Churning Point

Lusha | Lusha Needs to Get More Specific

Allissa and Neel break down Lusha's cancellation flow. They talk about the importance of specificity, implementing proper salvage offers, and making reactivation easy.

Lusha

On this episode, Allissa and Neel break down Lusha. Lusha is a database for SaaS contacts founded in 2016. It’s entirely crowdsourced and has a 670,000 person community. Plans for Lusha range from free to $51 per month. Lusha is a great product with a ton of happy customers, but when a customer goes to cancel their product, the cancellation process is less than ideal.

Quick Hits

  • Be specific: When it comes to loss aversion tactics, get specific. How many credits am I missing out on? When exactly do I lose all my paid features?
  • Don’t waste a good survey by not offering up salvage attempts: If you have a well designed survey, use it to your advantage. Take the responses you gather and use them to inform a proper salvage offer.
  • Make reactivation easy: Your reactivation email should be specific and easy to navigate. Don’t make your customers log back into their account or read through a wall of text just to sign back up.

Takeaways

Be specific

When we went to cancel with Lusha, the first thing we get is a pop up asking us “Are you sure? You still have credits”. Although we always recommend loss aversion tactics like this, Lusha’s attempt just isn’t specific enough. You have a ton of data on your customer, and its important to use this data to make the customer feel more loss aversion in the cancellation flow. Instead of saying “You still have credits”, Lusha could say “You still have 7 credits”. By letting your customer know they still have 7 credits, you’re making those credits feel a lot more real and therefore instilling more pain in your customer.

Similarly the microcopy here can get more specific as well. Instead of saying “Next”, Lusha could say “Lose my credits”. A simple microcopy edit like this could be the difference between your customer continuing on with their cancellation.

Don’t waste a good survey by not offering up salvage attempts

The next step in the cancellation process leads us to a simple survey that asks us why we are cancelling. The survey is actually pretty well done. It’s straightforward and a multiple choice with pretty informative cancellation reasons. However, Lusha is not using their well designed survey to their advantage.

Lusha needs to take the answers that they gather from this survey and then use those responses to guide the customer into a proper salvage offer. For example, a customer could select that Lusha was too expensive. Offer them a discount to try and win them back. If a customer is not sure how to use Lusha, send them to premium support.

Proper salvage offers, like the ones we offer with Retain, can improve retention by 25%-30%.

Make reactivation easy

Once we cancelled with Lusha, we received an email asking us to “check out their new pricing.” This button just led us right back to their generic pricing page. We say it time and time again, but the email you send after your customer cancels is one of the most important emails you are ever going to send. Your reactivation email should be specific and straightforward. Your customer shouldn’t have to decipher a wall of text and navigate through a bunch of web pages just to resubscribe. Reactivation should be a few clicks at most.

Lusha’s entire reactivation email should be a lot more straightforward. Firstly, the copy of this email is confusing. “Cancellation request received” is a very vague title. Being specific with your reactivation email is crucial, because you want your customer to effortlessly be able to resubscribe. Secondly, instead of leading us back to their pricing page, they should be leading us to a reactivation process that only takes a few clicks. We shouldn’t have to read a wall of text, click and button, log back in and then navigate to a revert cancellation button. Make reactivation as frictionless as possible.

Make sure you email us at churningpoint@paddle.com or hit up Neel and Allissa to tell us who you want us to break down next.

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00:00:00:01 - 00:00:25:11

Neel

Don't make your customers do all the work. The email a company sends once a customer cancels, is one of the most underrated emails you're ever going to send to your customers.

00:00:25:13 - 00:00:32:06

Neel

Hello and welcome to Churning Point, a show where we sign up for products just to see what it's like to cancel them. I'm Neel Desai.

00:00:32:10 - 00:00:33:08

Allissa

I'm Allissa Chan.

00:00:33:08 - 00:00:48:07

Neel

And today we're breaking down the show. Lusha was founded in 2016 and is a database for SAAS contacts. They use crowdsourced information from 670,000 people in their community. Plans range from completely free to $51 per user per month.

00:00:48:08 - 00:01:05:03

Allissa

Well, she's doing some really cool things, but as we'll see, their cancellation flow needs a little bit of work. And so today we're going to break down some things that they're doing really well and some things that they're doing not so well when it comes to saving their customers before they reach their Churning point.

