Why is this metric more accurate than page views or time spent?

It takes into account the regularity, frequency, and volume of content consumed, while adding a weighting based on the “importance” of the content: the greater the “value” of a piece of content in terms of editorial significance, revenue generation, and the time spent producing it, the higher its weight will be.

• Regularity, frequency, and content volume: factors in the weight of consumed content—giving more weight to editorially and financially valuable content.
• Frequency of visits: How often a user returns to the platform (both web and apps)
• Content diversity: The range of distinct content consumed
• Tenure: How long someone has been a member or subscriber
• Interaction with content: With higher weighting for Flagship content

For instance, a user who primarily reads “live match” content with low consumption of premium or flagship content will get a lower RFV than someone consuming more higher-value articles or documentaries.

Triple objectives to boost engagement (and of course retention!):

1. Increase recurrence
2. Improve frequency
3. Encourage consumption of high-value editorial content

Key insights from RFV analysis and actions taken:

#1 Correlation between app downloads and high RFV

We developed, in partnership with POOOL, various formats to promote app downloads.

#2 Email openers have higher RFV

We launched a newsletter project targeting subscribers with a low RFV (less than 25) —particularly those with weaker weekend engagement— to provide a weekend news summary and insights from our editorial team.

#3 Consuming Flagship content drives high RFV

Although we defined the content weighting in our algorithm, our initial analysis emphasized the importance of ‘original’ content in customer lifetime value.

By ‘flagship content,’ I mean the very best of L’Équipe — the finest work from our journalists, whether in the form of videos, podcasts, written pieces, or documentaries.

One of the challenges for a media organization is ensuring its content thrives on the homepage of the site. News moves quickly, one story replaces another, and an incredible piece can fail to reach its audience because it was showcased for too short a time, paired with an unclear image, or given a misunderstood headline.

To address this, we adopted an idea suggested by our subscribers: releasing a monthly preview of upcoming content, similar to how platforms present their programming schedules.

Both on site:

And in the newsletter:

These campaigns resulted in notable RFV increases:

• +9% for platform clickers
• +12% for email clickers

> Subscriber (re)engagement strategies from L’Équipe and Les Echos-Le Parisien

#4 Interactive features do have an impact on RFV (Especially for members)

We aimed to foster interactivity among readers. With over 500K monthly comments, the “comments” section on the platform is essential. So to maximize its value, the first step was to update the space with a redesign and new features, such as emoji reactions, AI-generated comment summaries, etc.

Our second objective was to foster greater proximity between audiences and the brand: bringing journalists and readers closer together to develop a sense of belonging. As part of the Olympic Games, we introduced several types of content, including Q&A sessions, which we plan to gradually roll out across our platforms.

> Going further with interactive engagement: DER SPIEGEL’s debating feature

Priority #2: Targeted retention and re-subscription offers in an marketing automated cycle

Prioritizing former subscribers in your strategy, especially reaching out to them within the first few days after they cancel, is crucial:

• 70% of re-subscribers re-engage within seven days of cancellation.Former subscribers acquired during promotions are particularly responsive to targeted relaunches with attractive pricing.
• On average, former subscribers are 18 times more likely to re-subscribe than members, while members are 18 times more likely to subscribe than anonymous users.

Retention and re-subscription scenarios:

We identified two main phases, each divided into distinct analysis periods:

Retention Period: The client has made his cancellation request but still has access and is informed of its impending end.

Re-Subscription Period: The client loses access, prompting relaunches during key periods:

• Day 0–7
• Day 8–30
• Day 30+

We deployed cycles of retention and re-subscription across all customer touchpoints:

• Cancellation form (called in France “loi MUPA”)
• Service-client cancellation confirmation
• Promotional messages on digital platforms
• Apps, push notifications, in-app messages
• Paid media

To achieve the highest possible results, we first implemented offers (initially the same for all users) across all customer touchpoints.

Spoiler alert: doing this across all channels and levers has a MASSIVE impact!

All this communication is coordinated using audiences created within our CDP, which are then shared with all our third-party tools.

A culture of testing as a growth driver

Over the past 18 months, we tried a growth marketing approach, which, in our terms, means ultra-personalization and precise targeting of our subscription messages, starting with our retention and re-subscription offers.

A multidisciplinary team (data, acquisition, and CRM) was formed to define targeting strategies and, more importantly, activate them across our platforms. Each step is tested, analyzed, and then optimized.

