Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. SubClub is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com.
Let's get into the show. Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard. Today's conversation is shorter than usual and will be featured in RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps report. Each episode in this series will explore one crucial metric and share actionable insights from top subscription app operators. With me today, Caroline Walthall, Director of Product Marketing and Lifecycle Marketing at Quizlet.
On the podcast, I talk with Caroline about the importance of cancellation surveys, leveraging social proof and win back campaigns, and why making it easier to cancel can actually increase retention. Hey Caroline, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. thanks for having me excited to dive into this topic so we're going to talk about your top tips for re-engaging churn users and subscribers but before we get to those tips i think it's really important to understand why people
unsubscribe before you even think about and why people churn out of your app. So let's start with the top reasons you see of why people churn out of an app or churn out of a subscription. There's kind of three main buckets of why people might churn from a consumer subscription.
First of all, they may have hit a natural breaking point with your product or your use case and they don't need it anymore. So like that's kind of acceptable type of churn in some ways. And Quizlet, the way that happens often is students might graduate from college and they don't. have constant tests anymore and so yeah we may not be a amazing fit for them going forward unless they're in certain careers and career paths where they have a lot of ongoing tests they're sort of an acceptable
churn that can happen. And I think sometimes people forget about that. Not all churn is literally bad. Some of it, you know, is natural. We were hearing about this more and more in the dating space as well of like, hey, you know, people churning from a dating app, that's actually good for them.
Maybe not good for the business, but it's like you kind of got to understand the business you're in and understand those natural turn cycles as well. There's also sort of... moments when customers didn't mean to churn but something happened with their payment method right their credit card changed because of losing it or something else happened you know and they didn't update their information there's a lot of things you can do to address
that level of sort of more technical problem whether it's you know really active communication proactively before a renewal cycle comes up but also dunning you can work with specific providers to help get to the root causes and figure out how to make sure you're able to apply new credit card numbers to old credit cards, things like that. One of the biggest categories and the thing that I think we can zoom most into today is maybe they didn't see the value, right? We have to be honest.
like that's a huge bucket as well and there's a lot of things that go into that. They may have felt that the value that was offered just wasn't meeting.
the cost of the subscription or maybe it didn't perform as expected maybe there were actual issues with the app or with the product there could have been cheaper or easier alternatives to access or maybe the problem itself at the time felt like a burning problem but When it came to actually needing to have a solution for it, they realized it wasn't that burning of a problem or that big of a problem.
which sometimes happens for certain segments and not others in your audience. How do you get at those things? What's the best way you've found to understand why people are churning? And even with the billing and the natural churn, it's sometimes helpful to understand that. So you're not sending them kind of the wrong.
message or trying to win somebody back when they've already graduated college. Trying to figure out how to get personalized information, you know, or personalized reasons why people are churning is great. And cancellation survey is an awesome thing to apply. Definitely industry best practice.
So when people decide to go through and cancel their subscription with you, you automatically trigger some kind of several question survey that just has some main categories for the reasons why they're done using. the subscription at the time and that can be just really helpful in sizing and directing your churn prevention efforts in the future and win back efforts that follow and so we found that really helpful at quizlet i would say as i mentioned we have
a good amount of acceptable churn due to students aging out. But the challenge for Quizlet is that one third of those no longer need users are just done with that more pressing test or need that they had, maybe not actually done. with college or high school and so we have a challenge to help people think about their
preparedness for tests and quizzes and things like that on a more ongoing basis. So that's still a group we should be targeting, for example. On a tactical level, do you only use predefined answer shows questions or do you actually have a text box? And then what are you seeing anything especially crazy in that text box? I think we used to have a text box. We over time were able to really kind of narrow it down to.
these buckets that have been pretty consistent over time. It's a good idea probably to every so often open that up and see if there's more specific feedback that you can get. We do get a lot of good feedback coming in to our user operations channels, separately to our help center and the agents that work on support at Quizlet.
so we're able to kind of put together the pieces from a few different sources but yeah it is an option you can leave a write-in i think especially if you're just getting going probably a good idea to do also a good idea to just do some interviews with churning users and understand more deeply.
what the story is behind things and then create your categories from there. Like if you create those predetermined buckets out of nowhere, you might be missing kind of significant cuts that you want to be able to track over time. handle on why people are churning and we have three top tips for us to re-engage those users again to re-engage both the usage but then also what we all want in this industry is also to re-engage them as subscribers as well so what are your top
Three tips to re-engage those folks. To make sure you're delivering value is one of the most important things you can do here. And that comes in a lot of different forms, right? If you are shipping new features and experiences that you know people churned. because you didn't have them, like, you know, you can reach out to those people and let them know, hey, you asked, we listened kind of message.
