/iblai-marketing-churn-prevention

Reduce voluntary churn (customers choosing to cancel) and involuntary churn (failed payments) with cancel flows, dynamic save offers, proactive retention, and dunning.

Step 0: Context Check

Read .agents/product-marketing-context.md (or .claude/product-marketing-context.md on older setups) first. Only ask for what isn't there.

Pull this context:

1. Current Churn Situation

• Monthly churn rate (voluntary vs. involuntary if known)
• Active subscriber count
• Average MRR per customer
• Cancel flow today, or does cancel happen instantly?

2. Billing & Platform

• Billing provider (Stripe, Chargebee, Paddle, Recurly, Braintree)
• Monthly, annual, or both
• Plan pausing or downgrades supported?
• Existing retention tooling? (Churnkey, ProsperStack, Raaft)

3. Product & Usage Data

• Per-user feature usage tracked?
• Can you spot engagement drop-offs?
• Cancellation reason data from past churns?
• Activation metric — what do retained users do that churned users don't?

4. Constraints

• B2B or B2C? (Affects flow design.)
• Self-serve cancellation required? (Regulations may mandate easy cancel.)
• Brand tone for offboarding — empathetic, direct, playful?

How This Skill Works

Churn has two types, each with a different fix:

Voluntary churn is typically 50-70% of total churn. Involuntary is 30-50% but often easier to fix.

Three modes:

1. Build a cancel flow — design from scratch with survey, save offers, confirmation
2. Optimize an existing flow — analyze cancel data and lift save rates
3. Set up dunning — failed-payment recovery with retries and email

Cancel Flow Design

Structure

Trigger → Survey → Dynamic Offer → Confirmation → Post-Cancel

Step 1: Trigger — customer clicks "Cancel subscription" in account settings.

Step 2: Exit Survey — ask why. The reason determines the save offer.

Step 3: Dynamic Save Offer — present an offer targeted at their reason (discount, pause, downgrade, etc.).

Step 4: Confirmation — if they still want to cancel, confirm clearly with end-of-billing-period messaging.

Step 5: Post-Cancel — set expectations, give an easy reactivation path, trigger win-back sequence.

Exit Survey Design

The survey is the foundation. Good reason categories:

Survey rules:

• One question, single-select with optional free text
• 5-8 options max — decision fatigue kills response quality
• Most common reasons first (review data quarterly)
• Don't make it feel like a guilt trip
• "Help us improve" beats "Why are you leaving?"

Dynamic Save Offers

The key insight: match the offer to the reason. A discount won't save someone who isn't using the product. A roadmap won't save someone who can't afford it.

Offer-to-reason mapping:

Offer Types

Discount

• 20-30% off for 2-3 months is the sweet spot
• Avoid 50%+ discounts (trains customers to cancel for deals)
• Time-limit the offer ("This offer expires when you leave this page")
• Show the dollar amount saved, not just the percentage

Pause subscription

• 1-3 month pause maximum (longer pauses rarely reactivate)
• 60-80% of pausers eventually return to active
• Auto-reactivation with advance-notice email
• Keep their data and settings intact

Plan downgrade

• Offer a lower tier instead of full cancel
• Show what they keep vs. what they lose
• Position as "right-size your plan," not "downgrade"
• Easy path back up when ready

Feature unlock / extension

• Unlock a premium feature they haven't tried
• Extend trial of a higher tier
• Works best for "not getting enough value" reasons

Personal outreach

• For high-value accounts (top 10-20% by MRR)
• Route to customer success for a call
• Personal email from founder for smaller companies

Cancel Flow UI Patterns

┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│  We're sorry to see you go          │
│                                     │
│  What's the main reason you're      │
│  cancelling?                        │
│                                     │
│  ○ Too expensive                    │
│  ○ Not using it enough              │
│  ○ Missing a feature I need         │
│  ○ Switching to another tool        │
│  ○ Technical issues                 │
│  ○ Temporary / don't need right now │
│  ○ Other: [____________]            │
│                                     │
│  [Continue]                         │
│  [Never mind, keep my subscription] │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘
         ↓ (selects "Too expensive")
┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│  What if we could help?             │
│                                     │
│  We'd love to keep you. Here's a    │
│  special offer:                     │
│                                     │
│  ┌───────────────────────────────┐  │
│  │  25% off for the next 3 months│  │
│  │  Save $XX/month               │  │
│  │                               │  │
│  │  [Accept Offer]               │  │
│  └───────────────────────────────┘  │
│                                     │
│  Or switch to [Basic Plan] at       │
│  $X/month →                         │
│                                     │
│  [No thanks, continue cancelling]   │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘

UI rules:

• Keep "continue cancelling" visible — no dark patterns
• One primary offer + one fallback, not a wall of options
• Show specific dollar savings, not abstract percentages
• Use the customer's name and account data where possible
• Mobile-friendly (many cancellations happen on mobile)

For cancel flow patterns by industry and billing provider, see [references/cancel-flow-patterns.md](references/cancel-flow-patterns.md).

