We used the web funnel to run quick win-back and refund offers tied to specific gateways. A few things stood out:
- Win-back offers are cheap to test. I can send targeted email flows or on-site offers and measure who returns and at what cost.
- Refund control matters. When we handled refunds through the web gateway we could craft partial refunds or discount offers instantly and see different retention outcomes.
- Some gateways make reversals slow or costly which hurt win-back ROI.
Running these plays on the web let us quantify how much retention each gateway preserved. What win-back test would you try first in your funnel?
I sent churned users a targeted one month 50% off email and tracked who came back and stayed.
Because the refund logic lived in the web funnel we could issue refunds instantly and offer credits instead.
Setting this up with a Web2Wave flow cut dev time a lot.
We tested offering a prorated refund plus a trial extension sent straight from the web flow. It improved 60 day retention for a small cost.
Web control of payments made the experiments low risk and fast to iterate.
I tried offering a 2 week free extension instead of a full refund.
Many users accepted and stuck around longer.
Worth testing on web first.
offer credit not refund more people stay
Treat refunds as experiments. On the web you can segment users by churn reason and run tailored offers: partial refund, credit, or reactivation discount.
Measure net retention and LTV lift per offer. Log timing and gateway behavior because slow payout or bank holds can break your math. If a gateway delays refunds you will misread offer ROI.
We discovered that offering account credit retained twice as many users as full refunds for low dollar complaints. Credits are cheaper than losing a customer.
Quick test I ran was a 30 day reactivation email with a small coupon. It worked better than I expected.