7 BFCM Aftercare Strategies to Retain Your New Subscribers & Boost LTV

Between juggling the endless marketing messages, choosing their favorite deals, and dealing with high credit card bills, shoppers can be easily overwhelmed during Black Friday & Cyber Monday (BFCM). But for brands, it can be even more demanding.

After months of planning, the last thing you want to see is a high churn rate for those new first-time customers and subscribers you spent months working to acquire.

Unfortunately, churn is inevitable – but with an airtight aftercare strategy, you can reduce holiday-related churn to engage your new customers before they even consider churning.

By setting up your aftercare strategies before BFCM, you can maximize the value of your newest subscribers while preventing your team from playing catch-up after one of the year’s busiest shopping events.

Let’s unpack exactly how your brand can implement an effective aftercare strategy for BFCM: 

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1) Optimize Your Cancellation Surveys

As the dust of BFCM begins to settle, you’ll start to see some of those new subscribers churn. The reality is that high-purchase intent occasions like BFCM will always attract some deal shoppers who are only here for deeply discounted deals – and sadly, may never become high LTV customers.

Nonetheless, by optimizing your cancellation survey reasons to address these shoppers, you can capture valuable insights on your BFCM shoppers – and even offer cancellation treatments to incentivize deal hunters to stick around.

For example, add cancellation survey options like: 

• “I just signed up for the discount”
• “I found better prices somewhere else”

Every option that you include around BFCM offers your brand an additional clue as to how you can get these shoppers to stick around next time.

Momofuku offers a cancellation reason for “I only subscribed to receive the discount.” This helps them segment and review the deal-shopping subscription shoppers versus those new customers with higher potential for long-term LTV.

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2) Create Enticing Cancellation Rebuttal Offers

When subscribers decide to cancel, you can present them with tailored offers that could change their minds. For example, if they’re canceling because they only wanted a BFCM discount, make them an offer that is too good to refuse. 

When Momofuku’s customers select the “I only subscribed to receive the discount” cancellation reason, they’re presented with a rebuttal that offers them a further discount to stay on their subscription.

Pro Tip: Cancellation rebuttals tend to perform a ton better when they include a video as a personal touch!

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3) Regularly Review Your Cancellation Data

It’s important to not only monitor your subscription program performance but also optimize it based on the insights you discover based on your cancellation response data.

Once you know why your subscribers are churning, you can tailor your retention strategies toward addressing their concerns. Proactively iterating your cancellation surveys based on the results can have a massive impact on churn rates over time.

This is especially important after big acquisition and retention events like BFCM when you need to answer questions like: 

• Did our BFCM discounts attract sticky subscribers or just deal-hunters?
• Are there any cancellation survey trends that we can/should address proactively?
• What kinds of rebuttals are most effective (including consideration of the cancel reason!) and how can we put more resources behind expanding that success?

Don’t just glance at your churn data. Decode it, act on it, and continue to optimize.

Unfortunately, we know a lot of subscription apps don’t make this particularly easy. If you aren’t giving yourself – or your team – the time to meaningfully improve things like your customer experience and retention marketing efforts, you are undoubtedly losing potential revenue. 

Using a tool like RetentionEngine, merchants can deliver dynamic cancellation surveys and better understand churn before it happens. RetentionEngine learns how different customer segments (based on location, acquisition channel, LTV, or product) behave over time to build dynamic cancel flows that capture insights on why customers are canceling, what rebuttals work best to retain them, and ultimately works to reactivate former customers.

Post BFCM, take a peek at the cohort of new subscribers you acquired, and who churned within their first month on subscription. Then look back at your acquisition streams to identify how you can better refine your strategy to get the right type of customer: a long-term subscriber.

In this article, we drill down on a few key performance metrics warning signs, and some actionable steps to consider if you find a certain metric trending in the wrong direction.

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4) Reactivate & Win Back Former Subscribers Before BFCM

It’s well known that brands are 40% more likely to convert a former subscriber than they are to convert a brand-new one. That means as you prepare for BFCM, your brand should think about ways to reactivate former subscribers to boost holiday sales.

We’ve cracked the code to winning back churned subscribers – and it’s not as crazy as you might think. The secret? Personalization. Delivering an enticing reactivation campaign is ultimately about putting the right offer in front of the right person, at the right time.

4 Personalization Strategies to Winback Churned Subscribers:

• Segment your winback flow(s) by cancellation reason
• Offer Personalized Winback Campaigns Based on Purchase History
• A/B test exclusive BFCM “Early Access” Offers
• Trigger a winback flow to former subscribers that make a new OTP

For a detailed breakdown of each of these strategies with merchant examples, checkout our top 10 tips and tricks for subscriber winbacks here.

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5) Leverage AI to Optimize Your BFCM Campaign

With the right machine-learning tools, you can optimize and scale your campaigns and subscription program far more effectively – saving your team time and resources during one of the busiest times of the year. 

Specifically, when it comes to BFCM, optimizing your cancellation surveys, winback campaigns, and dunning payment recovery settings with AI ensures that your campaigns are optimized for peak performance and holiday revenue.

Our friends at Lifeboost have built out an extensive cancellation treatment library with the help of RetentionEngine’s advanced AI, allowing them to split-test, optimize, and combine their best cancellation rebuttals to increase their subscriber save rate from 5% to over 27% – and rising.

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6) Deliver Winning Reactivation Campaigns with AI

For any subscribers who churn in the weeks following BFCM, it’s worth sending this cohort a reactivation campaign (based on their cancellation reason) to attempt to win them back. Remember – even if a customer is deal shopping, if they were willing to purchase once, it’s possible to get them back. But when’s the right time to re-engage these subscribers? 

Optimizing the timing of your winback communication is crucial. If you reach out too early, customers may be reminded why they churned in the first place. Wait too long, and the harder it becomes to re-engage. Your timing needs to be juuuust right.

But no need to fear: our WinbackEngine feature utilizes proprietary machine learning models to take the guesswork out of winback timing by learning the most probable time to send tailored re-acquisition emails to churned subscribers.

What does this mean? No more manual work on your end, and no more A/B testing on your own. Now, you won’t have to guess at the perfect time to reach out to churned subscribers. You’ll be able to build winback flows with full confidence, knowing that our proprietary AI has determined the best time to re-engage your churned subscribers.

For more information on WinbackEngine, read more here.

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7) Combat Passive Churn & Recover Failed Subscriptions with Advanced Payment Recoveries

Is your brand thinking about subscription recoveries from failed billing attempts this Black Friday? 

Nearly 25% of billing failures come from generic card declines. When Black Friday rolls around, we see even more card failures resulting from upticks in credit card swiping, unusual card behavior, and stolen cards. For your brand, this can mean thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

To avoid these losses, you need to be proactively reviewing your data around dunning, top causes of failed billing, and subscription recoveries. When it comes to diving deep into billing failures, the objective is clear: you need to gain a comprehensive understanding of what is happening to take appropriate action.  

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Looking for More BFCM Tips & Tricks?

Stay’s industry-leading team of retention experts analyzed over 300 subscription and retention programs to bring you an actionable playbook of winning BFCM strategies guaranteed to convert.

For anyone looking to optimize their Black Friday & Cyber Monday revenue this year, our Ultimate BFCM Playbook is a must-read. Download the free Ultimate BFCM Playbook here.

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