January 28, 2025

In the fight against membership churn, you have many tools in your arsenal. You can prevent involuntary churn by implementing a retry period and using Credit Account Updater. You can run a pricing analysis to ensure you haven’t priced yourself out of the market. And you can send members emails and text messages reminding them to use the plan and showing them your appreciation.

Despite your best efforts, some members will still want to cancel. You should make this hassle-free by allowing them to manage their plan within a mobile app. But it’s not over until they confirm their cancellation. 

Serving up a retention offer can help you retain the member and increase their lifetime value. Let’s see how this works.

What are Retention Offers?

In a broad sense, retention offers are special promotions or benefits extended to current customers to encourage them to continue their relationship with the brand. Retention offers can include discounts, coupons, loyalty programs, exclusive offers and more. 

Retention offers for members of monthly recurring plans typically involve offering a discount on the next month’s service to encourage the member to stay. You may have encountered this when you tried to cancel a monthly streaming service, for example.

Why Should You Use a Retention Offer?

If you have encountered a retention offer like this, think about how it influenced your decision. Did you take the discount and remain on the plan? How long after the discount ran out did you stay? 

It’s likely that you either forgot to cancel or you remembered why you joined the plan in the first place and decided to stay. With that in mind, retention offers not only prevent a member from churning in the moment but also potentially extend their membership for months to come.  Remember, it costs less to retain an existing customer than to market to new customers.

Retention Offers at Your Car Wash

So how does this work at your car wash? First, you need a modern point-of-sale system, such as Patheon^®, that automatically serves up a discount offer when a member goes to cancel through a mobile app.

You can structure your retention offer in different ways. You can offer the discount on just one month, or you could extend it to two or three. The discount can be a percentage or a dollar amount off. If you’re not sure of the best setup for your discount, consider testing different structures to see what is most effective at preventing churn.

Give Them an Alternative

Automation makes retention offers seamless. Patheon, DRB^®’s car wash management software, allows you to automatically serve up retention offers through its Essential Web App (EWA). When a customer initiates a cancelation, the EWA will present the retention offer of your choice. 

Get a demo of Patheon today to see automated retention offers in action!

See Retention Offers in Action