Too Much Friction with Wix
Wix
Wix is a website design tool founded in 2006. With sleek and easy to use design elements, Wix has garnered over 150 million users on plans ranging from $16 to $45. Wix is a great product with a ton of happy customers, but when a customer goes to cancel their product, the cancellation process doesn’t match the quality of their product.
Quick Hits
- Don’t hold your customers hostage: Simply finding out how to cancel Wix took us forever. You don’t want your customers walking out the door but don’t hold them hostage either. There’s good friction and bad friction.
- Present customers with proper salvage offers: 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
Don’t hold your customers hostage
When we went to cancel with Wix, the first thing we noticed was how difficult it was to find out how to cancel our account. Plans were tied to our sites and we needed to move sites to the trash to cancel their plans and from there we had to navigate back to the main page. It was a lot of clicking.
You shouldn’t let your customers walk out the door, but you shouldn’t hold them hostage either. Canceling with Wix was way too complicated. When all was said and done, it took us about 5 minutes just to figure out how to cancel our account.
When it comes to your cancellation flow, you need to make sure your friction is good friction. Is your friction there simply to make a customer struggle and frustrate them into giving up or is your friction using loss aversion tactics and gathering useful information to try and save your customer. Wix seems to be doing the former when they should be focusing more on the latter.
Present customers with proper salvage offers
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. They have some nice drop down menus that address the customer’s concerns and try and drive them towards a solution. However, they still don’t go far enough here.
They’re doing the basics, yet, instead of just guiding customers to their FAQ page they should also be presenting salvage offers like discounts and pause plans to help retain customers. Leading customers to an FAQ page is a good start, but you need to really think about other, specific avenues towards winning them back.
Proper salvage offers, like the ones we offer with Retain, can improve retention by 25%-30%.
Make reactivation easy
Once we cancelled with Wix, we received an email telling us that our “premium plan has been cancelled” with a button below to renew our plan. The email you send after your customer cancels is one of the most important emails you’re ever going to send. With this reactivation email from Wix, there is simply way too much friction to resubscribe. You want to make sure the process to sign back up is as frictionless as possible.
First, we have way too much text here. They are specific in telling us when our subscription will be canceled, but showing a list of steps is essentially telling the customer that they are going to be dealing with a ton of friction ahead.
Next up, when we actually click the “Renew Premium Plan” button, we have to log back in. Make reactivating a simple process that can be done in a few clicks. Most emails are opened on a mobile phone, and we’ve all had the experience of opening our email client, which redirects to a login page, which redirects to the website, etc. All of this friction should be avoided when you’re trying to get a customer to resubscribe.
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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00:00:00:02 - 00:00:21:03
Neel
Can we just agree that 7 minutes to sign back up for a product I just canceled is insane. That's insane.
00:00:21:05 - 00:00:27:23
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.
00:00:28:01 - 00:00:28:22
Allissa
I'm Allissa Chan.
00:00:28:23 - 00:00:43:09
Neel
And today we're breaking down Wix, which was founded in 2006 and is a website design tool and has over 150 million users. Plans range from as low as $16 a month, up to $45 per user per month.
00:00:43:11 - 00:00:59:09
Allissa
All right, Now I love Wix, but this was a rough one. So we're going to get into some of the things that they're doing pretty well and some of the things that they're doing not so well when trying to save their customers before they reach their Churning point.
00:00:59:11 - 00:01:23:21
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.
00:01:23:23 - 00:01:32:19
Neel
Look, I love Wix, but I absolutely hated canceling my subscription two weeks. It was just way too confusing. Roll the tape.
00:01:32:21 - 00:01:41:10
Allissa
There's like a bunch of options and different dropdown menus. The plans are tied to your website. At one point you have to like, disconnect your domain. There's a bunch going on and.
00:01:41:10 - 00:02:06:05
Neel
Let's talk about friction for a second, because I think on one hand Wiggs has a pretty sophisticated UI UX team, right? But there's good friction and then there's bad friction. Good friction, right? Are things that a company does in their UX and UI. They try to slow the user down and rethink their action. Bad friction is when you mislead the user entirely and send them down a rabbit hole of things that may or may not pan out.
