Give Your Subscribers Better Options On The Path To Unsubscribe

This was fascinating. So I have been scaling back on some things that I'm not using that I hadn't thought about before. But given the current economic environment, a lot of people are doing the same. And one of the things that I was scaling back on was Audible.

I love Audible. I listen to audiobooks regularly, but I haven't in a while because my listening habits have changed. A lot of people listen to stuff on their commute. If you don't have a commute anymore, you're not listening to audio content as much anymore. So it's kind of the same deal with Audible.

But I had a bunch of credits stored up.

Pro tip: if you're going to cancel your Audible account, make sure that you redeem your credits before you do the cancel because you'll lose them, otherwise. If you redeem your credits before you cancel, then you will still have those books to listen to it even though you've canceled. So be sure you do that if you're going to cancel.

But when I went to cancel and I went through the process to click-through and at the end of the process, I got three different options. This is very smart way of dealing with exiting customers, because we all know it takes a lot more to re-acquire a customer than to retain the customer in the first place.

As I said, I love Audible, I didn't really want to cancel, but I needed to scale it back. So the three options I got were:

  1. Limited time offer: lock-in one year plan for $99.50. So I'd save money by just buying buying it up front, so they're trying to save me money there. Instead of $149, I get it for $99.
  2. The other option was keep listening for less, so I could go and do a lower tier and pay less on a monthly basis.
  3. And then the third option was pause your membership. So it gave me the option to pause my membership for 30, 60 or 90 days and therefore I wouldn't be paying for the next--if I chose 90 days--for the next three months.
Screenshot: Audible Pause Membership

I didn't really want to leave Audible because I love Audible. I just didn't want to pay for it. And so that was a great option. I chose that option. It just seems like a really smart way of dealing with with exiting customers and trying to retain them.

Consumers Want The Option To Pause Subscriptions

I am not alone in the desire to have an option to pause, rather than cancel, my subscription services. Marketing Charts reports:

With an estimated 27.4 million US consumers at risk of canceling at least one subscription in the next 6 months, subscription services are looking for effective ways to retain subscribers – and according to newΒ research from Recurly, a pause feature could be one productive approach. Indeed, among at-risk subscribers, half (51.8%) say they would be very or extremely likely to pause a subscription if the option was available.

Chart: Benefits Of Subscription Pausing