Flamingo cuts subscriber cancellations by 36% with in-email subscription management

By embedding Zaymo's in-email subscription portal into its Klaviyo billing reminder flow, Flamingo reduced subscriber cancellations attributed to the billing reminder flow by 36% — proven through an A/B test.

Flamingo offers women’s razors, blade refills, and body care products on a recurring subscription, delivered through a Klaviyo-powered email program. Like most subscription businesses, its highest-risk moments are the ones where subscribers are reminded that a charge is coming.

Initial Problem

The most common reason Flamingo subscribers cancelled was the same one that drives churn across subscription commerce: too much product. Subscribers were accumulating blade refills faster than they could use them, and when the billing reminder arrived, the easiest path forward felt like cancelling.

The underlying problem wasn’t dissatisfaction with the product — it was friction:

Modifying a subscription meant leaving the email. Customers had to log in and navigate account settings to make any change.
Subscribers didn’t know their options. Customers who didn’t know they could push back their order were making a permanent decision to solve a temporary problem.
Cancellation was the path of least resistance. With no self-serve option inside the email, too many satisfied subscribers churned over a pacing problem, not a product problem.

'I have too much product' was our number one cancellation reason — being on Zaymo has been great at allowing our customers to just quickly push out their order rather than cancel, which is what we were getting more of. They may have been less aware that they had the option to modify.

Emily Lambert Flamingo

Zaymo’s Solution

Flamingo embedded Zaymo’s interactive subscription management portal directly into its Klaviyo billing reminder email, giving subscribers every tool they needed to manage their account without leaving their inbox:

Delay, skip, and frequency controls — without leaving the email. Subscribers could push back their next shipment, skip a delivery, or change their cadence with a single tap — no login, no redirects.
In-email upsells that drive product discovery. Flamingo surfaced product add-ons directly inside the email. The plug-and-play upsell tool made it easy to test and iterate between manual and dynamic product selection without engineering resources.
A retention moment inside the highest-attention email. By giving Flamingo’s customers something to do other than cancel — right inside the billing reminder — Zaymo converted a reliable churn trigger into a proactive retention touchpoint.

With Zaymo, it's been fun to plug and play and quickly adjust with new products. Customers are realizing they can take these actions — and that they can easily reverse them too. It gives more power in the customer's hands. They can make the decisions.

Emily Lambert Flamingo

Setup

Flamingo ran a controlled A/B test on the billing reminder flow to isolate the effect of in-email interactivity:

Control. A standard billing reminder linking out to the subscription portal on-site.
Variant. A Zaymo-powered billing reminder with the full account management portal embedded directly inside the email.

Both variants were deployed to statistically significant subscriber segments. The 36% reduction in cancellations is attributable entirely to the presence of the in-email portal — with no changes to offer, copy, or send timing.

Results

36% reduction in subscriber cancellations attributed to the billing reminder email — A/B test validated
↑ Product adoption as subscribers discovered and added new items directly from inside the email
↓ Cancellations driven by overstock as subscribers could delay or skip without leaving their inbox

Takeaways

Flamingo’s 36% reduction in cancellations came from solving a problem that’s easy to misdiagnose. Overstocked subscribers aren’t dissatisfied customers — they’re satisfied customers who’ve temporarily run out of need. The difference between losing them permanently and keeping them subscribed came down entirely to whether they could act on that feeling in the moment, from inside the email.

The broader lesson for subscription brands: friction in the wrong place at the wrong moment doesn’t just create support tickets — it creates churn. When the highest-attention email in your lifecycle program offers no self-serve release valve, you’re not giving subscribers a reason to stay. You’re giving them a deadline to leave.