# The email you'd write yourself, if you had the time

Every customer who cancels gets one short, plain-text question from your address — minutes after they leave, while they still remember why.

Canonical URL: https://whyleft.com/features/exit-interviews

## Benefits

### It doesn't look like software

No logo, no tracking pixel, no star rating, no branded template. Plain text from your address, signed with your name — the same thing you'd have typed manually.

### It arrives at the only moment that works

Minutes after the cancellation, while the reason is still fresh and they're still thinking about you. A week later they've moved on and won't reply to anything.

### Replying costs them nothing

There's no form to open and no page to load. They hit reply in the client they already have open, type a sentence, and they're done.

## Why not a survey?

An exit survey asks someone who has just decided to stop giving you money to click a link, load a page, and fill in a form. Almost nobody does, and the people who do are systematically the angriest — which quietly skews everything you learn.

An email that can be answered by replying removes every step between the question and the answer. The customer doesn't have to decide to "go and do a thing." They just answer, in their own words, at whatever length they feel like.

Free text is also the point. A dropdown forces someone to pick the closest of your five guesses. An open question lets them tell you the thing you didn't think to list — which is usually the thing worth knowing.

## You control every word

The default email is short and deliberately unpolished, because that's what gets replies. You can rewrite it entirely, keep your own subject line, and set the name and address it sends from.

You can also run several variants at once to see which phrasing your customers actually respond to, and switch between an AI-written email that adapts to each customer's context and a fixed template you've written yourself.

## Sending is capped, on purpose

A cancelled customer receives at most two messages per interview: the question and one follow-up. That limit is enforced in the send path, not by policy — the code checks before every message goes out.

Every email carries an RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe header, so a single click in their mail client stops everything permanently. No landing page, no confirmation step, no dark pattern.

## How it works

1. **Cancellation detected** — From your billing provider, the API, a webhook, or a CSV import.
2. **Short delay** — A couple of minutes, so the email doesn't collide with your provider's own cancellation receipt.
3. **Email sent from your domain** — Through your own verified sending domain, so it authenticates as you and lands in the inbox.
4. **Reply routed back** — Their reply is captured, threaded, and handed to the follow-up and tagging steps.

## In practice: The founder who kept meaning to ask

You've told yourself for a year that you'll start emailing churned customers. You did it twice, got two genuinely useful answers, and then a busy month happened. WhyLeft is that intention, running whether or not this month is busy — and unlike you, it never skips the awkward ones.

## Related

- https://whyleft.com/features/ai-follow-ups
- https://whyleft.com/features/insights
- https://whyleft.com/features/integrations