CANCELED Member? Avoid THIS Mistake When Revoking Access Automatically

If you're running a subscription-based business, cancellations can be tough. They're tough mentally, they're tough emotionally, but also from a technical standpoint, they're tough to automate. Because if you think about it, unlike a purchase or a refund where you give or remove access to a member immediately, you can't do that if someone just canceled. And here's why. The moment they cancel, they're still members and they will remain members until the billing period ends. So you're going to want to wait until that period before you In this video, I'm going to show you how to handle a canceled member automatically using Zapier. So stay tuned. If you're new to this channel, my name is Isaac from Upside.co, where we've helped over 50 companies automate more than half a million tasks using low-code tools like Zapier. And I started this YouTube channel to share the work we do and hopefully help some education and service-based businesses focus on what they're good at while they let automation do the rest. In this video series, I'm discussing the most common post-purchase automation scenarios you may want to set up for your subscription offer. And I'm illustrating the process using ThriveCart as the checkout system, Kajabi as the course hosting platform, Circle as the community, ClickUp as the project management system, and ActiveCampaign as the email marketing tool. Though keep in mind that the same concept can be implemented into any other platform if it integrates with Zapier or it's capable of receiving or sending webhooks. Let me share my screen and let's get into it. So here's a high-level overview of what we're going to be covering in order to be able to On these automatic actions, we're going to have a trigger, maybe the recurring payment canceled.

Okay.

And after that, we're going to have a delay here. Interestingly enough, we can use the delayed until Zapier function.

However, we can only use it if the period is going to be less than 30 days because this particular tool doesn't allow for more than 30 days of delay. And if it's more than 30 days, what I'm going to suggest we do, I'm going to see, you're going to see an example, is to actually add The person and the end date with Google Sheets.

And with a separate Zap, we're going to every day check in on whose subscription ends today, and that date's gonna run.

Okay. That's, that makes this a little complex, but it's gonna make sense once I show the screen. From there, we're gonna revoke access to the offer on Kajabi, remove the member from the Space Scooping Circle, and we're gonna update the contact in ActiveCampaign where we're going to remove Remove tag and add a cancel tag. This cancel tag will trigger an automation where you may want to send specific emails to cancel— canceled members that you want to, for example, win back in some way, maybe some sort of discount or offer for them to become a member again.

And lastly, we're going to have here find a task by custom field on ClickUp so we can find the tag that relates to this person, and we're going to update that task accordingly.

So if there are people that are need to do certain tasks for this client, they know they, they're canceled already. Okay? So let's, let me share.

Let's go into Zapier and let's see how this is done.

Okay? So we are here on my YouTube folder. I'm gonna go ahead and as usual create a Zap clicking on this blue button right here. And for clarity's sake, let's simply real quick name this workflow accordingly so we know what it's all about. case, we're gonna put Workflow 3, Cancellations. So we're gonna go ahead and find the trigger, which we already discussed, the start card, and we're gonna look for cancel.

You can see here recurring payments cancel, that it's triggered both from a subscription and from the split pay.

So this is relevant for both instances where you may have a course with split pay or a subscription that it's like an undefined period. Here we give— it gives us the option to specify item type, and I'm gonna simply click a product. I'm gonna specify a product that we're using right now as a test. Okay, we have— we're testing product here.

You may want to specify specifically a pricing option. For example, we already discussed that the second step, the delay, is gonna depend on whether it's monthly or potentially if you have a quarterly or semiannual or annual subscription.

You may wanna make sure that here you only select the monthly option for the workflow we're gonna build. Right now.

Let's click on Continue.

Let's test this trigger to pull up the data that we need. And here I want us to pay attention because there's a value that's gonna be very helpful for us here, and it's called billing period.

And this is the date where the billing period ends, and this is the date you want to use to delay the workflow.

Okay.

So let's go ahead and let's assume for this specific instance that the delay, it's less than 30 days.

This is some sort of monthly or maybe even a lower frequency— well, higher frequency technically— subscription. And we're gonna pick delay until.

