Brainspace* is a meditation app that has a trial, paid, and free subscription model. The Brainspace team has been using UXCam for a while, and now is curious about their canceled users; how do they cancel within the app and how can the Brainspace team mitigate that churn. 

In order to analyze what was happening within their app, the Brainspace team reviewed the cancelation steps users took to terminate their subscription. A Brainspace user can go into their profile, choose their subscription, and tap cancel. There is a required field that is collected as to why they are canceling. Once they fill out that field, the subscription is terminated and the user is moved to a free subscription.

 

 

Tip: If you are unsure about your cancellation flow, you can utilize the App Navigation> ScreenFlow section of UXCam to see what screens users visit during cancelation. To do this, filter for the cancel screen and then reverse the flow.

 

 

Now that the Brainspace team understands the flow users take to cancel their subscription, they want to enrich this information so that they can gather more details. The Brainspace team sent UXCam user properties and custom events so the team can filter and report on that data.

 

Here are the custom user properties the Brainspace team sent to UXCam:

Here are the custom events the Brainspace team sent to UXCam:

Once all the custom data was in UXCam the team filtered on this information to get insights.
Using Sessions the team filtered for the user property “Subscription_type” equals “Canceled” and this pulled in all user sessions for canceled users. The team added one more filter “video recorded” is yes to look at only sessions with video replays.

Tip: Saving these filters as a segment will save you time so you can periodically check in on this cohort of clients.

 

The Brainspace team clicked on Analytics and grouped by Cancelation_Reason to identify the top reason.

 

The Brainspace team saw that “Too_Expensive” was the main reason for recent users’ cancelation.

Since “Too_Expensive” is a bit ambiguous, the Brianspace team clicked on the purple part of the graph (the “Too_Expensive” reasoning) to see all sessions of users that canceled for that reason.

The team watched the replay for 10-20 specific users and applied a label to those that are interesting or sessions they wanted to share with the team.

Tip: Be on the lookout for patterns such as the number of rage taps, frequent crashes or UI freezes, common devices or platforms, etc.

When the Brainspace team watched their end users’ sessions, they found that most users canceled after trying to play a featured guided meditation video. For some reason, the video was not playing at all and many users were rage tapping the screen trying to get it to work. There could be other cases like this that might make their end-users think this is not worth a paid subscription.

The Brainspace team added “rage taps” or “crashes” as filters within Sessions. The team saved this filter as a segment and applied this segment to different areas of UXCam. For example, they went to Issues > Crashes > and filtered on the Canceled User segment. Now the team saw all the data in Crashes around the canceled segment. 

The Brainspace team noticed that a crash occurred 287 times within the canceled users’ experience. One of the Product Managers, Titilope, sent this crash to the dev team to improve the app experience. Titilope also shared three recorded sessions with users rage-tapping the guided meditation video mentioned earlier.

Once the new version of the Brainspace app was released with the issues resolved, the team compared the new release to the old release and the new release had 10% fewer rage taps which reduced the amount of churn.

The team also contacted all users who were affected by the rage taps and offered them a free month of a paid subscription. 40% of the users opted into the free month, and 15% of the users continued on a paid subscription.

The Brainspace team still uses these saved segments to gain more insights on how to improve their app.

Do you want to measure and reduce churn? Start with this process:

1. Observe your current cancellation flow within your app.
2. Track milestones within the process such as screens visited or send UXCam custom events to track buttons tapped, actions completed, etc.
3. Segment your users (for example based on subscription or billing cycle)and send those properties to UXCam.
4. Analyze the cancellation process with your milestones through Sessions, App Navigation, and Crashes to start. Identify outliers within your data and dig into the details.
5. Make the appropriate changes to your design and release a new app. Compare the changes.
6. Iterate

*Name of real company has been replaced for privacy reasons

Images are examples, not real data