Reverse Audit: Breaking down adcreative.ai's free trial loop

Changing things up a bit here and instead of a growth audit with recommendations, I'll share some good tactics that various SaaS are doing to achieve growth or in this case retention

Adcreative.ai is one of the bigger payers in the “ai ad creation” space. According to SimilarWeb they attracted over 1.2 million visits last month.

I studied their onboarding as well as offboarding process and thought while there was room to improve, overall the whole thing was designed pretty well.

In particular their cancellation process which I’ll discuss at the end took at least 7 clicks before you can successfully cancel your subscription.

Activation: Abandonment Popups & Emails

Upon signing up for the free trial you’re asked to enter your credit card. This will likely lead to lower sign ups but higher quality leads.

To reduce abandonment, AdCreative shows an exit intent popup that only shows up when a user’s cursor starts to move towards closing the tab.

You also get an email the next day trying to further convince you to complete your registration.

Revenue: 50% off offer

Two days after signing up I get an upsell convincing me to upgrade today to get 50% off the annual plan.

I’m not sure if this was a segmented email or they just blast this offer to all new free trials. It feels like a shotgun approach.

That said there are a few things to takeaway from this

1. Nudge - Don’t wait for the end of the free trial to make an offer. If a user actually likes the tool and is on the fence, this is a compelling offer

2. No limited time offer - Given that it’s sent 4 days before end of trial, I’d have liked to see a limited time offer included to further nudge users to start paying before the end of the trial

3. Hitting above their weight - I think the goal is to get 1 month paid first. Annual plan seems a bit of a high ask. Offering 50% off 1 month might’ve gotten more conversions. That said it’s entirely possible they’ve tested this and concluded this is the best offer in terms of ARPU.

Retention/Revenue: Cancellation Sludge 101

Now I tried to cancel my subscription before I get charged anything. AdCreative’s offboarding implemented what is called in UX speak as a “sludge.”

DesignLabs defines a sludge as:

“…essentially the opposite of a nudge. While nudges try to push people to make better decisions by making certain choices easier than others, sludges make a process more difficult with the goal of creating friction, which makes the consumer less likely to continue the process.”

There are several ways to implement sludge in your user off-boarding, some sketchier than others. One of the simplest ways is to simply ask users to send you an email to cancel subscriptions rather than having an on-site user journey.

AdCreative’s off-boarding looks more like this.

First, you’re taken to a page that offers a 25% discount for 12 months. (Seems to lack some internal communication because I already got a better offer of 50% OFF.)

You’ll also get a popup that offers the same 25% discount.

But if you ignore these you then have to scroll down to answer a survey asking why you want to cancel.

Selecting any answer will then show a bigger discount of 50% for 12 months. I do like the increasing levels of discounting here. This way they can potentially get away with just 25% off before offering a sweeter deal.

If you decide to continue to cancel the subscription you’re then asked to confirm the cancellation.

Once you’ve gone through all of that, you’ll see a popup confirming cancellation but where the highlighted button lets you “Reactivate Subscription.”

I’ve ran similar popups in the past and I’m gonna bet that the number of people who accidentally reactivate subscription is relatively significant.

You also get an email confirming your cancellation with another subtle upsell to reactivate the account.

So throughout this sludge of an off-boarding, adcreative employed a lot of dark UX.

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