LOLA prevents 23% of cancellations with Cancellation Prevention
About
LOLA was created to address the need for more transparency in women’s health. Founded to make tampons from healthier, cleaner ingredients, LOLA’s quality products help women know exactly what they’re putting into their bodies.
Challenge
High retention is key to LOLA’s subscription-based business. Though their average churn was already low last year, every customer counted toward their bottom line, and they were on the lookout for a new component of their holistic churn reduction strategy.
LOLA was already gathering data on cancellations with an out-of-the-box cancellation survey, but they hadn’t begun offering canceling customers any incentives to maintain their subscriptions. The team didn’t want a solution that would simply give offers to customers as an alternative to canceling—they also wanted the ability to test and measure those offers along the way, intelligently improving their process.
Solution
LOLA collaborated with the team at Recharge to brainstorm their options and decided to implement Cancellation Prevention, as it allowed the team to both present customers with offers as an alternative to canceling and to A/B test those offers’ effectiveness.
“Recharge’s team has been really supportive and helpful in guiding us along that path as we figure it out together.”
Cancellation Prevention
Cancellation Prevention is a no-code solution designed to retain subscribers attempting to deactivate their subscriptions. It uses customer cohort data and order data to create churn reduction strategies and present targeted cancellation reasons and winback strategies.
Implementation: How-to
LOLA’s Cancellation Prevention approach included the following steps:
1. Streamline survey
LOLA streamlined their new cancellation survey to cover the reasons their subscribers most frequently gave for canceling, customizing their phrasing to fit their brand and products.
2. Understand cancellations
With subscriptions comprising over 80% of their business, LOLA knew that it wasn’t enough just to offer customers compelling incentives to deter cancellations. They also needed to understand which tactics aided retention and why, so they could constantly improve their efforts.
3. Launch survey
With that in mind, LOLA launched their first Cancellation Prevention survey to include seven responses, four of which would result in a discount offer when selected. For the options that would offer customers discounts, LOLA included both 10% and 20% discounts to test them against each other.
4. Study analytics
LOLA used the Cancellation Prevention report to track key metrics at a glance, including customer responses, save rate, and estimated save MRR. They logged a 13% save rate overall, and, more importantly, a significant difference in between the two test incentives: the higher discount outperformed the lower one 14% to 11%.
5. Implement learnings
With learnings in hand, LOLA set out to determine if the 20% discounts would outperform their other offers. Their remaining 3 cancellation reasons had historically offered a product swap; now they used Cancellation Prevention to A/B test swaps against discounts.
6. Analyze results
The results are promising: discounts outperformed swaps 19% to 15%, bringing LOLA’s overall save rate to an impressive 23%.
Since this case study was performed, LOLA reported that their overall save rate has already increased to 23%.
“Everything being housed in Recharge is very helpful, as opposed to having to dedicate time in your ESP (email service provider) to then set certain segments or behavior activity and ensure the tagging is correct for those order details that are subscription-based.
So that was a really big help, to be able to do everything under Recharge as opposed to having to dedicate some kind of siloed work in an ESP environment as well for some of that churn mitigation and subscriber activity.”
Results
Cancellation Prevention helped LOLA push their churn even lower. It saved 23% of attempted cancellations, forming part of a comprehensive churn reduction effort that brought their overall churn 22% lower than the same period a year earlier. On top of that, Cancellation Prevention’s A/B testing feature allows the LOLA team to continually check in on the performance of various offers to iterate and optimize their retention strategy.
