Subscription Cancellation Survey Questions and Best Practices

Looking for a way to get valuable feedback from users who cancel their subscriptions? Create a subscription cancellation survey with useful questions.

Creating a subscription cancellation survey is important for getting the most out of users who don’t want to continue their subscriptions. This can help you improve your subscription plans or membership content.

However, creating an effective subscription cancellation survey that helps reduce the churn rate can be difficult. This is because you need to make sure you’re asking the right questions and can collect the information you need to actually improve your subscription or membership content. On top of this, you also need to ensure it’s concise so users fill out your cancellation survey instead of skipping over it completely.

In this post, we’ll explain why a subscription cancellation survey is useful and cover some of the best cancellation survey questions you might consider asking your users and also some best practices.

Because losing subscribers is never fun, but it is a natural part of running a membership site. So, the best you can do is try and make the most out of the situation and learn from your less satisfied clients.

The Importance of a Subscription Cancellation Survey

A subscription cancellation survey is a list of questions that users who cancel their subscription plan can fill out before leaving your site.

This way, you can ask important questions to users who were once interested in your product or service in order to better understand why they ultimately decided to leave. Since membership and subscription sites have a strong sense of community, it makes it essential to take care of users who were once fond of your content but now have decided to cancel their subscription plan.

Let’s dive deeper into some of the other major reasons why you need to use a subscription cancellation policy:

• Improve user experience and brand image. While you can ensure all subscribers have the best experience with your brand, a subscription cancellation policy will let you improve the user experience for users who decide to cancel their subscription plan. This lets customers know you care about their opinion and helps promote a better brand image.

• Better understand your member’s needs. If you’re asking the right questions in your subscription cancellation survey, it can help you better understand your members’ needs. As a result, you can make improvements that matter to your audience and potentially encourage lost subscribers to give your brand a shot again.

• Enhance marketing campaigns. If you know some of the major reasons why users cancel their subscription plan with your brand, you can enhance your marketing campaigns. With a better understanding of the pain points of users who decide to cancel, you’re able to create more successful marketing campaigns for your business that address those exact points for potential customers.

• Reduce churn rate. A subscription cancellation survey can help you improve your offerings so it’s more suitable for your target audience. This is also great for preventing any more users in the future from leaving your site and reducing the churn rate for your brand.

6 Subscription Cancellation Survey Questions

When creating a subscription cancellation survey for your membership site, there are some essential questions you want to ask users who decide to cancel their subscription plan. This can help you better understand what went wrong and how you can improve your offering so it doesn’t happen again.

It’s important to keep subscription cancellation survey questions short and succinct so that more users answer questions and submit the survey. This is because users who are leaving your membership program may not want to spend time answering open-ended questions. Instead, it’s much better to give customers MCQs or rating-based questions that don’t require much effort from the user’s end.

In addition to this, you can also include one or two open-ended questions for users who want to provide more information or are willing to spend the time to tell you more about why they are canceling their subscription plan. But I’d recommend making those optional.

These are some of the most useful subscription cancellation survey questions you might want to include in your brand’s survey:

#1. When did you first subscribe?

The first question you might want to ask your customers is about the time they first subscribed to you. You can give users a list of answers so it doesn’t require any additional effort for them to answer this question. For instance, you can create an MCQ question such as “When did you first subscribe?” and let users select their answer from multiple choices like “Less than a month ago”, “More than 6 months ago”, and “Over a year ago”.

This helps you better understand the user’s situation and helps you connect with them on a deeper level. If a subscriber cancels their subscription after a year, it can help you better understand why they decided to cancel after using your service for over a year. If a lot of your members tend to cancel their subscriptions around the same time period, this might give you some insight into the limitations of your product.

In addition to this, it helps you segment canceled subscriptions better and enhances marketing efforts for your business.

#2. How often did you use the subscription?

You can create another MCQ question that asks users who cancel their subscriptions about their usage. For example, you can create an MCQ question such as “How often did you use the subscription?” and give users a list of answers like “Daily”, “Once a week”, and “Once a month”.