We pick delay until. Let's go ahead and simply look for billing period end date, and we're gonna select this, uh, the one that's formatted like Here it's gonna ask you, how should we handle if the dates are in the past?

And what I would like to do is simply I'm gonna say always continue. And we are gonna see later on why. Continue. We're gonna click on test action and we're gonna go ahead and continue the following steps. Once I finish this, this step, I'm gonna show you how I would do it if I, if the delay was greater than 30 days, but let's go through the process.

Kajabi.

Let's add that step where we wanna be revoking access to an offer. Revoke access to an offer.

We'll kill it and continue.

We select the specific site ID, the specific offer in question that you wanna remove access to. And here, as we've mentioned a few times in this video series, we're gonna use the email as the external user ID of the Kajabi customer or the student, however you wanna call it.

Let's skip this test and let's keep going. As I said a couple times, Circle doesn't have a free trial that includes API integration.

As a result, I have been unable to, to do it for illustrative purposes. I don't wanna deal with my client's account for YouTube. So here you, you're just gonna want to, similar to what we've just did, select remove member from SpaceGrid, SDNI, and Circle, and you'll be easily able to remove access to people from your paid community if you have one. Then let's go ahead and put here ActiveCampaign when we're going to add the member tag.

So we add the cancel tag and we remove the member tag.

So we're gonna go ahead, create or update contact. We're going to select the lists that's relevant.

Technically, some people might wanna have like a pre-existing clients or like canceled clients lists.

But since we're going to use tags for that, we'll just use the clients list. Let's pick email here and use the following tag: event canceled membership monthly. This is the event we're going to be—

the tag we're going to be using.

Let's click on continue and let's skip this particular step. We also want to remove the tag, and for that we actually need to add another Step because unfortunately with the create or update contact, we didn't have the ability to remove the tag. But here we can. We can remove a tag from a contact. And what we're going to do is that we're going to select the contact ID that it's already available from the last step that we tested. If we show our options here, you're gonna see contact ID.

Select that.

We're gonna go ahead and click on action and click that we want to remove the purchase account, which should be a contact. Here that's called membership monthly.

You can see it right here.

And we're gonna click on continue and it's going to skip this task. Lastly, we're gonna find the task by custom field in ClickUp and we're gonna update it accordingly.

In this case, we might wanna label it as canceled to let people know that this person canceled.

We're gonna look for ClickUp.

We're gonna look for find task by custom fields.

Click on Continue. I'm gonna choose my account. Continue. I'm gonna select the workspace. Then I'm gonna go ahead and select the space and the list that we wanna use. In this case, there are no folders. I'm gonna select operations. And what we're gonna wanna do is that as the custom fields appear, we're gonna use the custom field, which we already populated in workflow number 1.

Check out the playlist in the description if you haven't checked that one out.

And we're gonna click on test this particular action. I'm not entirely sure if that is available, so this might fail.

Oh, looks like it does exist. So it found the task that relates to this particular email.

What we're gonna do now is we're gonna go ahead and add another ClickUp task that's gonna update that task. It's pretty common for you to need to find something and then update it whenever you want to update any task or any contacts. Yep.

Let's go ahead and find the family task.

So we're gonna add the ID from that step above. And what we're gonna wanna do, we're gonna wanna specify the space. Oops, that's not the one I intended to select. Specify the space, specify the folder, and specify the list.

And the reason we do so is because that's going to allow us to see the tags that are—

that already exist on that, on that list. If I click here, I shall see that we created in advance the refund and the canceled tag for tasks. And in this case, since this person canceled, this is the one we're gonna add.

I'm gonna click on continue, skip step, and technically this workflow right now, it's done. I'm gonna publish this app. But I want to go ahead, I want to go ahead and duplicate this workflow and show you what I would do if instead the delay was greater than 30 days.

Okay, let's go ahead and do that.

Okay, so here's what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna duplicate this workflow, but I'm gonna create a new one because you're gonna need 2, and I'm gonna show you why right now.

