Reducing subscription churn by 31%

Designed to support artists through creative or financial breaks, the pause feature helps preserve trust, build loyalty, and reduce churn without adding complexity to the experience.

2024

2024

B2C

B2C

UX Design

UX Design

Design Research

Design Research

Design System

Design System

Prototyping

Prototyping

Figma

Figma

User Interface

User Interface

Quantitative Research

Quantitative Research

Networking

Networking

Problem and Context

Loopcloud is a cloud-based platform for music producers, offering a vast library of royalty-free samples, loops, and sounds. Designed for various genres, it integrates directly with DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) like Ableton, FL Studio, Logic, and others, allowing producers to easily browse, preview, and download sounds without leaving their workflow.

Since it’s launch as a platform on August 2019, users have only been able to cancel their subscriptions if they wanted to stop paying. So, similar to other subscription based platforms out there, churn (close to 15%) has been one of Loopcloud’s biggest problems. Recurly’s benchmark for B2Cs SaaS models is 5.61% (making Loopcloud’s quite high).

On top of that, more than 50% of LCs users identify as hobbyists. So they don’t always have the time, money or inspiration to make music. If they lack any of those three, they are most likely cancelling their subscription (this information was reflected on Loopcloud’s off boarding survey)

The risk of not implementing a solution for the users meant our subscribers would continue to churn voluntarily at a rate of almost 10% per month. And after analysing the data we had on our users and Recurly’s research on Pause Subscriptions, we deciding on implementing a pause option.

Process

The team came up with a set of requirements and after having discussions with engineering and the stakeholders, the following user flow was approved:

Step 1. (User has clicked ‘Pause subscription’)

  • The user should be able to select how many billing cycles they’d like to pause their subscription for (up to 3).

  • The user should be able to enter a reason for wanting to pause their subscription (this is optional)

  • The user should be shown information about what happens when they pause their subscription.

  • The user should be presented with 2 buttons: ‘Confirm pause’ and ‘Keep subscription’


Step 2. (User has clicked ‘Confirm pause’)

  • The user should see text confirming their pause start date and subscription resume date.

  • The user should see reassuring text saying they will not be charged during such pause, and they can resume their subscription at any time if inspiration strikes.


‘Keep subscription’ should take the user back to the ‘My Account’ page, and not pause the user’s subscription. And logging back onto their accounts after the pause takes effect should take them to ‘My Account’ page where it states their subscription is paused (anything else they could do while their subscription was on is on complete pause).

The team came up with a set of requirements and after having discussions with engineering and the stakeholders, the following user flow was approved:

Step 1. (User has clicked ‘Pause subscription’)

  • The user should be able to select how many billing cycles they’d like to pause their subscription for (up to 3).

  • The user should be able to enter a reason for wanting to pause their subscription (this is optional)

  • The user should be shown information about what happens when they pause their subscription.

  • The user should be presented with 2 buttons: ‘Confirm pause’ and ‘Keep subscription’


Step 2. (User has clicked ‘Confirm pause’)

  • The user should see text confirming their pause start date and subscription resume date.

  • The user should see reassuring text saying they will not be charged during such pause, and they can resume their subscription at any time if inspiration strikes.


‘Keep subscription’ should take the user back to the ‘My Account’ page, and not pause the user’s subscription. And logging back onto their accounts after the pause takes effect should take them to ‘My Account’ page where it states their subscription is paused (anything else they could do while their subscription was on is on complete pause).

The team came up with a set of requirements and after having discussions with engineering and the stakeholders, the following user flow was approved:

Step 1. (User has clicked ‘Pause subscription’)

  • The user should be able to select how many billing cycles they’d like to pause their subscription for (up to 3).

  • The user should be able to enter a reason for wanting to pause their subscription (this is optional)

  • The user should be shown information about what happens when they pause their subscription.

  • The user should be presented with 2 buttons: ‘Confirm pause’ and ‘Keep subscription’


Step 2. (User has clicked ‘Confirm pause’)

  • The user should see text confirming their pause start date and subscription resume date.

  • The user should see reassuring text saying they will not be charged during such pause, and they can resume their subscription at any time if inspiration strikes.


‘Keep subscription’ should take the user back to the ‘My Account’ page, and not pause the user’s subscription. And logging back onto their accounts after the pause takes effect should take them to ‘My Account’ page where it states their subscription is paused (anything else they could do while their subscription was on is on complete pause).

Outcome and Impact

A few month after implementing the ‘Pause subscription’ flow we noticed a few changes:

Voluntary churn

  • Prior to making any changes, our monthly average voluntary churn rate from subscribers was around 5% (average from paying subscribers 400 days leading up to the implementation)

  • After introducing the new pause and resume subscription flows, the voluntary churn rate is now 3.50% (-31.08%).


Revenue

  • Following the launch of this initiative, over the course of 34 days, we prevented $26K worth of subscriptions from churning by instead encouraging to pause.

  • 220 subscriptions paused

  • Annualised, as a result of this implementation, we’ll see a revenue uplift of almost $285K if 100% of the pause subscribers renew just once more.


In a short span of time we were able to validate our assumptions and create almost immediate impact both on churn and revenue for the platform.

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Valeria Zschaeck

Valeria Zschaeck

Valeria Zschaeck