00:02:06:05 - 00:02:17:09
Neel
And I think this is a good example of the latter, is the spirit of their friction. You're trying to create, try to instill reflection and thoughtfulness from your customers or just something else. And really think about that when you're building your flow.
00:02:17:11 - 00:02:33:05
Allissa
And moving on to their cancellation flow. I actually quite like the UI here. I like how I select my cancellation reason and a dropdown and then a message appears anticipating, you know, why I'm trying to leave and trying to handle that objection, even though the bones are there, there really is no material salvage offer that I'm being presented with.
00:02:33:05 - 00:02:40:18
Allissa
There's no discount, there's no maintenance plan or an offer to pause my plan. It's really just a lot of different ways to redirect means there. Thank you.
00:02:40:18 - 00:03:03:10
Neel
Page And this was surprising for weeks because Weeks has an amazing collection of self-service resources from a knowledge base to an API board, and some other things to really help customers figure out their issues on their own. And so I would have expected a company like Wix that has so many self-serve options, try to get ahead of some of these objections by not only giving them a message, but baking in salvage offers right in this flow.
00:03:03:12 - 00:03:23:04
Allissa
Now, following our cancellation, we did receive this reactivation email, and I do want to call out that I love how explicit they are about how much time I have left on my plan before it expires. Now, beyond that, though, it really wasn't that helpful. And I think we spent probably like 5 to 7 minutes going to hell and back trying to figure out how to reactivate our subscription in all of our sites and so on.
00:03:23:06 - 00:03:44:17
Neel
Can we just agree that 7 minutes to sign back up for a product that just canceled is insane? That's insane. Curate an offer. Wix knows exactly why we canceled. Was it price? Was it functionality? Was it something else? Entirely? Right. I don't want to do a bunch of thinking and a bunch of work to figure out what the best plan for me is, which should start off by curating a dedicated offer for me.
00:03:44:19 - 00:04:05:08
Neel
And then I can change that if I need to change it. Right? The second thing is friction. Weeks provides me with a three step plan on how I can sign back up for a paid subscription. This is way too much work, right? 60% of all emails today are opened up on a mobile phone, and I'm sure everyone watching has had that experience where you click a link in your mobile email client, it opens up a browser.
00:04:05:10 - 00:04:19:21
Neel
That browser doesn't have your password saved, and then it's a giant mess again, right? Giving the user the ability to sign back up and buy a plan without needing to log in is critical in reducing that friction and boosting conversion rate.
00:04:19:23 - 00:04:39:05
Allissa
All right. So to recap, there are three main takeaways here. There's good friction and there's bad friction. This was pretty bad friction. And so you need to make it as simple as possible for your customers to know how to cancel. Now, secondly, I think Wix does a really good job of, you know, having pretty nice UI throughout their cancellation for the bones are there, but there's no real salvage offers being presented.
00:04:39:05 - 00:04:56:15
Allissa
And this is a really big missed opportunity to save your customers while they're going through the cancellation process. And finally, just make it simpler to reactivate your subscription, like make it a one click user experience. Don't make me have to, you know, navigate to different pages like sign up and remember my password and all of that. We don't need all of that.
00:04:56:20 - 00:05:16:08
Neel
I think the silver lining here is that while Weeks does an okay job of all of this, what we've seen in the data with retained pretty consistently is that even just implementing a couple of these interventions we've talked about today can boost retention by 20 to 30% a few weeks or any other company out there interested in optimizing your cancellation flows or even just want a retention audit.
00:05:16:10 - 00:05:20:02
Neel
Reach out to us at Churningpoint@paddle.com. What's up next week? Alyssa.
00:05:20:04 - 00:05:28:05
Allissa
So next week we're diving into the world of video marketing. With video, their cancellation flow definitely could use a little bit of work, so make sure you're tuning in to that episode. Thanks for watching.
