Retain More, Grow Faster: Subscription Automations That Save Churn & Time

Retain & Grow is a powerful new set of features inside your Autoship account—designed to help you reduce churn, increase subscriber lifetime value, and unlock sustainable growth. By allowing your customers more flexibility and control over their subscriptions, Retain & Grow makes it easy to keep them happy and coming back—so you can scale your recurring revenue with confidence.

The  Hidden Costs of Subscription Churn

Think all churn is the same? To reduce it, you need to understand the two types every subscription business faces—and why both matter.

• Involuntary Churn: refers to technical errors that cause 20-40% of all subscription losses. This includes things like failed payments and stockouts.
• Voluntary Churn: refers to the situations where customers actively choose to end their subscriptions. This typically accounts for 60-80% of churn

And with customer acquisition costs rising, this means that retention has never been more valuable.

The problem is, most subscription platforms only offer basic failed payment automations or one-size-fits-all retention automations. Leading to poor experiences that only further damage your relationship with your subscribers.

Enter: Retain and Grow

Our new feature set in Autoship helps you reduce churn and increase lifetime value (LTV) of your subscriptions by addressing both voluntary and involuntary churn. On average, merchants using Retain & Grow are seeing a 15% drop in churn and a 60% lift in lifetime value—within just 60 days of implementation.

What’s included in Retain & Grow?

Retain & Grow combines three powerful features to help you maximize subscription retention:

1. Smart Coupons: Instead of offering random discounts to everyone who pauses or cancels their subscription, in Retain & Grow you can enable highly targeted, conditional discounts on shipping, specific products, their whole subscription, and more to help prevent voluntary churn.
   
2. Advanced Dunning Management: Beyond basic dunning automations, this allows you to set up advanced retry logic with customizable flows and messaging. Helping you recover involuntary churn — without spamming subscribers with too many notifications.
   
3. Retention Workflows: These are automated pause and cancellation workflows that help you get to the underlying causes of churn. As well as test and measure the effectiveness of different winback and retention campaigns to fight both voluntary and involuntary churn.

What’s New & What’s Now Possible:

• Retention Workflows
• Dunning Automation
• Coupons

Retention Workflows: Save the Sale Before It’s Lost

When a subscriber tries to cancel or pause, Autoship can trigger Retention Workflows automatically, allowing you to turn cancellations into opportunities.

These workflows combine:

• Interactive surveys: Understand exactly why customers choose to take this specific action with customizable question flows. From shipping costs that are too expensive to too frequent deliveries, or any other reason.
  
• Strategic winback offers: When you know the underlying reasons as to why subscribers are churning, you can help them resolve their subscription issues and offer targeted incentives to help encourage them to stay. This includes things like:
  
  • Explaining to subscribers they can change the frequency of their scheduled orders if they have too much product, and schedule their next order a few weeks or months later.
    
  • Enabling subscribers to skip an order cycle skips for temporary pauses, such as if they’ll be traveling or away from home.
    
  • Giving subscribers one-time or recurring discounts on shipping to help see them through a rough patch.
    
  • Offering product-specific discounts or even free products for subscribers that are seeking extra value.
    

At the same time, you can also set up multiple retention flows so you can A/B test the impact of different offers and messaging on your retention rates.

Advanced Dunning Automations

Unlike basic dunning tools that treat all payment failures the same, Autoship lets you target specific error types, so you can respond with precision, not spam. This means you can build smarter workflows that address real issues, support your subscribers more effectively, and reduce unnecessary notifications.

Our advanced automations allow you to:

• Target specific error codes—whether it’s a payment issue, inventory glitch, or something else entirely.

• Set custom retry logic with full control over timing and frequency.

• Define fallback actions if retries fail, so nothing slips through the cracks.
• Customize subscriber messages to guide them through fixing the issue and completing their order.

Coupons

Most coupons feel like they’re one-size-fits-all. But with Retain & Grow, you can offer highly targeted coupons to match different subscribers’ wants and needs.

This makes your subscribers feel that your subscription program really is designed with their best interests in mind — which can help stop voluntary churn before it happens.

With coupons, you can:

• Offer price or percentage-based discounts on shipping or scheduled orders.

• Provide coupons for free samples, products, or discounts on select items.

Give recurring discounts on products, shipping, or entire orders.

You can set rules to automatically prevent double discounting and easily control when subscribers can or can’t apply coupons, giving you full flexibility.

Getting Started with Retain & Grow

Ready to Retain & Grow? You can start using these new features today—and as always, our team is here to help you make the most of it.

Posted by:

Riley Trepanier

Riley is a communications professional from Arizona who specializes in content creation, editing, and storytelling. Outside of writing, Riley enjoys exploring the outdoors, getting lost in a good book, and building meaningful connections.