How we reduced our cancellation rate by 87.5%

Re:How we reduced our cancellation rate by 87.5% by cperciva on Sunday June 17, 2012 @07:31AM (#4122709)

On the topic of emails and account cancellations: When I started sending out "Your Tarsnap account will be deleted soon" emails, the account attrition rate dropped by 50%. The change wasn't from people who didn't realize their account was going to be deleted -- they had received two emails already, 1 week and 2 weeks earlier -- but getting that last prompt seems to have shifted people's default action from "do nothing" to "pay some money to make the account stay around".

Some time later, I cut Tarsnap's account attrition rate by another ~50% by adding a line to the "account will be deleted soon" email: "If you've decided to stop using Tarsnap, I'd love to know why." This wasn't deliberate -- I added it for the simple reason that I really do want to get that information -- but it seems to be causing people to stop and say "hmm, I can't think of any good reason to not use Tarsnap, so maybe I should keep using it after all".

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Re:How we reduced our cancellation rate by 87.5% by enjo on Sunday June 17, 2012 @10:39PM (#4124658)

Regarding that last bit:

I wonder if they feel a bit of social pressure to stay. Basically when you say "I'd love to know why" all of a sudden there is an actual person who would be clearly harmed by their decision to leave.

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Re:How we reduced our cancellation rate by 87.5% by polynomial on Monday June 18, 2012 @12:02PM (#4127054)

Would like to see some A/B testing with "I'd love to know why" vs. "We'd love to know why."

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Re:How we reduced our cancellation rate by 87.5% by cperciva on Tuesday June 19, 2012 @01:47AM (#4130438)

Fortunately, the number of people who let their Tarsnap accounts expire is small enough that unless there was a huge signal it would take a very long time to get a statistically significant result.

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