Among the initiatives:

• Over 300 campaigns tested annually, featuring variations on:
  • Marketing angles (what are the benefits? Content? Which words should we use to define the benefits?)
  • Pricing approach
  • Trial period and its price

In 2024, enhanced automation of campaigns enabled us to manage around 15 specific segments with tailored offers and messages. The primary advantage of this automation is its ability to significantly improve our conversion rates.

Key learnings from these tests:

• We discovered that a significant portion of former subscribers are quite receptive to retention offers at higher price with commitments that do not negatively impact our ARPU but instead come with a one-year commitment.
• This approach meaningfully increases the LTV of our subscribers and, by extension, boosts our margins.

Thanks to these strategies, 75% of customers who reached the -100 days mark of their promotional offer period are still subscribers as of November 2024.

The context of our two media brands featured in the session?

• L’Équipe: the newspaper (inevitably) took advantage of the momentum of the Paris Olympics to launch a monthly subscription offer at €2.24 for 36 months in the 1000 day run up to the Games. Never-before-seen for L’Équipe over such a long period, and an exciting opportunity to acquire and engage. But a super discount also means potential super churn. But, spoiler, 75% of those who subscribed to this highly reduced offer are still active today (the end of November 2024).
• Les Echos – Le Parisien: acquiring new subscribers was THE priority for the group. But the teams realized that, while welcoming new customers, they were sometimes forgetting to take the time to get to know them properly – so as not to let them slip away.

So what lessons did these two huge names in the French Media landscape have to share on retaining subscribers?

The best-of retention strategies from The Audiencers’ Festival Paris in 4 steps!

Step #1 : Define engagement

How do you define and measure engagement to be able to effectively use it in subscription models?

For L’Équipe, the aim is to define a score for each subscriber, enabling them to be classified according to a RFV index: Recency, Frequency, Volume. They chose to measure 4 criteria corresponding to this index:

• Number. of visits
• Volume of unique content consumed
• Frequency of visit
• How long the reader has been a subscriber

To these criteria, L’Équipe adds a weighting according to the content formats most followed: a subscriber who visits long-form documentaries twice a week, for example, obtains a higher RFV score than one who visits the web every day only for live content.

For Les Echos – Le Parisien, the challenge was to measure engagement using simple, readable data that could be accessed in real time. First of all, the group collected its readers’ browsing data over a one-week period:

• Number of devices
• Number of visits
• Number of days when the reader visited the site at least once
• Number of articles consumed

This criteria enabled them to distinguish 3 reader segments and define a decision tree to detect weak or positive engagement signals. The result: data that is sorted, ordered and, above all, immediately usable.

> To read next: How we measure audience engagement at DER SPIEGEL

Step #2 : Segment audiences

For L’Équipe, the D-1000 offer for the Paris 2024 Olympics gave them the opportunity to test scenarios on their subscribers, using a bit of what they knew but also experimenting with hypothesis:

• What they already knew: ex-subscribers are 18x more likely to subscribe than readers who have never subscribed before
• What they learnt: there’s a “promophile” audience who’s addicted to good deals! And this requires a very specific retention strategy. If it’s well thought out, it can lead to an even better re-subscription

To reach profiles with lower RFV scores, multidisciplinary teams tested over 300 different messages in one year. Verdict in 2024: L’Équipe has identified 15 segments, with specific offers and messages for each.

At Les Echos – Le Parisien, to address paying customers – and thus generate additional sales – they segmented subscribers into 3 categories:

1 – Subscribers who haven’t logged in for a while, who don’t seem to visit anymore (with a high churn propensity)

2 – Subscribers with a falling level of engagement (who need to be re-engaged)

3 – Engaged subscribers (who should be converted into brand ambassadors)

Recurring actions have been set up for each of these identified populations, with different triggers when engagement decreases or increases.

Step #3 : Prioritize

As we said at last year’s Festival, keeping up with 4,000 KPIs at a time is a fail-safe way of losing track of what’s important. It’s all a question of focus and prioritization.

At L’Equipe, certain projects have been prioritized for long-term retention: 

• Previews of upcoming releases in newsletters: +9% clicks and +12% email opens. And, according to a study conducted by the publisher, subscribers report consuming more content thanks to this feature.

• More interactivity between readers: with over 150,000 comments per month, the publisher has chosen to redesign this key space with new functionalities. Subscribers can now find all their comments in one place, click on other subscribers’ profiles, add emojis or ask an AI to summarize all the comments on an article.

