How to Drive More Revenue with RetentionEngine: A How-To Guide

Understanding why customers cancel, delivering personalized rebuttals to retain them, and building a feedback loop for data-driven decisions are all critical components of a successful retention strategy — and your bottom line.

That’s why a tool like Stay Ai’s RetentionEngine is so valuable to your subscription program. Many brands that have thoughtfully implemented RetentionEngine cancellation surveys have saved six figures in revenue (or more) in a year.

In this post, we’ll explore how RetentionEngine makes all these things not just possible, but simple — and show you how a few brands have made it work for them.

The Benefits of RetentionEngine

1) RetentionEngine helps you understand why your customers are canceling.
To clean up the holes in your subscription program, you have to know why your customers are canceling, and how those reasons are trending over time. That’s where the cancellation survey comes in.

Knowing why your customers churn enables data-driven improvements to rebuttal and winback tactics. Plus, the information from those surveys can indicate potential issues elsewhere in your business. For example, if a specific product consistently leads to high churn rates, it may point to a manufacturing or product quality issue that needs addressing.

2) RetentionEngine delivers personalized rebuttals to keep customers subscribed.
There’s a not-insignificant amount of subscribers who will abandon their cancellation attempt for the right response or offer. Using RetentionEngine, you can manually set up any number of cancellation rebuttals and tie them to specific cancellation survey responses.

Or you can use the full AI power to optimize your rebuttal flows. RetentionEngine uses machine learning to analyze the complete customer profile — spending habits, preferences, and comparable customer journeys — to craft and deliver the rebuttal that resonates.

Want more on building cancel surveys and flows? Check out this blog article on cancellation surveys and cancellation flows.

Pro Tip: Cancellation reasons are also passed back into Klaviyo, so you can craft tailored winback messages further beyond a subscriber’s successful cancellation to tempt them to reactivate.

3) Implementing RetentionEngine builds the feedback loop necessary to make data-driven retention decisions.

As you run with RetentionEngine for a while, you’ll get enough data where you can really start optimizing every piece of your retention puzzle

Watching cancellation reasons and save tactic success evolve as your business grows can give you incredible insight into your subscribers at the highest risk of churn, and help you evolve your subscription program and your business at large to keep up with customer trends and behaviors

And beyond that, Stay’s ExperienceEngine leverages all that RetentionEngine data so you can pinpoint your churn risks and target them with promotions before they even start to cancel.

When Lifeboost switched from Recharge to Stay Ai, they increased their add-on revenue by 120% in 90 days — an incredible boom for their bottom line.

But the growth in add-on revenue wasn’t their only win — not by a long shot.

Lifeboost has taken every opportunity to optimize their RetentionEngine setup. Ultimately, year-to-date in 2023 the brand has an eye-popping 29.6% save rate, and an MRR save rate of 24.2%.

Let’s unpack their strategy a bit further.

The Cancellation Survey
You can tell Lifeboost has optimized their cancel survey just for their brand and subscribers. Subscribers can choose from specific, distinct cancel options, so the brand can really understand what’s driving the cancel.

We also love the way they’ve included “Swap your roast” as a shortcut, in response to noticing that’s really what many subscribers wanted in the end — and this makes it easier for them to do so.

Read Lifeboost’s Full Stay Ai Case Study

Rebuttal Treatments
Lifeboost has created an assortment of treatments, like discounts, pauses, and ‘contact customer support,’ that respond directly to the subscriber pains on the survey. And they don’t waste the blank space on the rebuttal — they’re using brand-building images all the way through.One takeaway for them is the efficacy of their GIF rebuttal nudging subscribers toward support, where they can have more of their concerns directly addressed. 

After leaving Recharge for Stay Ai, OLIPOP was able to grow their subscription revenue by 35% and reduce active churn by 26%.

While Stay’s product add-on functionality and ExperienceEngine promotions played a big role in that success, their experience with RetentionEngine has been nothing short of spectacular. In the first half of 2023, OLIPOP had a 23.7% save rate, and an MRR save rate of 14.7%.

Here’s how they made it happen.

Cancellation Survey
Just like with Lifeboost, OLIPOP’s cancellation survey shows how thoughtful the brand has been in understanding their subscribers and their pain points up to now. When subscribers answer these questions, they’re offering personal data. But in aggregate, that response data will help them optimize their entire business — not just the retention flow.

OLIPOP’s cancellation survey options are strategically developed for both saving subscribers and collecting actionable insights:

Customers looking to make a change to their subscription (ie: I want a different flavor) are nudged towards to modifications over cancellation, and for those who do truly intend to cancel (ie: I no longer drink OLIPOP), cancellation intent is also collected.

Rebuttal Treatments
One of the reasons OLIPOP has been so successful in retaining subscribers is their super well thought out cancellation flows.

On-brand rebuttals use graphics that would make anyone thirsty, and add solid discount offers to entice subscribers to stay. They also frequently refer back to their brand mission to “share the benefits of our fizzy, functional pop with as many people as we can,” which helps qualify the discount and remind subscribers why they signed up in the first place.

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Want more RetentionEngine inspo? We’ve got you covered! Check out this blog post with cancellation survey and rebuttal treatment examples. If you’re a current Stay Ai customer and need assistance with setting up or optimizing your RetentionEngine, just shoot your CSM a note – we’re happy to help!