Merchant HQ > Retain

Retention guide

Elevate your subscription program to boost retention and revenue. There are two keys to retention:

Building trust by delivering positive customer experiences.
Preventing both passive and active churn.

We've put together a list of quick wins you can implement right away, plus more long-term projects designed to set you up for lasting success.

Build trust by delivering positive customer experiences

Brand loyalty isn’t dead. Deliver frictionless subscription experiences and best-in-class support to your customers by implementing the features below.

Quick wins

Create a landing page to feature positive reviews, promote best-sellers, and host answers to common questions from current and prospective subscribers.

Train your support team on Recharge and integrate your help desk (Recharge supports integration with support solutions like Gorgias).

Choose the Affinity portal theme to simplify the subscription experience. Jimmy Joy reduced churn by 7% and support tickets by 40% just by switching their portal to Affinity.

Offer partial fulfillment to ensure a positive experience even after a loved product goes out of stock, or bulk update out-of-stock items to a comparable alternative.

High-reward projects

Enable Rewards to build targeted strategies using credits, free gifts and discounts to engage and retain customers at key points of their lifecycle with your brand. Pro & custom plans only

Prevent active and passive churn

You can prevent up to 88% of passive churn and up to 44% of active churn with the products featured below. Need we say more?

Quick wins

Ensure your subscribers can pause, skip, change their order frequency, or even gift a skipped shipment rather than cancel. Make these features easier to access using passwordless login.

High-reward projects

Prevent active churn and protect revenue when you enable Cancellation Prevention and offer customers discounts and incentives based on their unique cancellation reason. Once you have 50 cancellation reasons, Cancellation Insights provides you with suggestions on how to decrease your cancellation rat Pro & custom plans only

Address passive churn with Failed Payment Recovery. Our smart learning technology learns how your store operates, aggregates data from 20,000+ brands to find the best times to retry payments, and notifies customers of issues—alerting them to update their payment information in their customer portal. Pro & custom plans only

Get an extra hand

We’ve partnered with Upwork to connect you with Recharge-experienced freelancers who can be hired on an hourly, ongoing, or project-based cadence, without a contract.

If you have a long-term or complex need, we recommend enlisting the help of one of our agency partners.

More resources to guide your growth

The State of Subscription Commerce 2023

Succeed with Subscriptions

How to get your first 1,000 subscribers & beyond

Expert tips to grow your revenue

The art of retention: How to keep customers coming back