Advance Local is home to 14 local market groups including NJ.com, Syracuse.com, PennLive.com and Cleveland.com. In 2022, the company experienced higher subscriber churn across their online publications. To tackle this problem, the design team was tasked to improve the online subscription cancellation flow.
Analysis revealed that 30% of subscribers who canceled via phone were retained while online cancellation saved none. To tackle churn, the online cancellation flow needed an update.
Limited engineering bandwidth and lack of flexibility with third-party subscription manager.
An improved online subscription cancellation flow that captured first-party data and surfaced win-back offers. Early results showed 27% of customers who entered the online cancellation flow were retained.
The "My Subscription" page was added for subscribers to provide a clear path to view and manage their subscriptions. Users now had the option to cancel their subscription through a dedicated cancellation flow as opposed to previously having to go through a third-party subscription manager.
Multiple signals of completion were added to the cancellation flow to gives users validation that they have successfully canceled their subscription and would not be billed.
Before. The biggest challenge was working around a third party subscription manager that had a default experience. The default experience proved to have many usability issues like hiding the "Cancel subscription" action behind a subtle vertical menu icon.
After. Working within our constraints, we redesigned the initial screen for when the job-to-be-done for a user was to manage their subscription. We paid close attention to the visual hierarchy to ensure important information was visible.
We implemented a short survey to capture information on why some users might be canceling which didn't exist previously. In addition, a progress indicator was added after discovering that many users were unsure whether they've completed the cancellation successfully.
If price was the reason for cancel, churning subscribers were presented with a win-back offer. This win-back offer retained about 27% of customers to entered the flow less than one month after the new cancell ation flow was launched.
The subscription manager had been outsourced to a third-party program which provided a streamlined solution for our subscription service but grossly lacked design flexibility.
A major challenge we faced in the early stages was to figure out a way to improve the experience without affecting the iframe of the subscription manager.
Our first iteration added a menu that took churning customers through a survey before reaching the subscription manager. Since we could not affect the subscription manager iframe, users were still required to find the "cancel subscription" button behind the menu. This resulted in very confused customers with one third of those who enter the experience failing to cancel their subscription.
We learned the hard way that messaging wasn't going to help either...
To validate our concerns, we tested mobile and desktop prototypes with 30 users within a general audience. 87% of users felt that they successfully canceled. Actual success rate was 37%. There was a gap between perceived completion and actual completion.
After several iterations, it was clear that we needed a seamless experience that would bypass the out-dated subscription manager. We created wireframes and mockups of what this experience could look like and presented it to stakeholders.
Within 1 month of "My Subscriptions" being launched, we were able to save 27% of churning customers. We weren't able to get there without the iterations and tests that taught us valuable lessons that would stick with us throughout future projects.
A seamless flow is necessary to help customers recognize when they have successfully canceled or if more steps are required. Especially when multiple steps are involved.
Instructions and messaging are not sufficient tools for users alone. Many will misread or miss them entirely.
It is important to test early and often. We could have avoided a lot of headache if we validated our concerns about quick fixes earlier.
