Up to date: March, 2025
Why let prospects cancel once they can pause a subscription? Learn the way giving prospects a break can scale back churn, enhance retention, and defend your income. Uncover greatest practices for efficient implementation.
For subscription companies, retention isn’t simply necessary—it’s important. Relying solely on new acquisitions is unsustainable, making it crucial to maintain present prospects engaged.
Why Subscription Pause Issues in 2025 Extra Than Ever
Finances constraints, too many subscriptions, elevated need for personalised experiences (“how I would like it, after I need it”), and altering priorities are driving even loyal subscribers to churn.
When cancellation is the one choice, you don’t simply lose income – you lose the connection you’ve labored so arduous to construct. Our findings present that round 10% of shoppers who cancel an auto-renewal subscription would relatively pause their subscriptions, if it was an choice. This share will increase considerably when contemplating all subscription varieties, not simply auto-renewals. Additionally, subscription pause utilization elevated 68% in 2024, exhibiting an elevated want for companies to supply this selection.
When You Provide Subscription Pauses, Your Prospects Acquire:
- Peace of thoughts and comfort – As an alternative of canceling and re-subscribing later, and having to undergo the complete signup course of once more, prospects can pause their subscription and resume seamlessly inside your set limits.
- Monetary flexibility – They handle subscription prices inside private price range constraints
- Management – Personalize their subscription expertise as they want it.
- Buyer delight – You present you care about your prospects and their wants by providing further flexibility.
How Your Enterprise Advantages From Providing Subscription Pauses:
- Cut back churn & improve buyer lifetime worth (CLTV) – Pausing offers prospects a substitute for canceling, preserving them engaged and decreasing misplaced income. And, let’s face it, if prospects wish to cancel solely briefly, they might even neglect later to re-subscribe or could also be lured in by a competitor.
- Preserve buyer relationships & decrease buyer acquisition prices (CAC): Subscribers stay in your ecosystem relatively than disappearing utterly
- Decrease involuntary churn – Subscriptions with non permanent cost points which might be prone to get resolved shortly may be paused till the cost goes by means of.
- Get various income sources – Request charges for entry to sure product-related info or provide downgraded merchandise all through the pause interval.
- Acquire useful insights: Be taught why prospects are pausing and use these causes to tell packaging, pricing, promotions, and many others.
10 Finest Practices in Pause Subscription Choices
1. Combine pause into your cancellation move and hold the choice seen and simply accessible.
Inside the Billing space of your app, place pause choices prominently inside the cancellation journey.
Tip: Current pausing as an interesting various earlier than they attain the ultimate cancellation button.
Supply: Straightforward steps to cancel Canva Professional, Funnelgraphic.com
2. Let the shoppers set the pause interval they want, inside your phrases.
Whereas flexibility issues, boundaries are important – provide pause limits that make sense on your prospects and what you are promoting and modify these in time based mostly on probably the most profitable combos.
Tip: Typical choices embrace: 1 month, 3 months. Longer pauses – 6 months, and even one 12 months, may match for seasonal merchandise.
Supply: 2Checkout – Pause subscription choice provided within the Billing & Funds space
3. Ask for suggestions concerning why they wish to pause – do that by way of free textual content, or a fast drop-down checklist.
Tip: Listed below are some survey choice examples:
- Don’t use the service as a lot// Want the product much less typically
- Want to scale back my prices
- Utilizing this seasonally, don’t want it now
- Different
4. As soon as set, clearly affirm the pause, its length, and any billing implications—each in-app and by way of e mail, for the client to have a file and to know what to anticipate.
5. Remind the client in regards to the worth of the pause, as a substitute of cancelling:
- Locking in present pricing
- Hold account historical past and preferences
- Keep away from reactivation charges
- Reserve entry to unique content material or options
- Gaining access to perks.
6. Provide a freemium various throughout the pause.
As an alternative of going utterly inactive, give paused subscribers the choice to remain engaged with a free or limited-access model of your service. This retains your model high of thoughts, maintains product familiarity, and will increase the probabilities of reactivation.
Tip: Permit entry to primary options, previous content material, or restricted utilization whereas highlighting options they’ll solely entry with a paid model, and the advantages of a full subscription.
7. Provide downgrades, upgrades or various billing cycles.
Generally, prospects don’t want a pause to their subscription, they might want a distinct product tier or extra predictability in managing their price range.
8. Talk worth all through the pause.
Ship e mail campaigns to remind prospects in regards to the worth of the subscription, and embrace incentives to restart sooner.
Tip: Personalize incentives based mostly on pause causes you collected earlier than. Value sensitivity? Provide downgraded plans throughout pause durations | Too many merchandise? Recommend diminished frequency choices.
9. Ship reminders when it’s time to renew the subscription, reinforcing the worth they’ll regain and clearly outlining upcoming expenses – be clear!
10. Double-down on the incentives to remain.
If on the finish of the pause interval, they wish to go forward and cancel altogether as a substitute of resuming the subscription, provide much more flexibility: proceed the pause, or provide further reductions.
The Behind The Scenes of Subscription Pause
If subscription billing was not complicated sufficient, subscription pause provides one other layer of complexity – for instance, when subscribers request to pause a subscription, this could stay energetic till the tip of the present billing cycle after which transfer right into a paused standing for a pre-defined time interval.
Simply guarantee your subscription billing and funds supplier has the capabilities for subscription pause, providing your prospects and your help group the instruments they should handle subscription pause seamlessly. Search for options that allow pausing by means of a number of channels—API calls, buyer account interfaces, and service provider management panels—to supply most flexibility.
Measuring The Affect of Subscription Pauses
Implementing subscription pauses is only the start—measuring their impression is essential for optimizing your retention technique. Observe key metrics like:
- Pause-to-resume price: The share of paused subscriptions that finally resume
- Common pause length: Understanding how lengthy prospects usually pause helps with income forecasting
- Churn prevention price: Examine cancellation charges earlier than and after implementing pause options
- Pause cause evaluation: Establish patterns in why prospects pause to deal with potential product or pricing points
- Lifetime worth impression: Calculate how paused subscribers have an effect on general buyer lifetime worth
Subscription pauses create a brand new buyer phase requiring particular evaluation and focusing on. By understanding this phase’s habits, you possibly can regularly refine your method to maximizing retention and income.
Making Subscription Pause A part of Your Retention Technique
In your efforts to retain subscribers, at all times keep in mind that providing wonderful buyer expertise performs an enormous half. Providing subscribers the choice to pause their subscriptions is one foolproof means to enhance your buyer expertise.
Subscription pauses are only one piece of a bigger retention technique—combining product engagement, buyer expertise, and perceived worth. Most significantly, it’s one thing you possibly can instantly affect and enhance with the correct instruments.
Supply: 2Checkout
Take a look at extra tried and examined retention methods efficient on your subscription enterprise. Learn our eBook on Learn how to Maximize Recurring Income and Develop Your Subscription Enterprise to seek out out extra ways that you need to use to enhance your retention efforts.
