Key takeaways
- In Loop's own data from 441,000+ cancel attempts, a generic discount saves about 6% and a three-stage cancel flow about 15%.
- Loop's migration FAQs say order history, past skips and discounts, and historical revenue and cohorts do not move, so every Loop report starts on go-live day.
- On one Appstle to Loop move, the raw data showed 440 cancels in 3 months, but 232 were migration records, so the real figure was 208.
Loop ships more retention tools than most brands switch on. Cancel flows with a benefits page. Quick Actions. Streaks. Payment recovery with a backup card. On the Loop stores I audit, half of it is off and the other half runs on defaults.
RetainUP works with $1-10M DTC subscription brands as a subscription LTV specialist. We have worked with 80+ subscription brands on Recharge, Skio, Stay AI and Loop. This is the Loop setup we run, what Loop does well, and where it leaves the work to you.
Just moved onto Loop? Start with the first 90 days below. Most of what goes wrong after a move is set in week one and found in month three.
What a Loop retention setup covers
A Loop retention setup is seven pieces: the offer and selling plans, the cancel flow, pause and skip, payment recovery, the customer portal, bundles, and the Klaviyo flows that run off Loop events. Loop has a setting for each. Picking the right one for your product is still a person's job.
Loop Subscriptions after a migration: the first 90 days
The first 90 days on Loop are three jobs: take the migration out of your numbers in week 1, check the settings the move carried over in weeks 2 to 4, and rebuild the save paths by day 60. Day 90 gives you the first clean cohort to read.
Loop's migration page offers a free, white-glove move in about two weeks, from 1,100+ migrations. Its migration FAQs put the import itself at 3 to 7 working days. Both checked 13 November 2026. The move is the quick part. The 90 days after it decide whether it paid off.
Most of these were set in week one and never checked. The Subscription LTV Maximizer™ builds a Loop setup or migration in 30 days, for $5,000.
Week 1: take the migration out of your numbers
Start with what did not come across. Loop's migration FAQs say order history and order counts, past skips, pauses and discounts, and historical revenue, LTV and cohorts do not move. Loop reports only on orders it created. So your first Loop dashboard knows nothing about anyone's first order.
| What | Moves to Loop? | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Live subscriptions | Yes | Spot-check Loop's 1:1 mapping report against the old app |
| Payment methods, same Shopify store | Yes, customers do nothing | Watch renewals on a sample in week 1 |
| Legacy frequencies | No | Recreate them under Acquire, Selling Plans |
| Order history and counts | No | Export from the old app before you uninstall it |
| Revenue, LTV and cohorts | No | Keep the old app's reports for anything before go-live |
| Price updates, swaps, prepaid, bundles | Only if flagged | Tell Loop's migration team at least a week ahead |
Then the cancels. On migration day the old records get cancelled. From Recharge, Loop's migration policy says it bulk-cancels the Recharge contracts by API so nobody is charged twice. Your count drops too, because Recharge counts each product as a subscription and Loop groups products billed together.
Here is what that did to one supplement brand that moved from Appstle to Loop on 29 June 2026. Loop created 348 subscriptions that day and cancelled 232 old ones, with the reason "migrated from appstle". Three months on, the raw data read 440 cancels. The real number was 208.
Filter out every cancel with a migration reason before you read churn. Then look for the opposite problem. Nine subscriptions on the same store were paused by the move and never billed again. Nobody had cancelled them, so nothing flagged them.
Weeks 2 to 4: check what the move carried over
A migration copies settings nobody chose on purpose. Four of them were costing that brand money by month three.
Loop's payment recovery settings give three choices after the last retry: skip the order, pause or cancel. Loop recommends pause for most brands. That store skipped, which keeps a dead card billing every cycle: 16 of 36 failed subscriptions failed a second order. Loop's own range is 7 to 10 retries per cycle. That store ran up to 19.
The payment emails had stopped too. In September Loop retried 184 times with no email to the subscriber, and no Klaviyo flow covered failed payments. Loop sends three events for it: loop_billing_attempt_failed, loop_billing_attempt_failed_and_will_be_retried and loop_billing_attempt_failed_and_last_retry_left. Build on those, then turn Loop's own notice off. The names on the other apps are in our Klaviyo event map.