This way, you can better understand each user who cancels their subscription and separate seriously interested users from ones who barely spent any time with your membership program. If most of the users who unsubscribe are not using your services very often, it’s probably because they were expecting something else from your it. But if a significant amount of your frequent users cancel their membership, that should raise some questions on your part. If that’s the case, your users might be finding your service useful but are unsatisfied with other aspects of your brand, such as customer support.

#3. What caused you to cancel the subscription?

Asking users the main reason why they canceled their subscription plan is one of the most crucial questions to ask in your survey. While you can ask a simple question like “What caused you to cancel your subscription plan?”, you want to give users two different ways to answer this.

First, you can include a list of answers such as “Not interesting anymore”, “Don’t have time”, “Too expensive”, or “Found a better alternative” for users who don’t want to put in much effort answering the question in detail. For those who do want to answer in detail, you can make the last option “Other” to give users the choice to provide a different reason and elaborate if they’d like to.

The answer to this question is very useful for any membership site as it’s the main reason why a user decides to cancel their subscription. You can then better understand your users and make improvements that help reduce the churn rate on your membership site.

#4. How likely are you to give us a shot again?

You also want to ask users if they’re willing to give your brand a shot again if you make the required improvements. For this, you can ask users something like “On a scale of 1 to 5, how likely are you going to use our service again?” and give them 5 options to choose their answer.

This requires the least amount of effort from your customers and subtly encourages users to re-consider your brand as a potential solution again.

#5. Will you recommend our subscription to others?

It’s also a great idea to ask users if they will recommend your membership program to others or their peers. You can ask something like “From 1 to 5, how likely are you to recommend our service to your friends and family?” or ask them “Will you recommend others to try out our service?” and give them a list of predefined answers to choose from.

This not only helps you get the right answers but also makes your customers feel special and lets them know that you care about their opinion.

#6. How can we improve? (Optional)

As mentioned earlier, it’s a great idea to include one or two open-ended questions in your subscription cancellation survey. For example, you can ask “How can we improve?” and let users give a detailed response in a text box.

For users who want to explain their reasons, it’s the perfect option for them to describe what went wrong and help you understand how your business can improve its offerings.

Cancellation Survey Best Practices

Your subscription cancellation survey strategy should aim to get the right answers from users who have decided to cancel their subscriptions. This helps you get maximum value from canceled subscriptions and effectively reduces the churn rate for your business.

Let’s briefly go over some cancellation survey best practices to follow for creating the ideal cancellation survey for your business:

• Understand your audience better. When creating your brand’s subscription cancellation survey, it’s important to understand your audience and create segments. This can help you better understand each user and is great for improving your marketing campaigns.

• Ask short and concise questions. You don’t want to agitate your customers with lengthy questions, especially if they’ve decided to cancel their subscription and leave your membership program for good. Instead, you want to keep questions concise so it encourages more users to answer and submit the cancellation survey form before leaving.

• Listen to understand. Even though users have decided to cancel their subscriptions, you still want to listen to their concerns and understand them. This is because it’s the best way to get a response from users and encourages them to give your brand another shot.

• Keep offering value. When a user cancels their subscription, it doesn’t always mean you’re losing a valued customer forever. If you show users who decide to cancel their subscription that your brand still cares despite their choices, it not only promotes a better brand image but encourages users to reconsider their option to cancel the subscription.
• Leave your door open. Assure you unsubscribing users they can always come back and make it easy for them to re-activate their plans if they ever want to.
• Take action. Make sure not only to listen to the answers abandoning users give you but to also analyze them and take action. Take a good look at their opinion and actively try to better your service accordingly.

Conclusion

Using a subscription cancellation survey can prevent users from leaving your membership program on a negative note and helps your brand better understand what improvements need to be made for reducing the churn rate.

To avoid any big mistakes when creating a subscription cancellation policy for your brand, you should go over our guide on the worst subscription cancellation policies and how to avoid them.

If you’re looking for an easy way to manage your membership site and its subscribers, the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin is the perfect solution for you. It not only lets you create subscription plans and earn recurring revenue by creating restricted content for your members, but also offers member management and subscription management features.

Do you have any questions about which subscription cancellation survey questions you should be asking? Let us know in the comments section below.

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