Cancellation flow best practices: Letting users go the right way

That’s it: you’ve had enough of an app. There are too many strange issues while using it, and the content is mediocre at best. You have too many subscriptions anyway, so it’s time to cancel. 

Your mind is made up, so you open the app. But after searching through the various settings and profile setup, you can’t seem to find it anywhere; there’s no option to cancel. 

You go to their website, log in, and search again. Nothing. In the end, with great frustration, you remember you can cancel apps through the app store. Fine, I’ll cancel it there. Goodbye and good riddance!

Or so it seemed, as suddenly you start receiving notifications and emails… Where’d you go? Why are you leaving us? We miss you… My inbox is filled with brands doing this.

Or, even worse, comparing it to a breakup.

And just like an over-clingy ex, desperate to get you back, it does the opposite. It makes you run away as fast as you can and potentially tell your friends just how much they let you down—how they aren’t even acknowledging all the things they’ve done wrong.

Cancellations are the worst. They hurt overall revenue and growth, with a higher churn rate slowing down progress. But it’s not just that we need more and more new customers to grow; it’s the smaller, subtle issues that come with a negative cancellation experience: 1-star reviews, bad word-of-mouth, and ultimately lower installs over time.

While it’s a SaaS example, I love Rosie Hoggmascall’s example of how Loom, the video recording tool, handles goodbyes. After she wrote a breakdown of Loom’s cancellation flow, they even reached out to share that they had worked on a better cancellation flow, and the change improved their retention. They called it a “graceful goodbye,” and that’s what you want to implement.

So, how do you improve this experience? Well, before you get to goodbyes, the first thing is to ensure you have a strong Phase 1 & 2 of retention: 

That is where you will see the most significant dropoff and where you can do the most work to prevent churn. 

From there, if you still haven’t managed to reduce churn, you want to work on your “graceful goodbye”, so here are the best practices to start reducing cancellations through an improved experience.

1. Understand what is causing the cancellations

Handling your goodbye gracefully starts with understanding. Everyone handles a breakup better if they know why it’s happening.

If you don’t know why customers are canceling, you can’t stop it. There are two types of churn:

• Voluntary Churn, e.g., dissatisfied with the service, found a better alternative, not using it enough
• Involuntary Churn, e.g., failed payment method, technical issue

We are going to focus on the first. You want to ensure that you build a moment into your cancellation flow to understand why people are leaving.

This can be as simple as a very short feedback survey, even built into your cancellation flow, like what RevenueCat offers in their Customer Center feature with exit feedback prompts:

This allows you to understand why people may be canceling.

Be wary: people are quick to click on these or skip them altogether, so make sure you:

• Keep it short and simple
• Randomize the order of reasons they cancelled
• Customize the follow-up question based on the reason given
• Start with why they are canceling
• Offer an option to stay—customized to their feedback

From there, you can use these insights to have a more segmented approach to their reasoning and what you can work on to prevent churn earlier.

If you want to dive one step deeper, let’s say they choose the option “It’s too expensive.” Your follow-up question could be, “What would make it worth the price?” That can help you determine if it’s a value issue or if they just can’t afford it.would make it worth the price?” That can help you determine if it is a value issue or if they can’t afford it.

2. Be mindful of the language and communication you use

I’ve already shared just a few examples of the guilt-tripping language some apps use. When someone goes to cancel, focus instead on communicating value before they cancel.

When I canceled my Strava subscription, I received a confirmation from the Google Play Store that it was canceled, but Strava ignored me completely. They continued yapping on about other things, showing no communication to acknowledge my leaving or to work out what would get me back:

This made me feel like they didn’t care about the reason I was stopping: their live tracking for bike routes was glitchy. If I hadn’t canceled directly through the Play Store, I wonder if I would have received any confirmation or a feedback survey. 

Strava had my email address, so they have no excuse. Even if they didn’t, they could have shown some type of response in the app or through push notifications. 

You want to send them an immediate confirmation of their cancellation. Provide a personal confirmation that reassures them they’ve canceled, and if they didn’t cancel directly in the app, add the survey immediately (in which case you build the survey into your flow). 

3. Ensure your offer is personalized to them

It’s easy to rush into offering them the world to stay. While promotional offers can effectively win back customers, they need to be personalized to them and focused on meeting their needs.

My partner and I wanted to cancel VidiVet, a vet app, the other day. The app is great for getting 24/7 vet support, but I just wasn’t using it enough to justify the monthly costs. My dog, despite being the world’s biggest troublemaker, doesn’t have health issues every month. So my usage is closer to once or twice a year when he is really sick from eating something in the park, or he’s played a bit too rough with another dog and is now dramatically limping around the house (only to be fine two hours later).

Then VidiVet offered us a better-priced yearly offer via email that better suited our usage than the higher-priced monthly plan (note the plan is on my partner’s name):

Super personal, mentions my dog’s name, and is very easy to do — just email back yes. What they also do well is use reassuring language to confirm that my plan is canceled. 

4. Make it simple and self-serving

The minute I get told, “You need to contact customer service to cancel,” an internal groan goes through me. I remember one app that said this and added an additional lovely message: “Keep in mind you need to cancel ten days before your renewal date.” Ten days? It’s an app, not a customized product being shipped to my home.

The worst is “You need to call.” I have a hard enough time turning away door-to-door salespeople, let alone sitting through an awkward ten-minute conversation about why I want to cancel.

You want to ensure your cancellation flow is self-serving — this reduces pressure on customer care and also improves the experience of the customer, making them less likely to leave a negative review. Case and point: Audible, the audiobook platform by Amazon. The majority of their 1-star reviews focus on the challenges of cancelling:

You can still contact the user if there is a specific issue you want to help them with, e.g., they are facing technical issues. Or have an option for them to contact you as Deliciously Ella does. I can either go to automatically cancel (which I wouldn’t because I love their app) or contact them about an issue:

Go through the experience yourself and count the number of steps. Ideally, it won’t take more than 4-6 steps to cancel directly through the app or website. Building such a flow is now simple to do with tools like RevenueCat. The Customer Center feature allows you to build surveys and offers into your cancellation flow.

Finally, consider user testing your cancellation flow to see how users experience it and where they struggle in working out where and how to cancel.

5. Consider a pause option instead

While you usually cannot pause an app subscription directly via the App Store (not available on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store), if you have a web-to-app subscription or a built-in subscription cancellation option, you could offer this option. This is great for apps that revolve around temporary usage, or when something might be happening to impact their usage.

This is something Peloton offers, acknowledging that there might be times their customers can’t workout:

Just make sure you don’t offer this indefinitely.

Handle your cancellation flow with care

Everyone is focused on first impressions. But what are customers’ last impressions of your brand? Even if you don’t win them back, you can say goodbye gracefully for now and learn from the experience. End things on a high note and you never know when a user might return.

For your cancellation flow, consider:

1. Understanding what is causing the cancellations
2. Being mindful of the language and communication you use
3. Ensuring your offer is personalized to them
4. Making it simple and self-serving
5. Offering a pause option instead

And most importantly: don’t be a guilt-tripping clingy ex in your cancellation flow.