I use this email to win back a churned customer

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On April 1st, we got an email from ProfitWell saying one customer canceled his plan. The reason he left is “I found an alternative.”

It’s not an April Fools’ joke; it’s a brutal fact of running a SaaS business.

But, wait a second, he found an alternative, so what? Why did he leave? Is it because of the cost? Or is it because of a lack of features or something else? I need to figure it out! So I wrote this email right after the ProfitWell notification email.

Hi Jack,

Thanks for letting us know the reason why you canceled. I know you found an alternative, maybe because it’s cheaper, or it offers more than we do.

Mind sharing more details? If the price is your only concern to cancel, I’d like to match whatever the alternative offers.

Please let me know if we can work something out 🙌

Best,
Damon, founder of Testimonial

I clicked Send, then started waiting. 24 hours passed, and no reply…

One more hour passed; I GOT A REPLY 😱

Hi Damon,

That is kind of you to reach out. I am currently demoing a shitty alternative at $1.99 monthly.

I liked your system too. Honestly, as we are just starting out, I am trying to keep the price low.

If you can help on that price I will keep going on your platform as it had a lot of things I did like.

Thank you,

This is the best reply I could have hoped for. He likes us, but it’s just a bit out of his budget. Actually, for Testimonial, we offer discounts to small businesses and early-stage startups.

In the next reply, I told him we would add a discount to his plan, and the discounted price will be lower than what the alternative offers.

He re-activated his subscription right away! 🥳

You can see the full event history of this customer from my Stripe dashboard.

To be honest, I follow up with every churned customer. In most cases, there will be no reply. But if I don’t shoot my luck, there will be no “luck”.

Bonus: automate the follow-up on Zapier

To further automate it, I made a zap on Zapier.com. What the zap does is whenever a new email matches the search query like below, it automatically sends a follow-up email.

from:(product@profitwell.com) subject:([ACTION REQUIRED] Customer cancellation) I found an alternative

Feel free to steal my email template and the Zapier automation 👊