Subscription Fatigue and How to Tackle it:

In the highly competitive and price-sensitive market, what can DTC businesses do to tackle the fatigue-induced subscription churn?

While it’s impossible to completely eliminate the much-dreaded subscription churn, here are five retention-focused strategies to help you avoid it:

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✅ Better "Pause" than "Cancel"

When customers decide they’re subscription-ed out, allow them to pause, skip, or snooze particular shipments.

It provides flexibility and puts the power in the customer’s hands, plus they’re less likely to cancel when given this opportunity.

Adding a "pause" button. 👇

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Once customers have paused their subscription, you have the task of winning them back.

You can always nudge them to reactivate their subscription after some time.

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👊 Enable Swap for Credit

Create the option for customers to convert the subscription box charges to credit.

Offering a "swap for credit" option doesn’t remove them from the customer pool altogether, and the credit makes them want to come back later on.

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FabFitFun executes this perfectly:

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🙌 Offer Multiple Tiers of Product Packaging

If you have a multi-tiered subscription plan, give customers an option to downgrade to a lower value plan as an alternative to cancellation.

You can always nudge them to upgrade to the higher value plan later on.

Customers switching to a lower plan still means downgrade churn, but it’s better than a cancellation. 🤝

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For example, Battlbox’s tiered pricing includes boxes from "Basic" to "Pro plus" range.

In this case, if an "Advanced" customer wants to cancel, they can nudge them to go for a "Basic" plan instead.

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🎣 Keep Them Hooked

One way to tackle subscription fatigue is to maintain a consistent value stream – something that makes the customers keep coming back.

Add a surprise element in every box to keep the customers hooked to your subscription or even send them teasers of upcoming subscription boxes.

🗣 Ask for Feedback

Like we said before, churn cannot be avoided completely.

If the customers still choose to leave anyway, ask for feedback!

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🚨Learn what their expectations were and what went wrong.

This data is valuable and a gold mine of insights that you can use to retain other customers.

These five retention strategies will help you keep your customers despite subscription fatigue.

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If you’ve implemented any of these or are planning to, reply to this email and let us know!

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