One of the most important metrics I look at it in my SaaS business is Churn (the number of months a customer stays until they cancel). For example if you get 50 new customers but also 50 customers cancel, you don’t grow. This is something all SaaS companies deal with. The first 6 months they think they are growing like crazy, but then the customers that signed up in month #1 start to cancel. So, on Month #7 your growth starts to decline.
Top 5 reasons people cancel on a SaaS product:
1. Product doesn’t work
Not Save-able You can’t save customers on your cancellation flow if you product doesn’t work for them.
2. Customer goes out of business
Not Save-able Unfortunately you can’t control this.
3. Switching to competitor
Maybe Save-able If they are already on your cancellation screen, this means they are already signed up with your competitor. You can’t really save them at this point. Try to be more competitive earlier on in the customer life cycle.
4. One Time Use
Save-able! Sometimes the customer just needs your product for a one-off project.
5. Price is High
Save-able! Offer the customer a low priced option.
This blog post is about how to save the customers that are canceling for reason #4 and #5.
Citrix is a leader in SaaS and they have figured how to keep their Churn low.
How GoToMeeting addresses the “One Time Use” cancellation
To start off with you can’t really “Cancel” your GoToMeeting account. But, you can “Turn Off Renewal”, this allows you to easily jump back and start paying again even after you have cancelled. This is pretty smart, because some months their customer might not need their software and this gives them the option to easily turn on their service again at a later time.
How GoToMeeting addresses the “Price is High” cancellation
They wanted to make sure if you were canceling because of price you don’t leave, after you click “Turn Off Renewal” in the screen shot above, you are taken to a confirmation screen where you see the ability to bump your package down to a low price option:
I was paying $49.00/mo which I thought was a little high and was intrigued by the lower price option. I decided to “Turn Off Renewal” anyway and I was then greeted to this screen:
They try to sell me again on the lower price option. This time with more force in case I missed it the first time. They added some testimonials and logos you trust. They also use the word “discounted” under the Yes! button, making it seem like you are getting a deal.
Closing Remarks
Churn will kill your business. Citrix brilliantly executes their cancellation flow. I also believe their $19/mo plan is specifically designed to make sure people are not switching over to their competitor join.me which is also priced at $19/mo (thus they are trying to also address the “Switching to Competitor” reason).
Rishi, thank you so much for sharing this!
We have a $19.97/m downsell to our $49/m subscription program. And we have a 1-page downsell in place, and we do get some takers from that. But I’m going to copy the 2-step process GotoMeeting.com uses. Really curious to see how it performs.
This is my favorite blog post of yours yet.
Thanks Pete!
Are you going to try the “Turn off Renewal” over “Cancel” too?
I’m not sure if we’ll use that exact language… Maybe. Probably.
By the way – another great downsell path is Audible.com. When you go to cancel, they ask why – and then it seems like they present a custom offer.
The last 2 times I’ve gone to cancel, the reason I was canceling is b/c I was getting more credits than i was using. So when I went to cancel, they gave me the option to put my account on hold for 3 months. Brilliant.
That is brilliant and better than the “Turn Off Renewal” button because it gets them to automatically start your service back up in 3 months.
Reason nr. 6 why people cancel on a SaaS product: they forget about it. When we sign up, we get a confirmation mail. Then – still quite often – the flow stops. When a SaaS (or blog, or social media, etc.) does not remind me from time to time to its existence, most times I would not come back to it again. From my experience in SaaS I know I’m not alone. It’s even intentional: looking at the effort and professionality of the very thing to which we just subscribed. It’s the service’s duty to send gentle reminders – only with permission, ofcourse.
Hey Ton,
That is true and good point! People just forget about it and then their credit card expires so they are automatically cancelled.
Pingback: Software Marketing Tweetables – 16 December 2013 | Smart Software Marketing
I like GoToMeeting, but I don’t really use it anymore… Now I’m using RHUB’s solution for web conferencing, because it provides me guaranteed attendance.