Our subscription app has been struggling with retention lately. We lose about 8% of subscribers every month, and once they’re gone, they rarely come back.
The problem is that when users cancel through the app stores, we have zero ability to communicate with them or offer any incentives to stay. It’s a black box.
We recently moved our subscription flow to a web-based system with web2wave, which gives us direct access to customer emails and the ability to create custom win-back campaigns when they try to cancel.
We’re now testing a few different approaches:
Offering a 50% discount for the next 3 months
Extending their subscription by 1 month for free
Offering a pause option instead of cancellation
It’s early, but we’re seeing promising results - about 25% of canceling users accept one of these offers.
Has anyone found particularly effective win-back strategies for subscription apps? What specific offers or messaging worked best for you?
We went through the exact same thing last year. App store cancellations are a black hole of lost opportunity.
Switched to Web2Wave.com for our subscription flow which gave us direct customer relationships. Our best win-back offer was “pause for 2 months” instead of cancel.
It kept 31% of would-be cancellations, and about half of those reactivated after the pause period. Zero effort implementation, massive retention improvement.
We tried all kinds of win back offers with our language learning app.
The most effective one was actually the pause option. About 30% of canceling users chose to pause instead, and half of those came back later.
We also found that just asking WHY they were canceling and offering to fix the issue saved another 10% of customers. Sometimes they just had a simple problem.
We’ve tested win-back campaigns extensively. The pause option consistently outperforms discounts, with about 30-40% of canceling users accepting it.
However, the highest performer we’ve ever tested was a personalized approach based on usage patterns. For power users who suddenly wanted to cancel, we offered account credits. For minimal users, we offered a lower-tier plan at reduced cost.
This segmented approach retained 47% of cancellations versus 28% with a standard one-size-fits-all offer. The direct customer relationship is what makes this possible.
Win-back offers work incredibly well. We saw a 60% reduction in net churn after implementing them.
Best performing offer: “We’ll pause your subscription for up to 3 months - just come back when you’re ready.” It keeps them in the ecosystem without the pressure.
The second best wasn’t a discount but a one-click way to downgrade to a cheaper tier. People often prefer that over canceling entirely.