CNN's renewal moment

The opportunity

Our UX research team had conducted a recent voluntary churn survey, which helped us see key themes and pain points within our subscription service. After taking a closer look, we saw that users picked price and value as a main reason for cancelling their subscription. Once users entered the cancel flow, most completed it, which highlighted the cancellation step as a high-impact and high-risk moment. A moment where a well-designed intervention screen could influence behavior without reworking the entire journey.

• Users reach cancellation intentionally

• No existing retention intervention existed

• Business wanted to test offers without redesigning cancellation

• Trust and clarity were non-negotiable constraints

What we already knew:

We framed this moment as a question: could a contextual, empathetic offer reduce churn without making users feel pressured or blocked?

The hypothesis

We believed that introducing a clear, supportive retention offer at the moment of cancellation would reduce completed cancellations, particularly for users whose cancellation was price-motivated.

Primary success metric: Reduction in completed cancellations during the test window.

Secondary success metric: Offer type acceptance.

Guardrails:

• No increase in support tickets

• No added friction to cancellation

The exploration

The cancellation flow would remain mostly unchanged except for the added intervention screen. With these boundaries in mind I started exploring concepts for the new screen with input from copy, legal, and marketing along the way.

The original cancellation flow was transactional by design because the main entry point for users was their account settings page, which is mostly associated with transactional tasks.

The starting point

Initial reviews led to some constraints

• Legal required equal-weight buttons and no preselection inside offer options

• Brand requested persuasive copy but legal restricted intensity

• Business stakeholders wanted to keep the design transactional and not test a visual component

We selected the pragmatic, lightweight offer direction because it balanced intervention with user trust, complied with legal requirements, and minimized friction risk while still presenting a clear value proposition.

The final design

In keeping with this entry point, I kept things simple and focused on copy variations that would speak to our price sensitive customers.

Designing concepts with copy and visuals

Then I wanted to look at introducing visual image to help create a 'premium' feeling and remind the customer of the quality of content that a subscription provides.

The execution

Although only one design variant was tested against the control, multiple concepts were explored to ensure we were designing an optimal experiment and not just the first design idea.

The experiment would run for 8 weeks as an A/B test: control vs a single retention-offer insertion. The new flow would allow a select number of users to enter an alternate cancel flow and test our new offer screen.

Top row is control flow. Second row is the alternate cancel flow and new intervention screen.

The analysis and learning

We learned that the size and clarity of the discount had a stronger behavioral impact than persuasive language. Overall, we saw enough reduction during the 8 weeks of testing to validate our primary success metric. A surprising learning was that mobile churn remained the same, so mobile users need to be enticed differently going forward.

Key figures:

• 3–5% projected long-term save rate

• ~300 subscriptions saved per month (projection)

• Desktop cancellation rates dropped; mobile remained flat

Outcome & Decision

With little to no downside, we recommended rolling this out as a feature to 100% of users to reduce churn. This shifted the cancellation flow from a passive endpoint to an active retention lever.