In the first workflow, what you're gonna have is the trigger And you're gonna add that person to a Google Sheets. Okay? That's the first step. The second step is gonna have a schedule that on a daily basis checks on that specific spreadsheet.

If there's anyone that— anyone whose subscription expires today, I'm gonna pick that and it's gonna repeat all the process that we did earlier. So here's how you would go about that. Let's get this started. Description, 443D cancellation rating. That is to our quick product cart, just as we did earlier. But as a next step, rather than having it delayed by Zapier, you're gonna want to add a Google Sheets. I already created Google Sheets, as simple as it can be— email and billing date. That's all I'm going to add. Okay, I'm going to add— I'm going to create a row, create spreadsheet row. And I'm gonna look for my personal account here. Oops, give it just one second. All right, so I reconnected the account here. I'm gonna pick into my Google Drive and I'm gonna select the spreadsheet I just created that's called YouTube Video, YouTube Video 30-day cancellation. The worksheet is going to be just US Social Security. I'm going to select that. And you're gonna see that the columns that I have here will show up.

So it's gonna tell email and billing.

Okay? So we're gonna want to add the email. And here we're gonna want to add the billing period and date. However, it'd be smart, or I, I like to personally just keep the, the format as simple as possible.

So I'm gonna add a step in between that's gonna format that time and date. So that is simply the year, the month, and day. So let's go ahead and do that. Gonna select here date and time in the formatter, and I'm gonna go ahead and add, uh, select format, date formatting here. I'm gonna add the building period end date that has all of these other, like the time and the time zone. I'm simply gonna say I want a format that only has, uh, this is the one that I like. Year-month-day. I'm gonna click on continue. I'm gonna test that action. And now I can go ahead and add the output of this second step as the value of the second column. I'm gonna click on continue. I'm gonna test this action. Okay, but as you can see here, now this person is here on, on the spreadsheet. And I'm gonna go back to the workflow we duplicated and show you what I would do in order to make sure that on that particular day, the person goes through the workflow we just created. So I'll probably call this 3A. Technically, yeah, technically the other one should be 3A and 3B, but that's just a little technical thing. What I'm gonna do here is rather than having 5-card as the trigger, I'm actually gonna have a schedule, which was one of the built-in tools from Zapier. I'm gonna make sure that I run this every day.

Okay?

So let's say midnight.

Test trigger.

Okay?

So what I'm gonna wanna do is I'm going to remove this step.

It's no longer necessary, and I'm gonna add a lookup.

Sorry.

Google Sheets first, and then in the event, we're gonna look— look up sheet row and output as line items. I'm gonna select that account where I have the spreadsheet. What I'm gonna do here is just like I did earlier. I'm going to select the spreadsheet and the worksheet. Now here's where the magic comes. I'm gonna select the column of the end date, and I'm gonna put here the value that the schedule gave me. They gave me the year. Yeah, I'm probably gonna want to also format this step. So let's go ahead and do that real quick just to make sure that, you know, both are matched. So similar to what we did earlier, we're gonna set date and time. We're going to format the date. And in this case, we're gonna take the date from the step above where in the ID they actually give us the date in a similar format to what we had earlier. But we're gonna go ahead and put it in the same format that we put in the spreadsheet. Let's test that action. There we have it. And now it's where I'm going to add as the lookup value the output Of that step above, I'm gonna just for the sake of this example, I'm actually gonna go ahead and add something here so that there's that date available. In fact, I'm gonna go ahead and put not one but two examples to see if it brings up both.

Okay, so you can see here it's looking up the question.

the SAP is asking here, it's essentially whose subscription expires today. And it's gonna pull up all of the people that are there whose subscription part expires today. And then with the looping function, we can go ahead and perform these set of actions. So let's test that. And you can see here, it gave me 2 people. The first is the March 2016 A and the March 2016 B.

So I'm gonna show you real quick how I go about finishing this workflow.