• Closer to the media brand: the aim here is to bring journalists and readers closer together, to develop a sense of belonging. How do they achieve this? With a WhatsApp channel gathering 195K followers (+6.3 CTR) or with words signed by the editorial team directly inserted in the weekend debrief newsletter (+16% RFV).

These examples have been materialized in a time matrix that defines which actions are activated throughout the lifecycle. Including for churned subscribers, during their grace period, and to promote re-subscription.

For Les Echos – Le Parisien, this began with the prioritization of 4 major KPIs to measure the actions implemented:

1 – Churn rate

2 – Email performance

3 – Subscriber evolution by offer development

4 – Follow-up of unsubscribers after 1 week, following a retention action

Some of the projects introduced by the group, according to their different types of subscribers:

• For sleeper subscribers: the publisher has chosen to completely stop sending emails to 20% of this group as a test.
• For those with declining engagement: more personalized content and an invitation to join the ‘Club Les Echos Débats’, the debating feature for Les Echos’ subscribers
• For those already engaged: communication focused on services and features (as opposed to content) and news previews.

> Unsubscription journeys on top publisher sites

Step #4 : Takeaways to apply elsewhere

What can you takeaway from L’Équipe and Les Echos – Le Parisien’s strategies? 

• Retention and engagement strategies are a team effort. Not just marketing. It’s a tasty blend of talents in data, CRM, distribution and, of course marketing. Several publishers also made a special mention to customer service, an essential aid to re-engaging ex-subscribers.

• Measure, classify, simplify, prioritize: when it comes to your engagement strategy, it’s tempting to go off in all directions. But at the end of the day, there’s only one objective: to produce data that’s simple, readable for everyone, accessible in real time, and that implies precise actions to be taken.

• 70% of re-subscribers do so within 7 days of the end of their access (the rate is even higher for new arrivals during a promotional period!). The actions to be taken before and during these first post-subscription days clearly depend on the subscriber’s profile and the weak signals of their commitment.

• Test, test, test. In addition to the duration and price of the subscription, many other metrics can be tested: the introductory price, tagline, design, email content, recurrence of notifications and pushes, etc. As the tests progress, the relevance of the tests is refined until the most impactful ones are defined.

This article is from Tom Burrell’s, Retention Blueprint Newsletter. Transform your retention impact in just five minutes per week. Written specifically for Subscription businesses, 'The Retention Blueprint' is a free, retention-focused digest delivered straight to your inbox every Friday, providing you with the insights you need to drive retention-led growth.

1. Gain a better understanding of an individual customer’s immediate and long-term needs and assist them in recognizing and communicating those needs.
2. Understand groups of customers, allowing us to improve existing products or create new products and to develop policies and programs to support customer retention at moments of truth. 

The key to realizing value in customer data is developing experiences that support customers at moments of truth and as a result improve customer retention. 

Ok, so this makes sense, I hear you say, but how do you do that practically? Let’s dive in.

1 – Analyze all recent voluntary churn events e.g. 12- 24 months of data   

• Ensure you have a complete view of customer interactions immediately before the churn event; this will be easy if you have CDP with this data consolidated. Otherwise, you must build a temporary data store to conduct the analysis. 
• These are the types of variables that you will need (lots of these are widely applicable, but some are more relevant to one kind of subscription business vs another):
  • Tenure
  • Usage patterns 
  • Service contact reason 
  • Service contact resolution customer effort 
  • Technical/service issues 
  • Delivery problems/delays
  • Actions in early life vs tenured customers 
  • Content consumed 
  • Acquisition source/channel 
  • Most recent NPS response 

> To read next: Publisher unsubscription journeys: benchmarking and best practices

2 – Identify the most significant cohorts

• Identify the most significant cohorts— in terms of the volume of customers that experienced one of the above categories immediately before churn, e.g., the volume of customers churning who experienced the same service issue prior to churn or the volume of customer cancelling in the first month.
• Your customers are all different. There are likely to be different ‘events’ that trigger churn for different cohorts. 
• The data is likely to contain some quick wins. For example, the way a specific service issue was handled may lead to churn for a particular cohort. If this is the case, you can jump to step 5 for this cohort; if not, proceed to step 3.

