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Predictive churn (powered by AI)

Andrija Krstic Updated by Andrija Krstic

Predictive churn is an AI-powered add-on and it makes a huge step forward in terms of churn optimization. Subbly already has a very robust tool for customer retention, however, this feature lets you stay proactive and try to fight churn even before customers ask to cancel their subscription. Get one step ahead of your churn with Subbly's AI-powered Predictive Churn!
Churn optimization is critical for long-term success of any business. We have a useful blog article that dives more deeply into how churn optimization suite works with Subbly. Make sure to check it out here.

How churn prediction works?

Subbly’s Predictive Churn AI model was trained on more than 2 million data points to calculate the probability of customer to churn, which include demographic (i.e. shipping address), behavioral data (i.e. frequency of visits to customer area) and subscription data (i.e. days since subscription started). It returns the % chance of subscription to get cancelled so you could sort the riskiest ones and act on them.

Subbly will automatically recalculate subscription churn probability of each customer on every event on the customer timeline. More than 30 events plus behavioral data are taken into equation and the model was trained on 2+ MM data points during the BETA phase. Therefore, your customer's churn probability scores will be recalculated a couple of times during the day.

Luckily, with our Automations feature you will be able to set some automated workflows that will automatically action something based on the customer's churn probability trend (whether it's increasing or decreasing). We make it automated for you so you don't have to do it manually.

Our suggestion for you would be to pay close attention to the ones with the churn risk of 65% and higher.

Why do I need this and how should I use it?

Speaking about churn, there is definitely no silver bullet or 100% working recipe that will help you prevent customers from churning away. It all comes down to knowing your customers and this tool will hopefully help you proactively find customers who will potentially churn so you can try to find why are some of them at risk of cancelling.

So the first thing you should be using the tool is to find out why some people might be on the verge of cancellation.

It may sound too obvious, but the idea of any churn risk mitigation is around delighting your customer by showing that you actually care. And once the churn prediction risk score starts increasing for somebody here's what you can do.

Email the customer to find out why are they wanting to cancel

Reach out to your customer and ask for a feedback. Ask open ended questions to figure out what concerns they might have. Of course you won’t get a response from every customer, however it will help you see the patterns and understand what approach to use.

One example of an email you can send to the customer can be:

”Hey {customer_name},

This is {your_name} from {shop_name}. I’m writing to collect the feedback about our {product_name} and would really appreciate it if you answered a short question.

What are the things you like and dislike the most about being a {product_name} subscriber?

As you might have noticed, we just love to hear what our customers think of us so your feedback is invaluable. Actually, just to spice it up a little, we will give you %20 OFF of your next box for sharing your feedback with us 🙂

Looking forward to hearing from you. Best regards {your name} ”

Possible actions to help prevent customers from churning away (based on their feedback)

  1. Your billing could've been more clear and upfront / I didn't expect that I'll have to wait a month to get my box / It would've been better if you've made it clear how I can change my box preferences month by month - Make sure that you have a proper communication in place. First of all you need to make sure that customers understand what and when they will receive. Customize the emails, optimize the website pages so they allow for additional information and make sure that you have a clear and concise FAQs so your customers are well onboarded.
  2. I'm not finding enough value for what I'm paying / Items are frequently damaged, not sure if that's on you or on my courier but it annoys me as hell - Add an extra item for free in the next order to soothe them up and then start building from there. It’s the easiest and cheapest way to prevent the cancellation. Almost every subscription entrepreneur has some unused inventory from recent months. If that’s not your case, you can come up with a universal item which complements your main offering to surprise your customers.
  3. I'm in a bit of pickle right now with my finances, I will probably cancel and pick this back up in 3 months. Liking the product btw! - Discount for next renewal. It might be either the applied balance, which will be fully used for an upcoming renewals or the long lasting coupon, i.e. 20% for next 3 renewals. Don’t forget to send an additional email about that prior to renewal so the customer would be aware of that.
  4. It's too frequent for me, I will likely cancel as I don't need this every month - Offer the customer to move to the different billing/shipping cadence for their product. If monthly is too frequent, they can switch to another product with a different billing/shipping cadence (quarterly for example).
  5. I generally like what you guys are offering but I simply feel that price point is too high - Offer your customer to upgrade to a prepaid plan for a decent discount or a special treat. Long term subscribers are the main contributor to your average LTV, and they also help stabilizing the cashflow and making it super easy for you to predict how much money you'll be getting on a monthly basis. If you successfully upgrade a risky customer to a prepaid plan (and get the customer to commit to X number of months by prepaying in advance for it), you didn't only mitigate the churn but you've also increased the average LTV! Don't be greedy with these types of offers though, tailor the one that won't hurt your cash flow but will be appealing to the customers at the same time.
Check this video to learn more on setting up prepaid subscriptions or this video that showcases some options of using commitment terms so customers get to commit to X number of months for a discounted price.

Setting up automated workflows through Automations to streamline the churn retention process

Are you familiar with Subbly's Automations? If not, you should get familiar with them straight away, because Automations are what will actually help you get the most out of the Predictive churn and will help you streamline the churn retention management.

Subbly's team added a couple of really useful triggers that can be used to build automated workflows using Automations that can automate pretty much anything suggested above.

Make sure to check some of the suggested use cases for automations here.

How to enable this and how much does it cost?

Predictive churn (powered by AI) is a paid add-on on any Subbly plan, and it's priced at $29/mo. If you're on an annual plan with Subbly, you will be able to add this add-on on a monthly basis for the same price.

If you're still wondering on whether Predictive Churn will work for you or not, think about how much do you lose when someone cancels your subscription (CAC + AOV/mo + some) and see if $29/mo is worth paying for this feature.

You can enable the feature from within your admin's My Plans section, by hitting the following button as in the picture below.

Any feedback? Please reach out to the customer support team. We're listening!

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