Behind every cancelled subscription is a story.

Last week, I had a member cancel a monthly subscription, and then 4 days later, they came back and upgraded to annual.

What could I learn by looking at this data?

Absolutely nothing.

But what could I learn by talking to them? A BOATLOAD.

We went back and forth over email and I now have a better sense of what they value and what brought them back in. The only way I could have ever known that was by talking to them. (Shout out to this person for being so open. Thanks for sticking with me :)

Those of us who run subscription businesses get obsessed with monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

But the real metric we need to be watching is churn.

Churn tells you if your business is healthy and if your subscribers are happy.

It’s a helluva lot easier and cheaper to KEEP PEOPLE than to find new fans so today, we’re looking at three ways to get a clue about cancellations.

Know why your subscribers leave

I’ve clocked 1000s of hours talking with customers who cancelled for different projects.

When I worked on a growth project for Gusto (payroll software), I convinced my team to fly to the Denver sales office so we could just listen in on calls and figure out why customers were bailing.

We categorized what we heard into three buckets:

1. Involuntary churn: people who didn’t mean to cancel. Expired credit card is the most common example.

2. Voluntary churn bad fit: people who intended to cancel and who probably never should have paid or had the wrong expectation about the offer.

3. Voluntary churn good fit: people who intended to cancel but who were a good fit and should have been served better.

We could solve for 1 and 3 through our customer experience and 2 indicated a mismatch between what we were marketing and what we were delivering.

It’s rare I would talk to someone and think “I already knew this.” It’s gold. Every time.

But let’s say spending hours on the phone with your subscribers isn’t the best use of your energy. You can still get intel from subscribers before or after the moment they cancel and you can use it keep more of them around longer.

Clue 1: Get a cancel reason

The moment someone decides to cancel is the best time to get an answer about why.

You can send an automatic note asking them why they cancelled. I use Zapier to do this but some email systems will offer an option to trigger an automation on plan change from paid to free.

Ideally, you’d redirect them to a one question form right after they cancelled but that’s not easy to do without development help. This is the next best thing.

I should mention that Stripe has a setting where you can “collect a cancellation reason.” Sounds useful! But in 4 years of running subscriptions, none of my cancelled subscribers have ever filled this out. If you’re doing higher volume than me, it might be worth a try. It’s just a switch to turn on under the customer portal settings.

✏️ How to do this: Use Zapier, your email tool or Stripe to ask for a cancellation reason (just one question! don’t make this a long survey!)

🧠 What to do with the intel: Collect cancel reasons into a Google Sheet and a couple times a year code the reasons by theme (label them by issue) to see if you can spot a pattern.

Clue 2: Run a survey

If you’re running audience surveys, you can include churn-related questions. You have to do this BEFORE subscribers cancel because once they do, they’re much harder to reach, so this would just be in your general survey to readers.

Make sure to ask questions that help you anticipate churn patterns. For example:

• Why did you subscribe?

• What keeps you subscribed?

• What’s the least valuable part of your subscription?

• What’s one thing you wish was different about [our work or the subscription]

• How likely are you to stay subscribed in the next 6 months? Why?

✏️ How to do this: Make a reader survey and include questions that directly or indirectly ask about subscribe reasons and possible churn reasons. Once a year is great or whenever you have time to do this. If you need this info bad enough, you’ll get motivated to run it!

🧠 What to do with the intel: Download the survey result spreadsheets (remove all personal data columns) and upload it to your AI tool of choice. Ask the AI tool questions like “What percent of respondents said they would likely leave in less than 6 months and what were the top 5 reasons why?”

Do this one question at a time. You can even ask “What questions should I have asked you based on this data set?” AI has made this type of research and analysis SO EASY AND FAST. Your questions determine your insights though so ask good questions.

Clue 3: Pull data from their email

I already know you’re gonna hate this one but I just want you to know it’s an option.

You can upload a set of emails to a CRM and have it pull down a bunch of data off a single email address. This method works best with professional email addresses but it can work on generic personal emails too. Tools like Clay and Apollo can pull job titles, company names, websites, social profiles and more.

It’s not cheap, so if you want a quick and dirty option, you can Google email addresses yourself. This is a helpful activity when you’re just getting started because you should pay extra close attention to who is subscribing and cancelling in the early days.

What you’re looking for is a gut check on whether you think that subscriber was a good fit or bad fit. Wait Lex, how am I supposed to figure that out?

Some hints:

• They live in the city you cover (or they don’t)

• They have a job in the field you cover

• They follow you on social media already

✏️ How to do this: Google email addresses when someone subscribes or cancels to look for clues about whether they are a good fit for your publication/subscription. You may not think you’ll be able to spot this, but if you do a little bit of this Googling, you’ll find some useful stuff.

You can also use a CRM data enrichment tool like Clay or Apollo or any of the million other ones out there.

🧠 What to do with the intel: Keep track of this in your cancellation reasons sheet. If you found a lot of “bad fits,” your messaging or audience targeting might need an adjustment.

If you found mostly “good fits,” you need to reach out to a few of them to find out what the mismatch was. Dig deeper than “too expensive”!

Our takeaway

If you want less cancellations, you need to know why people are cancelling.

A simple automation, a reader survey or a data lookup can help you spot patterns and head off bigger problems as your publication grows.

Are the right people subscribing? Are they getting what they came for? Anything less than yes and yes yes means you have a chance to make your revenue and audience relations healthier. Any subscribers you keep is money you don’t have to chase down.

Try one of these methods and stay tuned next week when we get into how to prevent churn altogether.