There's a looping function within Zapier that you can simply create a loop from line items. The only thing you need really here, it's the email of the customer. So say customer email. And the customer email, it's coming right now on from this. You can see here from column A. So what this is going to do is gonna separate those values. I'm gonna take it one by one, and it's gonna iterate through a process that the particular step you have below this loop. Once you have this, the only thing you're gonna wanna do is gonna Go on outline, and all of these steps that we created earlier, we're gonna simply move it below the loop, just like this. And as you can see now, you're gonna notice that the loop— sorry, all these steps are within the loop now. So what that means is that all of these steps will happen as many times as they need to happen. for each person that's on that spreadsheet.

The only thing you're going to want to do from there is to remove this customer email and select instead from the number 4, step number 4, the customer email.

So now the customer email is not coming from the first step as it did for the 30-day version, but instead it's coming from the loop and this particular iteration we're going through right now. If you repeat that process for all of these steps and you make sure to use that email, then you're good to go. And that would be a way of essentially having the same workflow work for subscriptions that are longer than 30 days. That said, that's a little bit more complex. I hope that wasn't super complex to understand, but I'm not going to turn these on because I'm just simply going to assume that we're gonna—

that we're working with a monthly subscription.

Now what we're gonna do is that we're gonna go ahead and test this workflow. So let's do that.

All right.

So if you've been following our series, you know that there are technically 2 ways in which people can cancel the subscription, but there's a 3rd based on how we'll be building this up. So 3 ways in which people someone's subscription can be canceled. Number one is that if you go into your ThriveCart dashboard and you look for the transactions of the person, you can actually click on Manage and cancel their subscription yourself. That's one. The other option is that they can actually cancel it themselves. They should have received an email early on with the invoice. And if they scroll all the way down, interestingly enough— oh, the challenge is that this is the invoice that comes from the other perspective, from the person that made the sale.

So here's— let's see.

Okay, so this is an example.

Technically, there probably—

there should be an invoice not about the refund, but about the sale. I wasn't able to find a Quickly, so bear with me because both actually have this link at the very bottom that says click here to manage your billing details. And in case you want to have a quick, a more quick way to find it, it should be your domain name, thethraka.com/updateinfo. And what you're going to have here is you're going to have a way for them to view their purchase history by introducing the their email address. So in this case, this is one of the email addresses I'm testing with. If I go ahead and put that in, I'm gonna receive an email that's going to allow me to see my subscription and cancel them right there. Here it is, the email. Click here, subscriptions, and you can see here— well, in this case it's already refunded. Let me see if I click on view. Yep, here it is. If I click on view, you can see that I'm able to cancel the subscription as the user, as the customer.

Of course, you are responsible for sharing that people can do this.

But actually, we're not gonna use any of those 2 methods, because if you saw our latest video, you know that when people fail to pay, we already set up an automation Then when they fail to pay for the first time, we're gonna tag them and encourage them to update their info. And if they, for example, fail to pay 4 times, so we make 4 attempts to charge them and we can't, we're gonna assume that they were canceled and we're gonna actually go ahead and automatically cancel the subscription.

And we actually set this up already in our last video if you wanna check that out.

And what I'm gonna do is I'm simply going to allow for this test that I'm doing to continue to fail on the RIBL.

I had to take a bank account of mine and withdraw all the funds from it.

I swear I have the money. And essentially, I'm gonna allow for this person to continue to fail to pay. And we're gonna see if the workflow we created in the last video cancels their subscription automatically and therefore triggers this other step that we just created and revoke their access accordingly. All right, so I am back the next day and as you can see here, the cancellation workflow went through successfully. And just a reminder that again, this can be either whether you cancel it yourself on your ThriveCart dashboard the customer cancel it themselves, or you have other workflow where this person, or you automatically cancel this person's subscription. Either way, this workflow will trigger. And as you can see here, we were able to revoke access to the offer to this person. We were able to put this tag here, event cancel. We removed their membership monthly tag because now they're not a member anymore, and we also labeled their task accordingly. So there you have it. You want to learn more about other automations for subscription businesses? We're going to keep releasing some automations related to that. So make sure to subscribe and stay tuned. And if you want to see the videos that we've already discussed, make sure to check out the playlist in the description below so you can check that out. I'll see you in the next one.