00:01:05:05 - 00:01:29:10

Neel

When a customer tries to cancel. You have 18 seconds to try and save them. Now, we're not suggesting you hold your customers hostage, but the tactics that we cover provides the right amount of friction to try and save these vital customers before they reach their Churning point.

00:01:29:12 - 00:01:43:03

Allissa

Now, when I go to cancel my leisure subscription, the first thing I see is this prompt, asking me if I'm sure I want to cancel and telling me that I'm going to lose all my credits. Here's something that we're going to be seeing over and over again in all the episodes of the season, where people will leverage these loss aversion tactics.

00:01:43:03 - 00:01:51:05

Allissa

But it's just much too vague. Tell me what my credits even represent and how many that I have. Maybe this means that I'm losing four accounts or four prospects.

00:01:51:06 - 00:02:07:13

Neel

You know who does a really good job of this? Alyssa is Amazon. I can't tell you the amount of times that I've almost canceled my audible subscription because I have credits piling up. And when I go to cancel, they do a really great job of telling me, Neil, you're about to lose seven credits now.

00:02:07:13 - 00:02:26:00

Allissa

All are on this. I also want to point out a little tweak they could make to the micro copy on this widget just to make the user pause a little longer before deciding to continue on with their cancellation. I think if they made that next button, say something like No, lose all my credits, even that alone would make the user feel a little bit more pain when continuing on with the cancellation process.

00:02:26:02 - 00:02:48:07

Neel

Next up, we have this cancellation survey. And I think here Lusha does a good job of trying to capture some feedback from the customer right when they cancel. But here's where the good news ends. Regardless of what option I pick. Nothing really happens. And here is where we want to introduce a second concept of salvage offers. Salvage offers this idea of presenting the user with a bunch of different options.

00:02:48:08 - 00:02:57:04

Neel

While they're canceling, they're trying to forget the cancellation entirely. It's ultimately just about presenting the user with another option instead of proceeding with cancellation.

00:02:57:05 - 00:03:03:02

Allissa

It's a huge missed opportunity here for leisure, right? If a customer selects too expensive. Why not offer them a discount?

00:03:03:02 - 00:03:13:07

Neel

And I love that because I think when a user fills out this survey, it's amazing signal around their intent and ultimately their affinity towards your product. And so you should be using that, nudging them to make buying decisions.

00:03:13:09 - 00:03:25:14

Allissa

Last up shortly after cancellation, we do receive this reactivation email header of the email says cancellation request received. Not really sure what that means. And then there's a button there telling me to check out our new pricing page.

00:03:25:20 - 00:03:47:01

Neel

The email a company sends once a customer cancels, is one of the most underrated emails you're ever going to send to your customers. First and foremost, don't make your customers do all the work. Sending them to a random pricing page doesn't actually do anything. At the very least, you should be nudging them in the right direction. Or even better, curating a special offer that's targeted to that specific customer.

00:03:47:03 - 00:04:06:15

Neel

Got to give credit where credit is due is this ability to revert your cancellation. Something that Lusha gives its customers is the ability to one click revert to cancellation. And I think this is a really effective strategy to give customers an out, especially if they started getting value from their product while they still have time left in their billing cycle.

00:04:06:17 - 00:04:21:00

Allissa

When you're using loss aversion, really try and make the pain that the user is going to feel as specific to them as possible. And then more importantly, make sure that you have salvage offers that are tied specifically to those cancellation reasons so that you can specifically curate everyone's offering flow.

00:04:21:01 - 00:04:40:11

Neel

Couldn't agree more. And I think when you think about a cancellation flow, it needs to be thought of holistically well past the survey. Right? I think for Lusha, one thing we found was a really confusing experience after we've actually canceled. And I think one thing we've seen in the data with reChurning is giving the user as low friction of an experience as possible to sign back up is key.

00:04:40:11 - 00:04:48:21

Neel

If your Lusha or any other company out there interested in optimizing your cancellation flow, reach out to us at Churning Point Apple.com. What's up next week or so?

00:04:49:03 - 00:04:58:01

Allissa

So next week we're diving into the world of web design with Wix. Now I love Wakes, but they're cancellation flow is a little bit of a mess, so definitely make sure you check that episode out. Thanks for watching.