But outside of that, I would say one of the best ways is just to figure out how to deliver personalized value through lifecycle marketing based on things that they've engaged with in the past, right? So it might be using segmentation or using dynamic variables of things.
that people have consumed before. So if your subscription is content-based, using whatever categories you use to break down content, focus on providing really useful recommendations for those people, the freshness factor to the table too of like you know we've got new xyz say you love dramas like on netflix or whatever it is right it's like having that relevant sense that like we know you we're not just sending you
random things or anything and everything, but we're leading with what you've liked in the past. And so I think that can go a long way. At Quizlet, one of the things we're doing is building out kind of a social graph that's based on the courses students are taking that data.
kind of lets us send the most relevant up-to-date hyper-local content that's coming from other students in your course directly or from your school. I think that's the kind of thing that is needed to capture people's attention especially if they have decided to cancel a subscription you know you need to sort of win back and give them reasons to believe that you are invested and that you have enough
ways to help them that maybe they haven't tapped into before. And it just helps signal this idea of like maybe a little bit of FOMO, right? Like there's other students studying here. There's other customers. like millions of people accessing this or liking it, like see why. You want to just keep things fresh at the end of the day, but you also want to keep things personal. So that's probably my top one. I think that works across re-engaging.
users who just churn broadly as well as subscribers who churn yeah and on that level of like super kind of hyper local content as you called it yeah being able to say hey there's 20 other people studying this or even more broadly like tens of thousands of students are using us for their algebra
you were taking algebra or whatever and then kind of hitting them with that that next test you're going to score way better and you're going to land higher on that bell curve because so many other people are the social proof is big i think and especially if you have enough usage to actually like make those claims, right? It's something to lean into and test. Awesome. Well, what's tip number two? Yeah. So tip number two, probably not revolutionary, but given consumer subscriptions cost money and
Everybody's got a finite amount to spend. At the end of the day, a lot of people churn because they're price sensitive, right? And so cancellation discounts or other personalized discounts to win back prior churners. is definitely something to be tried right you have to be careful in how you approach this and you know definitely recommend working with the data scientists as you do so but essentially you want to make these offers highly targeted you can tier them as well like
So you can give a bigger discount if they were a subscriber for a longer period of time. Consider a smaller discount if they were maybe only subscribing for a month or two. And so that's one way you can kind of balance cost effectiveness a little bit.
it but you don't want it to be like a blanket discount that you're offering because at the end of the day a lot of times that's going to really cut into your overall bottom line in a way that isn't really sustainable or if people learn that triggering the cancellation flow always means they're going to get a 50 percent even if they say it's too expensive but it wasn't really too expensive for them right like you want to be careful with that a little bit and you need to apply some level
of model like you know whether it's bringing ml into things right like you can do ml modeling or just testing out some tiering structure that you know helps you mitigate the potential lost revenue from, you know, over discounting.
offering discounts is super helpful and again for a ton of apps like it's probably just should be the default but as you said like as you get bigger like there's more things you need to do and so i think tip number three it kind of speaks to that so what's tip number three if you can't afford to discount or you decide discounting is complicated or maybe layering it on with discounting like these aren't mutually exclusive tips here is to offer more control over the terms of their subscription
so as i mentioned value sometimes this is because there's value there but it's more intermittent value like maybe they only have that use case every so often it's not a daily use case or a weekly use case you know you can try to think about how to offer shorter subscription durations
or give consumers the ability to pause their subscription when they are in sort of an off season for whatever that use case might be. So examples might be like Quizlet decided to offer a monthly plan. We tested into offering that a few years.