3 – Research your most significant cohorts to understand why

• 1-1 interviews, focus groups and even ethnography can help you understand the why behind the churn decision.
• Then, using qualitative insights, extrapolate them to the base through surveys to ensure you do not make assumptions based on small samples.
• Additional customer data and analytics may help here, too. 
• Sometimes, a combination of things cumulates in the churn event, not just the most recent moment, research / further analysis can help uncover false positives.

4 – Leverage learnings from others 

• Case studies from how other brands handle similar moments can help massively.  
• I shared four examples from Netflix, Starbucks, The FT and Apple in episode 15 of this newsletter here 
• Another from Amazon in episode 1 is here.
• Learning what others do can help you identify what to do and sometimes what not to do.  

5 – Adjust the experience 

• Armed with knowledge of what happens immediately before a churn event, why it happens and what others do, plan your tests to optimise the experience.
• Tests could be conducted on Products, CRM Marketing, Customer Service, Operations (like delivery), Instructional information, and more.  
• Remember to ensure you run an A/B test, keeping the existing experience as is for a proportion of the customer base and adjusting the experience for the others.  
• Running with the idea without setting up a proper test is dangerous because you could positively impact churn but not be aware of it because of other external factors like market dynamics, seasonality, and other significant events impacting overall churn.

6 – Monitor & iterate 

• Monitor the incremental impact on retention of your actions vs your control experience.  
• Iterate the experience to improve it further.
• Track CLV improvements and map them to your actions.   
• (There is more on CLV in episode 1).

Note, we have looked at churn events here, but this approach can also work for retention by examining the patterns and behaviors of long-term customers and the interactions and experiences that drive tenure.  

Final Thoughts: 

To effectively realize the retention opportunity in customer data, brands must focus on transforming customer data into actionable insights. By analyzing churn events, identifying key customer cohorts, and understanding the deeper reasons behind churn, you can craft targeted experiences that address critical moments of truth and turn a churn event into a retention event. 

Transform your retention impact in just 5 minutes per week, with ‘The Retention Blueprint’ Newsletter“.

The goal during the unsubscription/cancellation journey is to both retain the subscriber whilst not harming potential future re-subscriptions or referrals.

• Create a fair amount of friction to prompt reconsideration
• Not be too obstructive to cause frustration
• Highlight the value loss
• Understand why they’re leaving to be able to…
• …offer relevant alternatives
• Encourage them to commit for a longer duration
• Ensure they’re confident in the fact that they’ve cancelled but can come back if they want to

Starting the cancellation process

• Don’t hide the “Cancel” button – the publishers benchmarked here all included this button in the subscriber account page, often in a “Manage subscription” tab

• Make use of this moment to provide alternative options to cancelling, such as changing to a different subscription offer or pausing subscription

Understand why the subscriber wishes to cancel

This step is only necessary if you’re going to do something with this information – either internally to improve your subscription product or to personalize the subsequent steps in the unsubscription journey, perhaps with offers adapted to the reason why the reader wants to leave.

For instance, The Economist adapts the messaging based on why someone wishes to cancel:

Loss aversion

Encourage your reader to reconsider and question whether they want to lose out on these benefits. This can be within the on-site journey but also in the period when the subscriber has cancelled but still has access, like the example from Amazon Prime who sent this in an email a few days after cancelling.

• Financial Times personalizes this page based on articles saved by the subscriber in their account

• Continue to push your value proposition, considering why the reader may have subscribed in the first place
• Create a sense of FOMO with messaging such as “lose” or “miss out”
• Provide a “Keep my subscription” button, perhaps making this bolder and more visible than the other
• Ensure help is easily accessed, perhaps with a call center number or link to a FAQ

Offer alternative options to cancelling

• The New York Times / The Athletic is very clear and direct, laying out what the subscriber currently has and what they could get, helping to build trust

• The Telegraph frame this page as if it were the subscriptions offers page, offering monthly or annual payment options

• Le Monde offer the option to pause subscription instead of fully cancelling

• Consider mutually beneficial offers – low cost for the subscriber, long term length to support your retention strategy
• Note that this step is the final one before confirming cancellation and often follows the step highlighting the value included in the subscription package, making the low offers seem even better value for money

Confirm cancellation on- and off-site

The cancellation has now been made. Although all is not lost (win-back campaigns can be highly effective), now is the time to reassure the reader that they will no longer be billed.