Churn Prediction & Proactive Retention

The best save happens before the customer ever clicks "Cancel."

Risk Signals

Health Score Model

Build a simple 0-100 score from weighted signals:

Health Score = (
  Login frequency score × 0.30 +
  Feature usage score   × 0.25 +
  Support sentiment     × 0.15 +
  Billing health        × 0.15 +
  Engagement score      × 0.15
)

Proactive Interventions

Before they think about cancelling:

Involuntary Churn: Payment Recovery

Failed payments cause 30-50% of total churn and are the most recoverable.

The Dunning Stack

Pre-dunning → Smart retry → Dunning emails → Grace period → Hard cancel

Pre-Dunning (Prevent Failures)

• Card expiry alerts — email 30, 15, and 7 days before card expires
• Backup payment method — prompt for a second method at signup
• Card updater services — Visa/Mastercard auto-update programs (reduces hard declines 30-50%)
• Pre-billing notification — email 3-5 days before charge for annual plans

Smart Retry Logic

Not all failures are equal. Strategy by decline type:

Retry timing:

• Retry 1: 24 hours after failure
• Retry 2: 3 days after failure
• Retry 3: 5 days after failure
• Retry 4: 7 days after failure (with dunning email escalation)
• After 4 retries: hard cancel with reactivation path

Smart retry tip: Retry on the day of the month the original payment succeeded (if Day 1 worked before, retry on Day 1). Stripe Smart Retries handles this automatically.

Dunning Email Sequence

Dunning email rules:

• Direct link to payment update page (no login required if possible)
• Show what they'll lose (data, team's access)
• Don't blame — "your payment failed," not "you failed to pay"
• Include support contact
• Plain text outperforms designed emails for dunning

Recovery Benchmarks

Complete dunning playbook with provider-specific setup: [references/dunning-playbook.md](references/dunning-playbook.md).

Metrics & Measurement

Key Churn Metrics

Cohort Analysis

Segment churn by:

• Acquisition channel — which channels bring stickier customers?
• Plan type — which plans churn most?
• Tenure — when do most cancellations happen? (30, 60, 90 days?)
• Cancel reason — which reasons are growing?
• Save offer type — which offers work best for which segments?

Cancel Flow A/B Tests

One variable at a time:

How to run them: use /iblai-marketing-ab-test-setup for statistical rigor. PostHog fits cancel-flow experiments — feature flags split users into different flows server-side, and funnel analytics track each step (survey → offer → accept/decline → confirm). Setup: [PostHog integration guide](../../tools/integrations/posthog.md).

Common Mistakes

• No cancel flow at all — instant cancel leaves money on the table. Even a simple survey + one offer saves 10-15%
• Hiding the cancel button — breeds resentment and bad reviews. Many jurisdictions mandate easy cancellation (FTC Click-to-Cancel rule)
• Same offer for every reason — a blanket discount doesn't address "missing feature" or "not using it"
• Discounts too deep — 50%+ trains customers to cancel-and-return for deals
• Ignoring involuntary churn — often 30-50% of total and the easiest to fix
• No dunning emails — letting payment failures silently cancel accounts
• Guilt-trip copy — "Are you sure you want to abandon us?" damages brand trust
• Not tracking save offer LTV — a "saved" customer who churns 30 days later wasn't saved
• Pausing too long — pauses beyond 3 months rarely reactivate. Set limits
• No post-cancel path — make reactivation easy and trigger win-back emails; some churned users will come back

Tool Integrations

See the [tools registry](../../tools/REGISTRY.md).

Retention Platforms

Billing Providers (Dunning)

Related CLI Tools

Related Skills

• iblai-marketing-email-sequence: For win-back email sequences after cancellation
• iblai-marketing-paywall-upgrade-cro: For in-app upgrade moments and trial expiration
• iblai-marketing-pricing-strategy: For plan structure and annual discount strategy
• iblai-marketing-onboarding-cro: For activation to prevent early churn
• iblai-marketing-analytics-tracking: For setting up churn signal events
• iblai-marketing-ab-test-setup: For testing cancel flow variations with statistical rigor