We rebuilt Orbio World’s billing reminder experience and dropped their subscription cancellation rate from 21.36% to just 4.50% — without changing a single thing about the product.
Facts
Client: Orbio World
Industry: D2C ecommerce
ESP: Iterable
Focus area: Churn prevention & subscriber LTV
Results
- 79% reduction in the upcoming-order cancellation rate
- 21.36% cancellation rate on the original billing reminder (control)
- 4.50% cancellation rate with YOCTO’s optimised billing reminders
Client Insights
Orbio World built a subscription brand in the health and wellness space — products designed for long-term, consistent use, where results compound over time. Their audience is motivated and health-conscious. But selling a product with a delayed payoff creates a specific retention challenge: the most expensive churn happens early, before subscribers have had the chance to experience what they paid for. That’s the window we were brought in to close.
The Challenge
When we audited the brand’s subscription lifecycle, one thing stood out immediately. Subscribers who renewed for the first time received an upgraded version of the product with a more advanced formula — a meaningful upgrade most brands would shout about from the rooftop. But the upgrade was packaged inside the shipment itself, invisible to the customer until it landed on their doorstep. And many subscribers were cancelling before that shipment ever arrived.
This is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes we see in subscription brands. Enormous retention value gets wasted — not because it doesn’t exist, but because it’s never communicated at the moment it’s needed most.
The billing reminder email, sent at exactly the moment cancellation intent peaks, was doing almost nothing to hold subscribers. There was no mention of the product upgrade. No reinforcement of why staying was worth it. No connection to the customer’s health goals. It was a transactional notification arriving in a moment that called for retention messaging.
Our Process
We turned the billing reminder into a reason to stay. Rather than patching the existing email, we rebuilt the entire pre-billing touchpoint from scratch — with two distinct versions, built for two distinct subscriber moments.
1. Reframing the first renewal
For subscribers approaching their first renewal, we built a billing reminder that made the product upgrade the centrepiece. Instead of a quiet surprise inside the box, the upgrade became an anticipated reward — something subscribers had earned simply by staying subscribed. The email named it, explained what made it better, and created a clear expectation before the order was placed. This single shift transformed a passive logistics notification into an active reason to stay subscribed through the next cycle.
2. Building momentum at all future renewals
For all subsequent billing cycles, the strategy shifted from upgrade anticipation to results reinforcement. Each reminder led with social proof — real customer outcomes from consistent use — alongside one or two practical habit tips subscribers could apply immediately. The logic was deliberate: a subscriber focused on improving their routine is not thinking about cancelling. By making every billing reminder feel like a coaching touchpoint rather than an invoice, we gave customers a reason to look forward to their next order rather than reconsider it.
The Results
We ran a controlled split test comparing the brand’s original billing reminder against the two new YOCTO-built emails. The primary metric: cancellation rate at the moment of upcoming-order notification — the highest-leverage point in the subscriber lifecycle.
- Control (original email): 21.36% cancellation rate
- Challenger (YOCTO billing reminders): 4.50% cancellation rate
79% reduction in churn — by surfacing value that was already there but never visible, the new billing reminders cut the cancellation rate from 21.36% to 4.50%.
16.86pp absolute improvement — nearly 17 percentage points fewer subscribers cancelled per billing cycle. At scale, that compounds directly into subscriber count, monthly recurring revenue, and lifetime value — with zero cost of acquisition.
Where To From Here?
Upcoming-order churn is solved. Now we’re going deeper. With the billing reminder results confirmed, our focus has expanded across the full subscriber lifecycle. Through the audit process, we identified the primary driver of longer-term churn: excess stock accumulation. Customers who build up more product than they’re using lose momentum — and eventually their motivation to stay subscribed. Our next phase is designed to solve that at the root:
- Adding freebies across multiple order milestones and surfacing them consistently throughout the journey, so each upcoming order feels rewarding rather than automatic.
- Building a post-purchase education flow focused on consumption-habit formation, so subscribers use the product consistently, see results faster, and stop accumulating excess stock in the first place.
- Developing smarter cadence messaging to give subscribers more perceived control, reducing the impulse to cancel when product begins to pile up.