• Confirm cancellation on-site and via email
• Reassure them that they’ll no longer be billed
• Make it clear when they’ll lose access
• Offer the chance to speak to support
• Provide a button to reactivate their subscription if they change their mind
• The Altlantic remind the user of the benefits of subscription:

• Financial Times promotes their lighter subscription offer, FT Edit, below the fold on this page:

What not to do in the unsubscription journey

• Make it hard to find the unsubscribe button
• Not provide easy-to-find information related to cancellation
• No possibility to cancel online
• Lack of written confirmation post-cancellation

> To read next: 3 clicks to cancel, the new legislations that are forcing publishers to rethink their unsubscription journey

Case study: making cancellation possible online at The Financial Times

The Financial Times shared 5 goals for online cancellation:

• To allow Customer Service to focus on increasing engagement and complex queries
• To allow subscribers to transition between products, especially at trial or discount end points
• Before considering Customer Service time saved, cannot be a revenue loss
• Improve NPS / customer feedback
• Reduce GDPR risk

The online cancellation flow:

Depending on the subscriber’s current state, there are 3 offer strategies:

Offer transition: offer a lower price product instead of cancellation. For example, Standard Monthly instead of Premium Monthly.

Offer discount: keep the same product but have the next X renewals at Y% off

Offer price freeze: your current discount would have expired after your next renewal, but you can keep it for another X renewals

Importantly, they measure the performance of these offer campaigns, and the value of online cancel vs Customer Service cancellations using the LTV adjusted save rate. If you only measure save or churn rate, campaigns will bias towards larger discounts.

As this data shows, save rate is slightly lower than Customer Service calls but the average discount given is smaller, so price adjusted save rate is higher.

Benchmarking

L'Equipe is an emblematic French sports newspaper with a daily digital readership of 2.5 million, and over 200,000 subscribers to its paid digital offer. Romain Lhote, CMO, spoke at The Audiencers' Festival and Workshop in London this June about their retention strategy whilst increasing their subscription offer price.

This is what happened to the sports daily newspaper, L’Equipe (which has 1.5 billion page views a month, just to give you an idea…), when they sold thousands of subscriptions at €2.24 a month (instead of €12) in celebration of the 1000 day run-up to the Paris Olympics.

The huge discount ends this summer, just before the Olympics. And of course, the L’Équipe team is putting in the work to ensure the subscribers who notice the price change don’t churn immediately.

So, how can we limit the damage? Poool’s team arrived with a few ideas to orchestrate a churn-prevention strategy, that marketers at L’Équipe have now made their own.

Their goal: Set up on-site user journeys that will enable them to maximize retention rates for those “flash” offers subscribers.

1. Split the project into phases, building a retro planning of actions to be accomplished before the planned price-change date

2. Define the type of actions that maximize reader engagement & loyalty

For instance, the team at L’Equipe found that subscribers who download their mobile app, are subscribed to certain newsletters, or read a certain type of long-form content are more loyal than others.

Therefore, they decided to start with 4 simple Poool Engage widgets:

Action #1: Show on-site banners with a 1-click newsletter subscription

The display settings

Format:	Display rules:
Sticky banner, top of screen	Show 10 times maximum
One-click newsletter subscription	Only on article pages
“Close” option available	Both web mobile & desktop

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> Also from The Audiencers’ Festival: The Guardian: reader revenue growth & proposition development

Action #2: Suggest mobile app download

The display settings

Format:	Display rules:
Sticky banner, bottom of screen	Capped to 3 times max every 7 days
Redirect to Apple or Android appstore	Only on article pages
“Ignore” option available	Only on web mobile

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Action #3: Announce which content is about the get released

The display settings

Format:	Display rules:
Sticky banner, top of screen	Capped to once per day
Foldable	Show 10 times maximum
No redirection, no link	Only on home pages

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Action #4: Invite readers to join their WhatsApp channel

Because the team at L’Équipe knows that their WhatsApp members will stay subscribed for longer, they launched a pop-in promoting it, for subscribers only.

The display settings

Format:	Display rules:
Toaster	Show once per week
“Close” option available	Only on articles pages
	Only on web mobile

Action #5: Warn churned users that they soon won’t have access to this content

The display settings

Format:	Display rules:
Sticky banner, bottom of screen	Show 10 times maximum
“Close” option available	Only on articles pages
	Both web mobile & desktop

Originally built for at-risk subscribers, these strategies have been progressively deployed for all subscriber cohorts.