Two more checks. Many subscribers on that store still paid the old $44 price from before the move. Decide whether to keep it, and tell Loop a week ahead if prices change. And the portal was still on a stock theme.
Loop's portal theme lives under Customer portal, Theme settings, Customize. Skip and date first, a short swap list, the next gift in view, cancel still visible.
Days 30 to 60: rebuild the save paths
The cancel flow came across as it was. On that store it saved 5.2% by Loop's count, and most of those saves cancelled again soon after. A save that cancels next month only moves the cancel.
Loop's cancellation flows now run four steps: a benefits page, reasons, a retention offer, and an instant winback offer after the cancel is confirmed. Cancellation profiles show each segment its own flow, and A/B tests on cancel flows are on Pro. Two rules to know. Subscribers in California and Colorado can always cancel without the survey, under a setting Loop turns on by default. And Loop counts several attempts in the same clock hour as one. The build we use is in the cancel flow section below.
Day 90: read the first clean cohort
By day 90, subscribers who started on Loop have had two or three orders. That is your first clean read: order 2 and order 3 rate for subscribers who started after go-live, saves that paid the next order, and recovery rate by the month the payment failed. Set them against the old app's reports for the same months last year.
| When | Check | Where in Loop |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Filter migration cancels. Find subscriptions the move paused | Analytics, activity log export |
| Week 1 | Recreate legacy frequencies | Acquire, Selling Plans |
| Week 2 | 7 to 10 retries, pause after the last | Retain, Payment recovery |
| Week 2 | Payment emails on, or a Klaviyo flow live | Retain, Payment recovery and Integrations, Klaviyo |
| Week 3 | Legacy prices: keep or change | Subscriptions, with Loop's migration team |
| Week 4 | Portal theme | Customer portal, Theme settings |
| Days 30 to 60 | Cancel flow rebuilt. Skip and delay links in the upcoming order email | Retain, Cancellation flows and Quick Actions |
| Day 90 | Order 2 and 3 rate, saves that paid, recovery rate | Analytics, plus your own export |
Put your order 2 and order 3 rates into the free subscription LTV calculator to see what each point is worth.
What Loop does on its own, and where it stops
Loop's retention tools sit under Retain in the admin: Cancellation flows, Streaks, Product swaps, Payment recovery and Quick Actions. Flows sits on its own menu. The gaps are in plan limits, in how saves get counted, and in a few setup details that break quietly.
Plan decides a lot. On Loop's pricing page, checked 13 November 2026, a free plan covers up to 50 active subscriptions. Starter is $99 a month plus 1.0% a transaction. Pro is $399 a month plus 0.75%. Cancellation flows, smart dunning, bundles, Quick Actions and the Klaviyo integration come on both. Streaks, Flows, the backup payment method, hard-decline handling and A/B tests on cancel flows are Pro only.
For a brand under a few thousand subscribers, Starter plus Klaviyo covers most of it. The order 2 and order 3 gifts move into Klaviyo and Shopify discounts instead of Streaks.
The offer: check what Loop actually charges
Before any cancel flow, check that the offer bills the way you think it does. Four things I check on every Loop store, each found the hard way:
- The interval, not the name. A new Loop frequency defaults to deliver every 1 month. On a supplement brand on Loop with about 300 subscribers, a plan named 3 months supply was billing monthly until we read the interval at checkout.
- Bundle discounts. Loop Bundles discounts fire through the bundle builder or its link. A product page widget that adds two units gets nothing, so it needs a Shopify automatic discount instead.
- Gift rules. A Shopify Buy X Get Y gift on a subscription line needs purchase type set to Subscription. Left on one-time, the gift charges full price and nothing flags it.
- Supply in the variant. Pack size goes in a variant, not quantity, so the portal can't put a 3-pack on a monthly cadence.
Then the offer itself: discount by frequency, a longer cadence as the better deal, and a gift promised for order 2. In our order 2 gift test, telling subscribers a gift was coming lifted order 2 conversion 85%.
Cancel flow: what Loop's own data says
Loop has published the best cancel flow data of any app. In an analysis of 441,000+ cancel attempts across 87 brands, a generic discount saved about 6%. A three-stage flow saved about 15%, and the best brands passed 20%.
Most of those saves happen before an offer shows up. The re-engage page saves about 10% on its own. So we build it in this order, under Retain > Cancellation flows:
- Benefits page. What they lose, in the brand's words. A short founder or product video if the brand has one.
