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Best practices to create better cancellation flows

Last updated: December 2, 2024

The better your cancellation flow is, the more likely that your at-risk subscribers stay subscribed or return in the future, whether immediately in the form of a pared-down subscription or in the future through a win-back campaign. 

Sure, you can’t win back all your departing subscribers with a few pop-ups. But an effective cancellation flow increases the odds that you’ll keep some of them from churning. Beyond that, it: 

• shows your audience you want to improve their experience and improves audience trust 
• gives you more information about your subscriber experience, helping you improve retention and prevent additional churn
• increases the odds that you’ll win back churned subscribers in the future

Personalizing your cancellation journeys and adding (some) friction to your unsubscribe process can remind your subscribers why they signed on — and keep some of them from leaving. But make it too hard to cancel and you risk violating your subscribers’ trust (and new federal click-to-cancel regulations).  

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So how can you strike a healthy balance — and keep your subscribers happy? Learn how to create more effective cancellation flows below: 

Best practices for creating better cancellation flows 

Make cancellation easy 

A transparent cancellation process maintains your audience’s trust and keeps you in compliance with a growing number of laws requiring simpler unsubscribe processes. 

The United States Federal Trade Commission will begin enforcing its own click-to-cancel laws on March 31, 2025. So if you haven’t updated your cancellation flow lately, test it ASAP to make sure it complies with the new laws. Key guidelines include: 

• It must be just as easy, if not easier, for subscribers to cancel as it is to sign up. So if users can sign up in two steps, you can’t make them complete six steps to cancel. 
• Customers who sign up via the web or an app must be able to cancel via those channels. So if someone can subscribe online, they also need to be able to cancel online (not call a customer service number, sit on hold for 20 minutes, then cancel). 
• Users must be able to easily identify how they can cancel their subscriptions. 
• You must get your audience’s consent before renewing subscriptions or converting free trials to paid memberships. 
• Brands must separate consent to subscription from any other part of the transaction via a consent checkbox. This consent should make clear (a) that the customer will be charged unless they take action to cancel, (b) the amount that will be billed and the frequency of recurring charges, (c) the date by which they must cancel to avoid being billed and (d) all information necessary to locate the cancellation mechanism.  
• If customers sign up in person, they must be permitted to cancel online or via a call center. 

So what does that mean for publishers? 

• If someone can sign up for your publication online, but they need to call a rep to cancel, you need to create an online cancellation flow ASAP. Set up a smart flow and you can actually reduce churn, though. One year after implementing online cancellation journeys, the Minnesota Star Tribune improved its save rate from 8.5% in the call center to 18.5% online, as Tom Burrell wrote in the Retention Blueprint newsletter. 
• You can make subscribers question their decision to leave. But if they do decide to leave, you can’t make it harder for them to follow through. So if you want to add friction to your cancel flow, you’re better served personalizing offers to your departing subscribers rather or encouraging them to pause/reduce their subscription, rather than adding extra steps to your process.

Use your first-party data to learn more about churning subscribers and identify key risk factors 

Nobody wants to lose subscribers. But some churn is inevitable. The best publishers know this — and they use their cancellations to improve their content and targeting going forward. So each month or quarter, review your first-party data to see what characteristics predict churn. 

This can reveal patterns or trends that’ll help you adjust strategy and retain subscribers going forward. 

For instance, certain audience segments may be more likely to churn than others. Or, as research from publishers like The Boston Globe has shown, paid subscribers that come from your newsletter may be less likely to churn than subscribers from other referral sources. 

But you can only do this if you have a single place to see how your audience engages with you across every channel. 

Otherwise, you won’t have a complete view of your subscriber journey — and you won’t be able to make the improvements you need to keep future subscribers onboard. 

The solution: Consider using a CDP to unify your audience data from every channel. This way, you can see how each audience member how interacts across each channel — and create segments that account for someone’s activity across your entire brand (for instance, you can create an “at-risk subscriber” segment that’s based on someone’s engagement with email, website, events, etc.). 

