Letting users pause Plus to improve long-term retention and customer acquisition

Hey, don’t cancel yet! How about pausing instead, and maybe coming back later? Or, in other words, letting Deliveroo Plus customers pause their subscriptions.

 
 

Project overview

From recorded data and qualitative research conducted back in Q2 2019, we know that a proportion of Plus customers routinely pause and resume their subscription based on their lifestyle in that time period (like students in term time or busy accountants amid tax season).

We hypothesised that by giving Plus customers flexibility to pause and come back when they’re ready, we’d see a decrease in cancellations over time.

My role

  • In charge of content strategy and writing copy as the sole content designer

  • Collaborated closely with product design, data science, product management, and engineering

  • Tested out a new translations workflow using a Figma plug-in, supported by our localisation coordinator and a backend developer

Outcome

Within the first few months of rollout, we saw a 3% increase of users who paused and ended up resubscribing.

 
 

The final designs

Manual pausing

 
 

Manual resuming

 
 

Updated cancellation modal

 
 
 
 

Future iterations

As part of our initial design efforts, we explored potential ideas for future iterations, such as:

  • Scheduled pausing – having Plus subscriptions auto-resume on a specific day of their choosing to prompt returns to the app

  • Optional feedback survey – collect qualitative reasonings as to why users are pausing, and use the info to improve and personalise

  • Rewards expiry reminder – if Rewards fully launches, we’ll need to let users know they may lose their progress or earned rewards

  • Build out an actual cancellation flow – allows us to create a stronger more impactful nudge for users to pause

 
 

Thoughts and takeaways

I’m really glad that we were able to successfully push for implementing a pausing function for Plus. For a while now, we on the experience team have strongly felt that allowing users to pause could mean improved long-term retention. Due to the pandemic, we finally got it prioritised and on the roadmap.

As always, there are things I would’ve done with more time and scope:

  • Redesign and restructure the account page to improve the cancellation and pausing experience

  • Strategise resurrection CRM to get users who have been paused for a certain amount of time back into Plus

  • Test out a few different feedback collection methods (in-flow, email surveys, etc.)