Off Brand
Why Subscription Businesses Need To Let Their Users Quit
Instead of intentionally hiding the ‘unsubscribe’ button, let customers leave gracefully. They might just come back.
No one loves a quitter. I don’t (just) mean that in the sense of a high school coach shaming anyone who walks away from the team. I’m referring to the moment a consumer quits a subscription-based business or service — one of the hottest business models of the moment, from giants like Spotify to box-merchant startups like Stitch Fix, to yes, us (as in, Medium).
Such enterprises, particularly newer ones, naturally focus on signups, easy onboarding, and racking up impressive numbers of new customers on a monthly or quarterly basis.
To the extent such companies think about offboarding, the strategy often boils down to intentionally orchestrated friction. If you’ve ever gone through, for example, the maddening process of dumping your cable provider — “Yes, you’ve mentioned the bundles” — you know exactly what I mean. But really, if you’ve ever broken up with any such business, you know that quitters get little respect. When it’s not an annoying process, it’s usually an indifferent one. And after all, why should a company bother to design for ex-customers?
