Anticonversions: The Overlooked Lever for Modern Tech Companies

We spend a lot of our time on conversions that we lose sight of their sinister cousin: anticonversions.

Losing out all your existing customers is the leading cause of failure for modern tech companies.

Companies don’t invest in reactivation, have a poor off-boarding experience, and lose customers forever.

There are three stats that I want to highlight to emphasize the importance of this lever:

• 40% re-subscribe rate: A complete 40% of Netflix’s new subscribers are subscribers who canceled within the past 12 months.
• 18s to catch them before churn: that’s about how long it’s estimated (on average) we have to recapture our user in our cancelation flow — or we end up losing them.
• 5x cheaper to reach out to: churned customers are much more cost effective to reach via paid advertising, outbound, or other channels.

I share the guidance I would give to my own teams working on anticonversions through this 5K word deep-dive.

1. Dissecting 6 of the best cancelation flows out there today
2. Why people cancel: when to optimize flows vs core
3. Encyclopedia of top 20 anticonversion tests
4. Ideal testing framework + metrics
5. Anticonversion’s 8 key principles
6. Top 7 big mistakes made
7. Cancelation prototype