How To Cut Subscription Churn by 23% and Scale Without Breaking

This weekend was an absolute blur.

My dad flew down from NYC for five days to celebrate his 78th birthday here in Atlanta.

Whenever he visits, he somehow ends up helping with a random house project. This time it was filing down two different sets of wooden train tracks for my sons so they’d fit together perfectly.

Now our living room floor looks like a mini Amtrak railyard, with a tiny battery-powered train randomly zipping around at all hours of the day.

I needed a great last-minute birthday gift, and figured a cookbook would be something my dad would actually use.

So I found myself inside a Barnes & Noble for the first time in maybe ten years.

And man… I forgot how much I loved it.

I went to high school in New York City, and Barnes & Noble was one of the few places you could just hang out after school. It was indoors, free, and nobody bothered you if you sat around reading or goofing off. 

Walking back in ten years later, now as a parent buying my dad a gift, felt weirdly full circle.

Man, that could be a whole other newsletter.

But we got some subscription churn to talk about.

Let’s get into it.

Let’s Talk About Subscriptions, Baby

In eCom, subscription feels like the holy grail every brand wants to reach.

And it makes sense.

It’s steady, recurring revenue.

It’s convenient for customers.

It creates predictable growth.

But here’s a truth I’m a little embarrassed to admit:

After almost five years working at two agencies, I didn’t have much hands-on experience with subscription platforms.

I was juggling five to eight clients at a time while trying to raise two kids. Most days, I was just trying to keep everything from falling apart.

Then I got fired. Almost exactly one year ago.

And one of my first freelance clients told me they needed help reducing subscription churn.

I was fired up.

It felt like the first time I got to actually do the thing instead of just talk about it.

So that’s what this issue is about.

Not to say “Look how smart I am.”

But to show you how simple this can be once you start digging in.

How We Reduced Subscription Churn from 11% to 8.5%

The first thing to know is that for this client subscriptions were already working.

They sell baked goods. This brand has steady growth. Customers were reordering. Revenue was trending up.

But there was one big gap.

There were no subscription cancel automations.

If someone wanted to cancel their subscription, they could… and that was it. 

No questions. No options. No intervention.

And when I’m looking at retention, that kind of gap is gold.

Because anything that’s missing is usually an easy win. You don’t have to optimize. You just have to turn it on.

Step 1: Start With the Reasons People Cancel

Before we touched any settings or built anything inside Stay AI, we took a step back and asked the most important question:

Why do people cancel?

To figure this out, we took a few educated guesses based on what we were hearing from customer reviews and surveys.

The most obvious cancellation reason was also the most universal: they had too much product.

That’s the number one reason people churn on any consumable subscription. I’ve done it myself. You fall behind, and suddenly your freezer is stuffed with bagels, so canceling feels like the only logical move.

After a little more digging, we came up with these reasons:

• I have too much in my fridge or freezer
  

• Doesn’t fit into my budget anymore
  

• I’m having a technical issue
  

• I need to change my diet, so I can’t eat this anymore
  

• I don’t like the taste
  

• Shipping is too expensive
  

This became our starting point. Each one of these became a branch in the cancellation flow. And once we had them laid out, we started mapping the right response for each one.

Also, all of this was set up inside Stay AI, which I’ve now used across a few brands. Overall, it’s solid and gives you what you need to get a flow like this live without a ton of friction.

Step 2: Match Each Reason With the Right Response

Once we had the main cancellation reasons mapped out, we came up with a simple response for each one. Stay AI refers to these as treatments.

Here’s how we approached it:

• Too much in the fridge or freezer
  
  Give them a skip option for the next order
  
  Let them know they can adjust their delivery frequency any time
  

• Doesn’t fit in the budget
  
  Offer a one-time discount to help them stick around for one more delivery
  

• Technical issue
  
  Route them straight to support so they can talk to someone
  
  Make it feel easy, not frustrating
  

• Needs to change their diet
  
  Let them cancel without pushback
  
  Some things are out of your control
  

• Doesn’t like the taste
  
  Same here — we didn’t try to argue
  
  Just a clean, respectful exit
  

• Shipping is too expensive
  
  Acknowledge the issue
  
  Let them know a West Coast facility is in the works to help lower costs
  

• Other
  
  Leave an open text field so customers can tell us their reason
  
  This helped us spot new patterns we might have missed
  

The Results

Here’s what happened after we launched the cancellation automation:

1. Immediate impact:

Within 90 days, churn dropped from 10.26% to 9.60%, and hit a record low of 8.61% in January.

2. Sustained improvement:

Looking at the bigger picture, average churn dropped by just over 1 percentage point in the seven months after launch.

That might not sound huge. It’s not a flashy number.

But at scale a 1% drop could mean thousands of extra customers sticking around over the course of a year. 

3. Held up under pressure:

During that same 7-month period, new subscriptions nearly doubled. More customers usually means more churn. But churn stayed low, even as volume grew. Meaning these automations held up at scale.

The Real Secret to Retention

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds when people throw around metrics like LTV and churn curves.

But retention isn’t magic.

To me, it always comes back to the same core idea: how do people feel when they interact with your brand?

If you take the time to listen to your customers, give them options that make sense, and focus on making their experience just a little bit better… you win.

Well I hope you folks enjoyed yourselves. I’ll catch you later on down the trail.

Got a topic you want me to cook up a recipe for? Drop me an email or a DM.

- Ben

P.S.

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