ago because we heard feedback that students wanted more flexibility especially if they were starting their subscription with us part way through the school year they didn't want to necessarily subscribe for a whole year and so definitely you know paying attention to
The natural cadences for the use case can help, and you can just offer a new subscription duration that you didn't have before. You can also give people, as I mentioned, the opportunity to pause the subscription. So you could pause it and... not pay for a few months and then it makes you happier to re-engage with it because you feel like the subscription respected the fact that as much as it might be a monthly cadence for some people or even for you sometimes
There's dependencies that you can't always predict as to like how much you actually need that in any given month. And so I think giving people control builds trust.
there's a lot of talk in in tech and even more broadly in society about subscription fatigue and you know another subscription or whatever and giving people control really is and putting them at the center and making them feel like they have control is one of the better ways to kind of build that trust and to make them feel more comfortable with
the subscription and i mean i feel the exact same way you know when there's a subscription that i know is going to be a pain to cancel or that i don't feeling those are the ones like i really avoid like any other kind of tips around this like helping people feel under control you can offer
Bundled subscription links is like a promo as well. So say a lot of folks use your product for a certain duration. Like I think about within the ed tech space, if you're studying for high stakes exams, oftentimes you have like a.
three month window, three to six month window or something like that, where you're studying really intensely for something like, you know, an entrance exam, like an MCAT or LSAT or something like that, or, you know, other types of professional exams that people study for. it's kind of in that realm and so you could offer a specific bundle that's like getting a deal for
Maybe not the whole year, but a half a year or a quarter or something like that. And, you know, you don't necessarily have to merchandise that as part of your normal options all the time. But if you see that somebody is churning and.
That's a reason why is that the length is not right or something like that like you can offer it then or maybe there's a sub segment that you know about like for like i mentioned if we see you're studying for specific exams maybe we can say hey actually come back and
use us for this specific duration and get a little bit of a deal on it so that's another way to kind of bring in a little bit of discounting into the duration piece and then you also mentioned free trials and offering a new free trial that's an interesting one how do you think about that
And then how do you think about kind of guarding against abuse of people who will just kind of use that free trial a second time just to get through that one exam and then not ever pay again? So do you offer kind of a refresh free trial more judiciously? We do it more judiciously for sure, but we've tested it at different points in time and we've seen some success.
But, you know, you'll see companies like LinkedIn, I feel like is a good example because I'll get these like fairly frequently where it's like they're trying to offer that free trial, 30 day free trial again. And, you know, I've used it. I think I've used their like re-up on trial before. I think it did cause me to subscribe at least one time. And so it's like a friendly on-ramp for something like LinkedIn. I think for students where
There is a bit more gaming maybe going on too. We do exercise caution on that a little bit, but it depends how long ago that was, right? And if we see you come back and we see you maybe are showing certain signs of being an engaged user again.
like you've really kind of come back and you seem to be focused because whatever classes you're taking that semester are a great fit for Quizlet. Yeah, maybe we should be refreshing that trial for you because we also usually have added a lot of value, maybe depending on how long.
it's been since they last subscribed. If it's pretty recent, I wouldn't really do that. But if it's been a year since they subscribed, oftentimes it's a nice way to say, hey, here's all the things we've added. That's great. Anything else you wanted to share as we wrapped up? Yeah, no, I mean, this is
a great conversation i think the only thing i'd say is at quizlet we're always hiring looking for great folks who are passionate about helping students and teachers and supporting the learning process we've got an influencer marketing specialist role that's open right now if anybody you know
has a skill set that seems to match that. And we will be hiring for some other roles on the marketing team coming up, likely a lifecycle marketing analyst role. So keep an eye out on the quizlet.com slash careers page. And yeah, we'd love. to have great smart folks join us.
a lot of great smart folks in this audience so uh hopefully that'll drum up a few interesting candidates quizlet just it's another one of those i feel like there's several like really cool big subscription companies i've actually spoken to several of them in this series with the
data subscription apps podcasts that just aren't on people's radar it's like everybody talks about duolingo or strava or kind of those big ones but then there's a lot of really cool companies like quizlet and onyx and others in the space that just don't get talked about as much so if you're in the
industry and you're looking for a new role, Quizlet's a fantastic company, been around a long time, doing a lot of really cool stuff. So a great place to join. Caroline, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been so fun. And thanks for sharing all your great tips. Thanks, David. It's been really great. Appreciate it.
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