- Reasons. Five brand-specific reasons, two or three sub-reasons each.
- Treatment per reason. The alternative that fits the reason.
- Two offers. A discount and a gift, so the subscriber picks one.
- Cancel. Easy to reach from there.
The map matters more than the offer. Too much product needs a delay. Too expensive needs a smaller size before it needs a discount. That is cancel flow routing, and it is how we took one Skio client's save rate from 14.8% to 24.8% in our cancel flow case study.
One thing I watch on Loop. A save counts the moment someone stays on the cancel screen. Loop's analytics show saves by treatment, which is useful. What they can't tell you is whether that person paid for the next order. Read that yourself, or a high save rate becomes one of the subscription numbers that lie.
Pause and skip: put them in the upcoming order email
Skip, delay and swap should be one click from the email that lands before the charge. Loop's Quick Actions make that easy: magic links that skip, delay or swap without a login. They only work if your Klaviyo emails carry them.
We put skip, delay and swap as buttons in the upcoming order email, written by order number. Pause goes in the cancel flow with a return date. I keep pause last because 40 to 60% of customers saved by a pause or skip were gone within 90 days when I tracked them.
Payment recovery: backup card first, pause at the end
Loop's payment recovery lives under Retain > Payment recovery. Its help center suggests 7 to 10 retries per billing cycle and a target of about 20% of failed payments recovered each month. A backup card, on Pro, gets tried before the retry schedule starts.
- Ask for a backup card once, in onboarding.
- Retries tight early. Bank declines recover here.
- Dead cards (expired, invalid, revoked) get a card update Quick Action link the same day, by email and SMS. No retry reaches them.
- Late in the window, an offer for updating, if the brand signs off.
- When retries run out, Loop lets you skip, pause or cancel. We pick pause, and Loop's help center now recommends it for most brands. A skip keeps a dead subscription billing every cycle.
Then switch off Loop's own payment emails once the Klaviyo flow is live, or subscribers get both. Check they didn't go off with nothing replacing them. On one Loop store we picked up, Loop's payment emails had been off for weeks and no Klaviyo flow had taken over. That is passive churn, and it never shows up in the cancel reasons.
The portal and bundles
Loop's portal is drag-and-drop, with pause, skip, swap, reschedule and payment update. We set skip and swap before cancel, show the next milestone gift, and keep the swap list short. A full catalogue in the swap screen sends people browsing instead of staying.
Bundles come on every plan. We use the bundle builder when order value needs it, and only with the discount checks above.
Klaviyo events: what Loop sends and what to build
Loop sends subscription events to Klaviyo: created, upcoming order, payment failed, skipped, paused, resumed, cancelled and reactivated. Each one needs a flow. Exact names vary, so check the list and sample payloads under Integrations > Klaviyo, as Loop's Klaviyo guide shows.
Two checks before building. Look at both Klaviyo and Loop for live flows, because Loop runs its own milestone and notification emails and either can be the one a subscriber gets. And when you export Loop's activity log, blank fields come through as a dash. Count those as filled and every column looks complete. On one export, the first read counted almost every skip as a payment failure for that reason.
Loop retention setup checklist
The Loop retention setup checklist below is the order we run in a 30-day build on Loop.
- Pull order 2 and order 3 retention by start month.
- Read Analytics > Cancellations: overview, saves and risk. Note the top three reasons.
- Export the activity log to see who skipped, paused and cancelled, and through what.
- Check the plan, the retry count and what happens when retries run out.
- Set payment recovery: backup card on Pro, retries, pause at the end.
- Rebuild the cancel flow: benefits page, reasons, treatments, two offers.
- Add skip, delay and swap Quick Actions to the upcoming order email.
- Check every offer: plan interval, bundle links, gift purchase type.
- Build onboarding for orders 1 to 3 in Klaviyo and turn off the Loop emails it replaces.
- Promise an order 2 gift, through Streaks or Flows on Pro or Klaviyo on Starter.
- Set the portal: milestones shown, skip and swap before cancel.
- Track saves that paid again, recovery rate and order 3 retention monthly.
Want to know which of these your store is missing? Our free subscription audit scores your program on 8 dimensions and 48 checkpoints.
