How Dropbox Handles Involuntary Churn (Part 3): Ending A Subscription, Sort Of

After informing us of our outdated billing information, Dropbox followed up with an email informing us that our storage is now full, and we

Part 1Part 2Part 3

This is part three of our DROPBOX Sample series, showing how one company is managing increased credit card fails, otherwise known as involuntary churn, in their customer communications.

In part one, Dropbox attempted to obtain updated credit card information.

In part two, they attempted to create urgency by upping the ante and warning of a service downgrade.

In this final sample, Dropbox is fulfilling its promise in its previous communications and notifying their subscriber of a service downgrade.  Notice that for DropBox, they have a FREE option of their service.  So, even while their paid subscription in the case has churned out of a paying subscription plan, they still have this subscriber in a free offering. They will be able to continue to “work the relations” and perhaps move this subscriber back to paying in the future.

In the service downgrade email, Dropbox sent its subscriber a very short but effective note trying to elicit a reinstatement of its paid service  The note:

  1. Has a strong opening statement informing us of the issue.  It’s simple, one sentence and all by itself.  Hard to ignore.
  2. Leverages bolded font stressing the importance of the downgrade to the Basic plan.
  3. Uses a hard-to-ignore  large blue button to upgrade.
  4. Includes a link to Dropbox support. Never forget that, you never know if a subscriber IS trying to reinstate/renew but can’t for some reason!

 

Overall, we can’t fault dropbox for trying to stem the tide of its involuntary customer churn, since that is the major cause of customer attrition for recurring revenue businesses. They tried a few different tactics over these past emails and all have maintained an upbeat tone. The potential loss of storage space we think would be enough to entice subscribers to upgrade – but attempting to keep subscribers updated no matter what the situation is certainly a best practice.

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