800% ROI: How Chargebee’s retention workflow helped Freshly boost revenue projections by $1M

As USA’s largest prepared meal delivery service, Freshly ships 1 million meals a week to unique customers across the country. With subscribers ranging from young professionals who need better, more nutritious prepared meal alternatives to elderly folks with nuanced nutrition requirements, Freshly wanted to drive adaption and personalization within their customer retention flow.

The subscriber engagement team at Freshly turned to Chargebee Retention (formerly Brightback), to drive a high-performing retention program for online subscribers, and the results have translated to savings worth millions.

Building Collaborative Retention Framework With the Product Team

Every team at Freshly is geared toward improving profitability. A key means to drive profitability for subscriber engagement leaders is improved customer retention. Specifically, finding ways to extend LTV for customers on the brink of canceling.

“My team’s goals are to drive retention and keep customers happy, so we’re focused on understanding our customers' problems and how we can solve them digitally. We wanted to use Chargebee Retention to start using personalized, targeted offers in our online cancel flow, which we weren’t doing previously,” said Adrienne Bouchie, (former) Product Manager at Freshly.

Freshly’s Retention North Star KPIs:

• Profitability

• Retention

• Cancel Completion Rate (%)

To reduce online cancels, the team at Freshly set out to A/B test their existing cancel flow against Chargebee Retention. The original cancel flow had an exit survey, but making changes meant pulling from internal resources that were hard to come by. Chargebee Retention presented the opportunity to experiment at the point of cancel, which gave Freshly the ability to solve customer needs instantly.

“We don’t have a team dedicated to reducing cancellations, so Chargebee Retention empowered us to test retention hypotheses rapidly with low engineering effort, run data analysis after each experiment, and share findings and get stakeholders' input on future testing. It was a holistic approach to retaining our customers,” Adrienne said.

Retention experiments to analyze offer ROI

Freshly used Chargebee Retention to randomize offers to customers at the point of cancel, testing against a control to determine the highest performing offer categories. Clear winners emerged: price and flexibility. They experimented further within these categories to test different offer strengths while monitoring offer acceptance rates, cancel deflection rates, and incremental revenue from accepted offers.

One such experiment included offering customers the option to skip multiple weeks of delivery. The offer had high acceptance rates. And despite initial fears that this period was delaying inevitable churn, the data revealed that a significant number of customers who accepted the offer were retained and went on to generate more revenue.

Freshly allows customers to select the pause duration for their subscriptions

“We learned you cannot just look at one retention metric because it doesn’t tell the entire story,” said Adrienne. “With Chargebee Retention's reporting, we could view multiple metrics together to understand which offers are attractive to our customers and which ones drive additional LTV for our business.”

A stronger retention magnet with offer personalization

Next, Freshly leveraged Chargebee Retention to create targeted offers for specific subscriber groups. Using cancel reason, customer tenure, customer LTV, plan size, and other data attributes, Freshly serves targeted offers to specific customers instead of relying on a generic promotion.

This targeted approach became critical at the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Some customers needed to increase shipments due to stay-at-home orders, while others had to pause due to relocation or financial hardship.

“We had to shift our initial strategy to accommodate customers going through various changes in their lives. This involved a lot of data collection and analysis using Chargebee Retention, Segment, Amplitude, and Looker. But, through this process, we learned what our customers really want from us and what we can expect to gain from tailoring offers to meet our customers' needs,” shared Adrienne.

Freshly learned that higher LTV customers were pausing more frequently and coming back at a higher rate. This insight led to targeting longer-tenured customers with offers to pause and flexibly manage their accounts. Customers experiencing financial hardship saw different offers. While other customer groups—like students—saw offers tailored to their specific needs, e.g., pausing their account for summer break.

An 800% ROI using Chargebee Retention to save customers

With Chargebee Retention, Freshly has been able to experiment, iterate, and find deep insights into its retention strategy by:

1. Monitoring retention offer efficacy at the point of cancel

2. Analyzing customer responses to offers

3. Identifying and optimizing offer categories and micro-categories

4. Delivering personalization at the point of cancel based on customer LTV, plan size, and other data attributes

This resulted in a tangible impact on revenue, customer retention, and business profitability within the first year:

• 15% save rate within 90 days of go-live

• $7500 in saved revenue within a month

• 800% ROI in 1 year

What’s next? Freshly is committed to using insights from Chargebee Retention to build more robust segmentation and personalized offers, push automated win-back campaigns and hone its churn propensity model to engage with customers proactively. The new insights gained will help develop and optimize their cancel experience further—an effort that clearly pays off.

The unparalleled insights that Adrienne and the Freshly team tapped into helped the company meet customer needs more proactively during an atypical year, strengthening their customer relationships. And the revenue impact is clear.