Results
RetainUP's public results include one Skio client's cancel flow save rate going from 14.8% to 24.8%, across 3,543 cancel flow sessions. And on a supplement brand, telling subscribers a free gift was coming in their next box lifted order 2 conversion 85% over the group told nothing.
One more, on Loop itself. An amino gummies brand's buy 2 get 1 offer page went from 6% to 12.5% conversion.
Both come from the same build we run on Loop. The Recharge version of this setup has a churn result from a $5M brand.
When to hire a Loop subscription specialist
Bring someone in when churn is the problem and your email agency only works in Klaviyo. Most Loop brands we talk to have an agency for email and nobody inside Loop. Loop's own team helps with the tool. Deciding the offer, the reasons and the gifts is a different job.
Our Subscription LTV Maximizer is that job, done for you in 30 days across Loop and Klaviyo, for $5,000.
Moving to Loop, or off it? Our subscription app migration checklist runs the move day by day, and the Klaviyo event map shows what each Loop event is called on the other apps. Still choosing? The best Shopify subscription app comparison puts Loop next to the other three.
Weighing Loop against Recharge? Loop vs Recharge compares fees at four store sizes, the portal, the cancel flow and the last-retry setting. Moving up from a cheaper app? Read outgrowing Appstle, Seal or Shopify Subscriptions. And Recharge vs Skio in 2026 covers the other two big apps, now under one owner.
Just moved onto Loop? The Subscription LTV Maximizer™ checks every setting the move carried over and rebuilds the offer, cancel flow, payment recovery and Klaviyo flows in 30 days, for $5,000.
Moving onto Skio or Stay AI instead? Migrating to Skio has the 4 to 5 week plan, the Skio cancel flow setup maps a save path for every reason, and our Stay AI review covers pricing and setup.
FAQ
Who is a good subscription LTV specialist for Loop?
Pick someone who works inside Loop, not only Klaviyo, and shows cohort numbers. RetainUP works with $1-10M subscription brands on Loop, Recharge, Skio and Stay AI, and lifted one client's cancel flow save rate from 14.8% to 24.8%.
Do I need Loop Pro for retention?
No. Starter at $99 a month has cancel flows, smart dunning, bundles and Quick Actions. Pro at $399 a month adds Streaks, Flows, a backup payment method and hard-decline handling, which matter more once you have a few thousand subscribers.
What is a good cancel flow save rate on Loop?
Loop's data puts a generic discount at about 6%, a three-stage flow at about 15%, and the best brands above 20%. Check how many saved subscribers paid for their next order, not only the save rate.
How many payment retries should I set in Loop?
Loop suggests 7 to 10 per billing cycle. We front-load them, send dead cards a card update link the same day, and pause the subscription when retries run out instead of skipping.
Does Loop work with Klaviyo?
Yes, on every plan. Loop sends subscription events such as created, upcoming order, payment failed, skipped and cancelled, and Quick Action links can go into Klaviyo emails so subscribers skip or update a card in one click.
How long does a Loop retention setup take?
Our build runs 30 days. Payment recovery and the cancel flow go live first, usually in week two, and the cohort effect shows over 60 to 90 days.
What does not move when you migrate to Loop?
Loop's migration FAQs say order history and counts, past skips, pauses and discounts, and historical revenue, LTV and cohorts stay behind. Live subscriptions and same-store payment methods move. Legacy frequencies need adding again under Acquire, Selling Plans.
How long does a migration to Loop take?
Loop's migration page says about two weeks, free on paid plans. Its help center puts the import at 3 to 7 working days. Price changes, swaps, bundles and prepaid need a week's notice to the migration team.
Why did my cancel count jump after moving to Loop?
The old records are cancelled on migration day, and from Recharge your subscription count also drops because Loop groups products billed together. Filter out cancels with a migration reason before you read churn.
What should I check in the first 90 days on Loop?
Week 1: migration cancels and anything the move paused. Weeks 2 to 4: retries, the step after the last retry, payment emails, legacy prices and the portal. Days 30 to 60: the cancel flow. Day 90: order 2 and 3 rate for subscribers who started on Loop.
One email a week on subscription retention: the numbers, the strategy, and what to fix first.
Rahi Jain
Rahi Jain is a subscription LTV specialist who helps $1M to $10M DTC brands reduce subscription churn and maximize LTV on Recharge, Skio, Stay AI and Loop.
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