How The Lift Box Reduces Subscriber Churn by 19% with Dynamic Cancellation Surveys & Superior CX

Adam Lien, founder and CEO of The Lift Box, spent 14 years in the Coast Guard, stationed around the world, before venturing into CPG. During his service, Adam recognized a need in the market from fellow servicemembers for a better-tasting protein powder. Adam developed a product plan that not only addressed shortcomings in the protein space but also pain points in the fitness space—and as a result, The Lift Box was born.  

Now, The Lift Box is America’s #1 fitness subscription box, helping customers discover new supplements, healthy snacks, drinks, and more in every box. Their team samples hundreds of products so that only the best make it directly to your door.

Challenges

The Lift Box team hasn’t seen a month without growth in the past six years—an impressive testament to their product and acquisition strategy. However, to continue optimizing their program for subscriber retention, the team needed a subscription partner with robust reporting capabilities, dynamic cancellation flows, and smart split testing. 

Additionally, Lift Box’s subscription model uses a unique selling plan that was unsupported by their previous subscription provider. As a result, the team would manually move new subscribers into their plan daily – and with thousands of subscribers, this process became increasingly unsustainable to support the team’s growth at scale. 

“We were on Recharge for the first 5 and a half years of the business. Over there, we had to pay for support, which is crazy. There was just a complete lack of support around the structure of how we handle subscriptions … We demoed Smartrr, Skio, and at least one other, and they were just not set up to handle us. [Stay’s CEO] Gina and [CX Director] Evan were on calls with us, even 10 o’clock at night, to set up our own unique solution queue. The other platforms we demoed would never have done that.” – Dan, CMO of The Lift Box 

The Solution: Capturing Dynamic, Data-driven Churn Insights with RetentionEngine 

As a 99.9% subscription-based business, understanding how to forecast churn and how many new subscribers need to be acquired across paid socials, affiliates, and other channels is crucial for The Lift Box team to forecast growth. Moreover, once you’ve acquired a subscriber, it’s critical to continue to engage and communicate to retain them.

To proactively tackle subscriber churn at scale, the team constantly tests and optimizes new subscriber offers and cancellation rebuttals with RetentionEngine. Coupled with Stay’s comprehensive churn dashboard, The Lift Box is able to capture real-time insights into why subscribers are canceling, what works to retain them, and how to reactivate those who previously churned.

The data collected in their churn dashboard reports allows The Lift Box team to deliver increasingly personalized cancellation treatments based on the reasons their subscribers select as their main reason for wanting to cancel. Then, by split-testing discounts, messages, pause options, and more, The Lift Box can use this data to hone in on pain points within their subscriber cohorts and, as a result, retain more subscribers.

“As we scale, it’s harder to maintain these metrics – but with RetentionEngine, we go in there, review the data, and regularly change it out to keep rates strong. Should we offer $10 off, $20 off, or give them a free gift with their next order? At the end of the day, whatever it takes to save somebody with RetentionEngine is going to be cheaper than the $35 to $40 it costs us to go and acquire a new subscriber.”

– Dan, CMO of The Lift Box 

By regularly monitoring and optimizing cancellation flow performance, the Lift Box has seen an impressive 19% save rate with RetentionEngine – a number that continues to increase month-over-month. 

We review [the data] regularly and have always been early adopters of everything that Stay AI launches.” – Dan, CMO of The Lift Box 

Raising the Bar on Customer Service: Leveraging Surveys and Community Boards to Scale Subscriber Performance

In addition to using RetentionEngine’s dynamic cancellation surveys, The Lift Box team also captures subscriber intent data before they enter the cancellation funnel through monthly surveys and direct communications.

The best way to keep subscribers around is to actively engage with them, understand their expectations, and then go a step further with surprise and delight. While some brands are afraid to communicate with subscribers once they’ve signed on in fear of nudging a cancellation, The Lift Box takes a proactive approach, interacting with subscribers directly on Facebook to ask for feedback to ensure their most valued customers are heard and excited about their upcoming orders.

“We found that one of the biggest barriers is subscribers don’t want to subscribe to a box that’s a mystery and know nothing in it. So we use the first week of the month as our advantage to say, hey, here’s everything that’s gonna be in this upcoming box.” – Dan, CMO of The Lift Box 

The Lift Box team interacts with current – and former – subscribers through a private, 8,600-member Facebook group, exclusive to vetted Shopify customers. Here, the team directly communicates with subscribers as part of their post-purchase funnel strategy, hosting weekly giveaways, providing sneak peeks for upcoming subscription boxes, and inviting users to take a monthly survey to drive engagement and add-on revenue.

Here, the team delivers a monthly survey to subscribers, allowing the brand to collect direct feedback from their subscribers to optimize and improve future orders. Subscribers who complete the survey receive an additional $5 off their next order, which can be applied directly within Stay AI’s Customer Portal.

Why does this matter? By collecting direct subscriber feedback and optimizing their subscription offerings accordingly, the team goes a step further to ensure that subscribers are happy with their experience and in turn increases LTV. This proactive engagement with customers allows the team to strengthen retention before subscribers consider churning, which, in turn, allows RetentionEngine’s cancellation treatments to serve as a second line of defense and keep churn rates far below industry averages.

“We get great feedback. We share that feedback with the brands as well, which allows us to pick up a lot of great partners through The Lift Box. What’s better than new customer feedback? If you’ve just launched a new product like a protein bar and get 1,000 pieces of feedback, it’s extremely valuable. Win win for everyone.” – Adam, Founder & CEO of The Lift Box

Creating an Intuitive Customer Experience

With their previous subscription provider, The Lift Box’s most ticketed CX request was from subscribers being locked out of their Customer Portal. The overall user experience was not intuitive, and caused more frustration and churn than satisfied customers. In addition, The Lift Box’s Selling Plan requires anchor dates in order to properly determine monthly billing configurations, which, when not done properly, can get “crazy very quick”.

With Stay’s no-code Customer Portal, The Lift Box’s subscribers can easily manage and update their subscription orders without any friction, which has allowed The Lift Box team to drastically reduce CX tickets.

“It was a smooth transition. Subscribers are able to go in there, skip a box, cancel, will change their size, whatever they need to do. Our ticket volume has drastically decreased in terms of account management by switching over to Stay AI.”

– Dan, CMO of The Lift Box 

Together, The Lift Box and Stay AI have effectively slashed subscriber churn thanks to robust reporting capabilities, dynamic cancellation flows, and smart split-testing, coupled with an unmatched customer experience and intuitive customer portal. In the coming months, The Lift Box expects to see even greater subscription growth as the brand continues to scale.

“We appreciate you guys and the ability to adapt quickly like you guys did, and get us to where we are now… we were on Recharge forever and we never got anything like this, not even close even when we were paying the extra money for support.”

– Adam, Founder & CEO of The Lift Box