For best results, use a CDP that connects to the rest of your audience development tools — like email and subscription management — so you can easily create segments and use them to run more personalized offers right away.

Consider providing a pause option   

Say that you’re running a prestigious sports publication and you charge $15/month for high-level team-specific reporting and analysis. For a full-time sports enthusiast, that’s a great deal. 

But what if Jennifer only watches football? Your $15/month subscription is a good value from August to February. But after Super Bowl Sunday, she’s going to cancel. And you have to cross your fingers and hope she remembers to resubscribe in August. 

She might, if your content’s good enough. But why risk it?   

In this case, it makes sense to offer Jennifer a pause option. This way, she can stop paying for the time when she’s unlikely to read, then receive reminders to resubscribe when enough time has passed. This reminder can consist of a single email or a full re-engagement campaign. Experiment as it makes sense for your audience and business model.  

Offer discounted or reduced subscription tiers during your cancellation flow 

In addition to an immediate unsubscribe option, allow readers to customize their subscription preferences. You could let them change their newsletter sending frequency (daily, weekly, monthly), topic selection, or specific newsletters. Giving your subscribers more control increases the odds that they stay subscribed. 

Include a survey in your cancellation flow to learn why people unsubscribe and create personalized win-back offers

Most times, you won’t be able to pin down the exact reason why someone’s unsubscribing. Or if they do provide a specific reason, it won’t be actionable for you. 

But sometimes, user feedback can give you useful next steps. Maybe someone thought they needed your proprietary industry research, but a competitor provides similar data for half the price. Or maybe your half-price intro offer attracts people that aren’t willing to pay for your full-price subscription. And those are factors you can control.  

So in your cancellation flow, ask departing subscribers why they’re leaving. This will give you the information you need to a) potentially win back those subscribers and b) keep your current subscribers happy. 

That’s all well and good, provided that people actually fill out your survey. Get more completions with these tips: 

• Ask 3 questions max: It’s hard enough to get someone to complete a survey in a neutral context. When they’re about to cancel their subscription, they’re even less likely to do it. Keep your survey short to increase the odds that someone stops to fill it out. The most important questions: why they canceled, what they enjoyed about your service, and what you could do better.
• Continuously refresh your survey options. Subscriber satisfaction is a function of their expectations — and those expectations are always changing. Your survey responses should reflect that. Regularly change the response options in your exit survey to accurately capture subscriber sentiment.
• Provide an open-ended feedback option: Let subscribers share feedback in their own words with an open-ended text box. This helps you monitor potential churn issues — and adjust accordingly — before it hurts revenue too much. 

Put in in practice: For instance, Minnesota Star-Tribune uses this survey to identify why each subscriber is leaving, then uses it to improve their offers and craft their messaging accordingly. 

Use survey insights to create personalized win-back campaigns 

So you know who your churned subscribers are. You know why they tend to cancel. Now you can start trying to win them back.

First step: Create win-back campaigns that specifically address the reasons your audience indicated in the surveys you just ran. 

Say that subscribers most often cancel because your content’s not relevant or the price is too expensive. 

You’d create two separate win-back campaigns for each of these audiences. 

For the former group, you might create a 3-email campaign focusing on your content. You could use content recommendations to surface personalized content for each recipient. Or you could spotlight additional newsletters and webinars that you offer.

For the price-sensitive group, you might send a promotional discount offer or promote lower subscription tiers.  

Your specific campaigns will depend on your audience, subscribers, and, most importantly, their most common cancellation reasons. But the key here is to turn your churned subscribers’ feedback into more targeted, successful win-back campaigns.

How it works: This is where using an integrated audience data platform like Omeda pays off: When you use Omeda’s CDP, each person’s survey responses automatically flow to their pre-existing audience profile. And they’re automatically added to any segments that they qualify for, including cancellation reasons. From there, you can easily create customized campaigns for each of those groups, then run and adjust campaigns for each of those groups, all in the same dashboard.

Book a demo now to see how Omeda’s integrated audience data platform can work for you. 

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