Posted on March 12, 2024
There are four key reasons why readers cancel their subscriptions. This is a breakdown of what they are and how to prevent subscription cancellations so you can increase your revenue and make your readers happy :).
#75 Transcript:
So today we’re going to be talking about. The four most common reasons that readers cancel their subscription end. And we talking about. The things that you can do. Two. I try and actually combat these reasons. I’m not going to tell you that you can stop a Reed from canceling their subscription. That’s dystopian. Readers can cancel inscription anytime. And as readers ourselves, you can imagine that we would want to be able to answer descriptions, but first for those who are new here, welcome prescriptions. Rather this podcast. This is visor. We help others make money from subscriptions. And you don’t want scriptures are. They basically payments that leaders make monthly or on a, some sort of recurring basis to an author. In exchange for access to maybe new stories, backless content signed books, it could be anything in short. And it’s your subscription. And your world as an author. It’s why we like to say storytellers rule the world now. We have some awesome. Free books about subscriptions. It’s called group’s fathers that you can download. We also have an accelerator that is open right now. Cohort three is closing on Friday, March 15th at the end of the day. And we’d love to have you in there and it’s going to be probably one of our last, like live cohorts, like this. We’re going to be transitioning how it all works out. And there’s a bundle called the serial scription author bundle. And this is like the only time we’re going to be offering it. And there’s limited spots in that. So if you want to check out that experience and kind of get in on the subscription masterclass, you can get in there, but. For a day. I want to share with you all the four top reasons readers, counselor descriptions. And. The first one. First one. It’s something that is not a surprise to us. And it’s actually the most common one and it’s money. Readers not having. Enough money to pay the next month. It could be financial difficulty. Could be a failed payment due to insufficient funds and a credit card or an expiring card. And now most of the time, platforms like green, we actually do auto failed payment recovery. And we can actually make up most of these payments. Soon after we actually seen issue. But sometimes we can’t because. Hey, the card’s expired. The reader didn’t enter in the new card or a. Car has insufficient funds, unfortunately like that really doesn’t have money right now, or the Raiders canceled. Because of monetary reasons. Now, what can we do to come at this? The truth is authors, like a lot of the reasons readers cancel are slightly out of your control. And. This is the biggest reason reader’s counsel. And this is certainly mostly out of your control. The first thing you can do is just understand it. And be easy on yourself. So if you see a cancellation happen, that this is probably the reason. But there’s actually that rings working on. I don’t like probably reinvent how this all works, which is. Has that actually a better canceling and they can choose to pause their subscription for a number of months. So that, if they are at a period where I don’t have the money right now, it’s okay if you have it later, we’ll just pause it and then I’ll start again. And we think that’ll actually dramatically decrease cancellations. But. For others, the Marine platform already. They basically see anywhere between 90% to a hundred percent net revenue retention. After nine months, which means if a reader joins month, one, And pays you $5 a month. Most of the time they’re gonna be paying anywhere from $4, 50 cents to $5 on average. Nine months later. Now that doesn’t make sense because it’s like people do unsubscribe and it’s yes, this is the aggregate. So this is more saying if you have 10 meters coming to a specific month, You might have some meters drop off, but net there’ll be some readers who upgrade. We make it super easy for readers to upgrade. That’s because charges are prorated on reign, meaning that they keep their billing cycle always. And when they jump up to a note here, they’re billed the difference between the two tiers, which just makes it easy. For readers to upgrade. It’s like a beautiful system. And that’s why we see so many upgrades and why we see a high net revenue retention. But with this, we even want to try and do it on the canceling end and build a cancellation flow, but hopefully like really decreases. Sure. So we’re excited about that. But there’s other three. Reasons, three other reasons that are really common, that readers cancel. And these, you actually can somewhat control this. Next one is the second most common readers. Cancel. And I’m being honest. This one, you also, you can influence, but you can’t control these next two. You have a high degree of control over it. So let’s talk to this first one. Which is time. What do you mean by time? It’s they didn’t spend the time. Actually getting use of their membership. This could be because they didn’t have the time. Quote unquote, they were too busy. Or just could be, cause they forgot. But in short, if someone doesn’t use their membership, they don’t get use out of it sometime in the first 30 to 90 days. There’s a high probability that we’ll see them drop off. Now if someone actually does make it at least 90 days into their membership and then drops off after that, they’ll probably stick around and then come back to it later. There’ll be what we call an inactive subscriber for a period of time. They’re paying you, but they’re not actively actually using their membership. And that’s common over periods of time, because if someone’s gonna be subscribed to you for three or four years, and N which is common, there’s going to be a few months where they might drop off a little bit in terms of activity, but still be paying you. But. If they drop off an activity in the first few months, that’s a bad sign because people are much more likely to cancel. In the first few months we see cancellations peak in the first few months and then dramatically drop where. There’s very little churn after three months. How do you keep your reader sticking for three months? What we’ll call the retention point. It’s simple. You want readers to get use out of your subscription? So how do you do that? So the first thing. Is actually sending. Either in a pin CUNY post. Or in your welcome email, sending them. Directly to the benefits that they get access to. So that is the moment they subscribe. They can start diving in. Reducing this friction is really important because the time period that breeders are most likely to use their membership is the moment they subscribe. So if you give them something right there to make use of that is that’s huge. The next piece is sometime in the first 30 days. Actually reaching out to your members. Seeing if they like your subscription. Seeing what changed the dad, just saying thank you. And that’s