How Wildgrain reduced churn with a comprehensive retention strategy

Wildgrain is a subscription solution founded by a husband and wife with a passion for high-quality baked goods. Born out of a desire to bring European-quality bread to customers in the United States, Wildgrain delivers ready-to-bake, premium bread, pasta, and pastries directly to subscribers’ homes each month.

Launched in 2020, the family-owned business combines one founder’s expertise as a baker with the other’s technical background as a computer engineer to create a flexible, customer-centric subscription experience.

Challenge

As the Wildgrain team prepared to scale, they needed a subscription solution that integrated seamlessly with Shopify, supported a curated and evolving box model, and allowed for technical customization without placing a heavy burden on their team.

At the same time, Wildgrain’s quality product helped them successfully cultivate a large customer base, but they also faced a challenge common in the subscription industry: customer churn.

Cancellation Prevention has been crucial to our retention team to allow them to quickly experiment and get real-time data on what flows are more effective than others for each cancellation reason.

Ismail SalhiCo-founder, Wildgrain

Solution

Wildgrain launched with Shopify and Recharge to power their curated box subscription experience. They chose Recharge for its robust API, strong Shopify integration, and ability to support constantly rotating SKUs, along with integrations with major payment processors like Stripe and Braintree.

Over time, Wildgrain partnered closely with the Recharge team to analyze customer behavior and implement a comprehensive retention strategy that addressed churn from both a technical and non-technical perspective. This included leveraging Recharge’s native customer portal, API and SDK customizations, Bundles, Flows, and arguably most importantly, Cancellation Prevention.

Cancellation Prevention is a no-code solution designed to retain subscribers attempting to deactivate their subscriptions. It uses customer cohort and order data to present targeted cancellation reasons and tailored winback strategies.

Wildgrain implemented Cancellation Prevention by first analyzing prior years of customer behavior to identify the most common reasons for cancellation, distilling them into 14 concise options that now power their cancellation experience. They then deployed Cancellation Prevention directly into the cancellation flow, presenting customers with tailored alternatives, such as discounts, product swaps, skipped intervals, or delayed shipments, based on their survey responses.

Results

Cancellation Prevention had an immediate impact on Wildgrain’s churn, saving an impressive 22.5% of customers who entered the cancellation flow. It played a key role in a holistic retention strategy that reduced Wildgrain’s churn by 18% year over year.

As a result of their integrated tech stack—along with Bundles, Flows, and their new Affinity portal—Wildgrain has also decreased their comprehensive churn by 17% in the last 6 months and increased their average active days by almost one-third. By utilizing Recharge’s API and SDK, they’ve given customers full flexibility to manage their subscriptions, including allowing inactive subscribers to easily order a one-time box without reactivating their subscription, an important driver of increased customer LTV. Additionally, Wildgrain has won customers back after implementing Bundles, giving customers exactly what they asked for to directly combat churn.

With support from Recharge’s Customer Success team, Wildgrain regularly collaborates on retention initiatives, LTV improvements, and recurring revenue health—drawing inspiration from best practices across similar subscription businesses. And with the ability to A/B test, Wildgrain can continue iterating on survey options and offers to continually refine its retention strategy.

If you want to run a subscription program—and I recommend almost every ecommerce company to try to do a subscription program—to use Recharge and give it a try. It’s very quick to onboard and you don’t really need help to do it.

Ismail SalhiCo-founder, Wildgrain