Subscriptions
BMO Media is a subscription marketing agency for DTC brands on Recharge, Skio, Loop and native Shopify subscriptions. We launch programs and, more often, rescue them: splitting churn into voluntary and involuntary, recovering failed payments first because it is the cheapest revenue in the business, then rebuilding onboarding, cadence control and the cancellation flow where voluntary churn is decided.
What we do
Why subscription retention is a dozen small problems, fixed in order of payback
A subscription is the most valuable customer relationship a DTC brand can build and the easiest to lose quietly. Subscription retention is not one problem. It is a weak onboarding, a rigid cadence, a card that expired, a cancel button with nothing in front of it, each shaving points off recurring revenue. Bain & Company's Frederick Reichheld found a 5% improvement in retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit; in a subscription business the arithmetic is more direct, because every saved subscriber is a saved month of revenue with no acquisition cost attached.
Most of the fixes are automations, and automations are where the money already is: Klaviyo's 2026 benchmark across 183,000 businesses found flows produce 41% of email revenue from 5.3% of sends, and pre-dunning, onboarding and save flows are exactly that kind of send. For Centr, a membership brand, rebuilding the lifecycle across trial, paying and win-back segments produced a 20% lift in trial-to-paid conversions and $1.9M+ in CRM-attributed revenue during BFCM.
Subscription retention that starts by splitting your churn
We start by splitting your churn. Involuntary churn, failed payments and expired cards, is often a startling share of the total and the cheapest to recover: these customers never chose to leave. Voluntary churn is a lifecycle problem, decided mostly in the first shipments, and we attack it where it happens: onboarding, cadence control and a save-first cancellation flow. The full breakdown is in why subscribers really cancel.
Involuntary churn is the fastest money in the building. Expired cards, insufficient funds and silent payment failures cancel customers who never decided to leave, and recovering them costs no acquisition spend at all: pre-dunning warnings before the charge, a retry schedule tuned to your billing day, account updater switched on, and a card-update flow that works on a phone in ten seconds. Our failed payment recovery guide shows the sequence.
Voluntary churn is mostly decided in the first three shipments. We rebuild onboarding so the second and third orders arrive with context rather than surprise, give subscribers real cadence control, pause, skip, swap, delay, so the answer to too much product is not cancellation, and put a save-first flow in front of the cancel button. Making cancellation hard is not retention; it is chargebacks and one-star reviews on a delay. The early-churn method is in our retention engine guide.
What's included
What's included in our subscription retention service
Churn diagnosis: voluntary against involuntary split, by cohort and subscription month.
Dunning management: failed-payment recovery, pre-dunning warnings, retry logic and account-updater setup.
Subscriber onboarding flows for the first three orders, where retention is decided.
Cadence control: pause, skip and swap options that intercept cancellations.
A save-first cancellation flow that offers an alternative before it processes a cancel.
Subscribe-and-save conversion for one-time buyers, timed post-delivery.
Platform integration: Recharge, Skio, Loop and native Shopify subscriptions.
Payment recovery infrastructure: pre-dunning, retry logic, account updater and mobile card-update flows.
Cohort reporting so each new subscriber group is compared against the one before it.
Reporting on churn curves, the voluntary and involuntary split, save-flow acceptance and subscriber LTV.
Results
Results from our subscription programs
Every figure below is published on the linked case study and was read from the live page on 8 October 2026.
Centr: lifecycle segmentation across acquisition, free trials, paying members and win-back, with email, push and in-app aligned; 20% lift in trial-to-paid conversions; $1.9M+ CRM-attributed revenue during BFCM; 2.5X higher engagement year over year in key sale periods.
MoonBrew: a subscription wellness brand where acquisition had outpaced lifecycle and early churn was high. We shifted revenue from campaigns to automation and rebuilt deliverability after iOS 15. Read the approach; results are described by the brand's team on the page.
Food, beverage and household brands: see our CPG marketing agency guide.
Process
How we work: four steps from churn split to compounding cohorts
1. Split the churn, week one
We pull churn by subscription month and by cohort, separate voluntary from involuntary, and read the cancel reasons and the payment-failure log. The output is a ranked list of leaks with the recurring revenue each one is costing. The method is our subscription retention playbook.
2. Recover the failed payments
Pre-dunning, retry schedule, account updater and the mobile card-update flow go live first. This is the fastest revenue in the program and it funds the rest.
3. Rebuild the first 90 days
Onboarding for shipments one to three, cadence controls surfaced where subscribers look for them, the save-first cancellation flow, and the post-delivery subscribe-and-save offer for one-time buyers.
4. Report cohorts, monthly
Churn by subscription month rather than a blended rate, the voluntary and involuntary split, dunning recovery rate, save-flow acceptance, and subscriber LTV against one-time LTV. The honest question is not what churn was last month but whether each new cohort retains better than the last.
Who it's for
Which DTC brands we build and rescue subscriptions for
Brands on Recharge, Skio, Loop or native Shopify subscriptions, whether you are launching a program or rescuing one where churn is quietly outrunning acquisition. We work in two situations: launching where one-time buyers clearly want replenishment, and rescuing where sign-ups look healthy but the subscriber count is flat. In the second case the leak is retention rather than demand, and that is the fastest place to find real recurring revenue. Brands that also run points pair the subscription with a loyalty program designed to reward tenure rather than compete with it. Subscription wellness and telehealth brands, including the GLP-1 programs now scaling on recurring billing, share the same churn shape with a compliance layer on top; we build the retention program around the clinical cadence and keep every message inside the platform's consent rules.
Platforms
Platforms we run
Recharge, Skio, Loop and native Shopify subscriptions, with the subscription events wired into Klaviyo so pre-dunning, onboarding and save flows fire from the email program your subscribers already receive. We build inside the platform you run; if it cannot support pause, skip and swap, the audit says so.
How we measure it
How we measure subscription retention performance
Churn by subscription month, the voluntary and involuntary split, save-flow acceptance rate and subscriber LTV against one-time LTV. When those curves bend, the whole P&L feels it. You can model subscriber lifetime value against one-time buyers with our free CLV calculator.
Frequently asked questions