actually a soft reminder for someone. To be like, Hey, I have this subscription. Let me go in and actually use it. And then, because they do that, there’ll be way more likely to keep it. Now, there are the things that reams going to do. That we’re really excited for it to hopefully actually increase retention during this period. That I won’t share now, but just know that we’re always bringing storming new product updates based on the data we see. And I’m excited for what’s to come here. But I want to mention the third reason reader’s canceled description decks. Which is either a series change. Or a benefit change in short. This is I came in for this. Maybe this specific story. This specific story isn’t being written anymore. So I think I’m going to leave. This is the third, most common reason. And. This one’s tough because since you do have to make changes, and it’s oh God, like I can’t continue this series forever. And it’s actually in the can cause people a lot of anxiety and rightfully so because we’ve seen subscription authors membership dropped drastically. After some series are finished and they start a new series isn’t as popular with their fans. What do you do to combat this? There’s really one key thing, which is you want to continue delivering a benefit with your fans. That they really enjoy. So that hopefully there isn’t actually much downtime and that they’re actually still enjoying something. This doesn’t mean you have to write a million chapters a month. No. You can keep the same lease kids, but what it means is. If you’re writing once where they really enjoy it, you hope they also equally enjoy that next race. That. They stick around. How do we ensure that because that’s hard, you can’t guarantee it. Okay. I wish I could tell you how to guarantee it. But I can tell you how to increase your odds of getting it right. Which are one communicate early and often with your readers. Meaning. Don’t just hit them with woof surprise. Last book. This series is ending. We’re pivoting away from this non to a new one. That’s gonna piss a lot of people off. Let’s get damaged or trust. But if they know it’s ending and you communicate with them and there’s endings coming in. We can all be sad about it, but this story is going to come to an end. Lufkin excited. It’s going to be great at it. Then it’s what’s next? And that’s where you can start actually asking your fans. What do you want to see next? Maybe you have polls. Utilize polls. Here are different ideas of different things that could be in the next series. But, Do you want to see. Ideally, you get your fans telling you what they want to see. And you’re able to figure out what you want to write. What do they want to see and figure out like the perfect. Story to write next. And this sort of R and D that you’re going through before coming out with a new product line, a new series, a new benefit, whatever it may be is super important because it helps you. De-risk the process of actually launching the new benefit. And actually. Probably make it to them. They already enjoys that. There isn’t much drop-off, that’s how you reduce that cancellation. The last reason we see leaders cancel. The fourth most common way. And I’m actually proud of this is the fourth, most common reason. We see vendors cancel, but it still happens. It still happens. And this one is, I want to say almost fully in your control. Funnily enough, these go in order of least control to most control. And in order of most common to least common which is just how these things work. This is part of business, but this last one we can control. It’s really important. Which is. If an author under delivers reader’s counsel, if they were promised something and they didn’t receive it. We usually get angry. Let me just look at angry and I’ll be honest. I’ll be honest here. Although, this is the fourth, most common reason we see readers. Cancel. If you do under promise over deliver, you will. If you do over promise and under deliver, you will see like the most cancellations, right? If you give them. If you don’t give them what they came there for. Um, like you will see, you probably see large drop-off and. This isn’t a scary. Because. Leaders do have like grace periods and they’re not literally waiting every single day, counting all the chapters posted a month. But if like you go dark and Lin for 30 days, That’s not great. So there’s two things you can do here. The first thing is do your best to under promise and over deliver. Don’t promise too much. Do you try and promising that sustainable? You’d rather have, 20% less readers join, but your readers stick around more because you didn’t promise the world upfront, but gave them the world once they were inside. And the next thing is that if you are. Seeing a major change. Maybe you have a health scare or health situation. Maybe you have a change at work. Maybe. You’re just feeling overwhelmed. You can pause your subscription so that. If you’re under, promising over delivering during a period of time, that’s great. But then if it comes and. You’re not able to meet those promises anymore. Pause your subscription. And maybe you’ll be able to promise, meet those promises again in the future so that during this period of time, your readers aren’t being built. So if it’s angry, it’s Hey, don’t unsubscribe. You’re not being built during this period. All as well. Life happens, but you’re also not paying for this. And readers tend to respond really positively to that. This is a bit about. Y leaders can subscription. And hopefully it’s some helpful advice. On how you can decrease your cancellations. And ultimately increase your scription revenue because people don’t realize how important this is. The difference between a 10%. Monthly churn rate and a 5% monthly churn rate. Or a 5% and a 2% monthly churn rate. Is literally extrapolated over a year or two years. Going to mean the difference between you having a hundred members in 200 members. Or two of your members and 400 members. That’s how big these jumps are, because if you’re keeping more fans on the Vermont, that means you have to grow. Less. To keep your existing audience. And if you can keep more of your growth and have that lead to actually future growth of your subscription, you’re going to grow your revenue a lot faster. So it’s super, super important. Now. If you want to learn more about how to greater description, if you want to be part of the ultimate story to get hands on experience. MI Amelia and the SFA team to help you take your scripts to the next level. We’d love to have you aside cohort three of the six figure scripts, not the accelerator. You find the link in the description to join. And in addition to that, you also will find a ton. Of amazing stuff in this year of subscription author bundle, it’s the ultimate bundle to help you succeed as subscriptions and cereals. We’ve been to find that below and otherwise. If y’all have an amazing rest of the day. And thank you for listening. Hope you enjoy this solo episode. We’ll be back more soon, but in the meantime, don’t forget storytellers rule the world.