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How to create a Cancellation Flow for SaaS

It's expensive to acquire users so SaaS businesses must do their best to retain them.

If you’re working on your offboarding and want to retain users, you want to set up a cancellation flow.

Effecive cancellation flows provide insights into why customers leave while giving them strong reasons to stay.

So the question quickly becomes:

How to create a Cancellation Flow for SaaS?

There are 3 fundamental rules to follow when building cancellation flow for SaaS businesses:

1. Show users what they’ll lose if they cancel
2. Ask them why they're leaving
3. Make custom offers based on the reason

Let's dive deeper into each of them.

1. Show users what they’ll lose if they cancel

When users think of cancelling a subscription, they don’t always realize what they’ll lose if they actually do it.

At the point of cancellation, you have a chance to prevent churn by reminding them of what features, benefits, or data they’ll be missing out on by closing their accounts.

Here's a quick review of LinkedIn's cancellation flow, with a great example of loss-aversion.

2. Ask users why they are leaving

There are several potential reasons behind any decision to cancel a subscription. If you never ask (watch the results, iterate, and ask again), you’ll never know.

Acknowledging the specific reason behind churn gets you two advantages - solving that pain point and further improving your product for clients worth saving.

Ultimately, this means that losing some users now can lead to retaining more in the future.

Adobe’s cancellation flow illustrates that quite well. They allow for multiple cancellation reasons and let users ellaborate with text feedback.

3. Make custom offers based on the churn reason

Some churn is inevitable, but not all of it. Many canceling customers would likely stick around if given a solution to their problem.

For each churn reason, you should make a custom offer that may work to retain the user. Make sure you understand the product’s flaws and users' pain points to adjust the offers accordingly.

Benefits of a Cancellation Flow

Cancellation flows are becoming table stakes in SaaS businesses. Here's what you get from them.

Make it easy to retain existing customers

No business wants to make it easy for users to cancel.

But it’s even more evident that no user wants to be left without the power of decision.

That’s why having a smooth, user-friendly cancellation flow takes a big part in conquering (or confirming) users' trust and respect.

Collect useful feedback

Churn is inevitable, and many times it's an opportunity.

When integrating a cancellation flow within your platform, you can take advantage of offboarding to ask questions about the churn reason.

This information allows you to know what you could have made to make the customer stay.

You can then use this to inform product strategy and choose which churn reasons you want to address.

Leave the door open to re-engage churned users

Every touchpoint of the user’s journey is crucial to building a good impression. The offboarding phase is no exception.

The user that leaves feeling that their issues about the product were valued and addressed is more likely to come back as a user.

Eventually, some of your customers will decide to leave your product - and you must continue giving them reasons to stay, right up until the very end.

This is, reminding them of the value they've built inside the product’s app, collecting feedback in virtue of the future of your business, and offering an adjusted solution to a specific problem.

By doing so, whatever the outcome, you’ll be capitalizing on offboarding.