Spring Cleaning for your Subscription Model: Volume One

We know that sometimes maintaining a successful subscription model can be hard! So what better time to fix it up than Spring Cleaning! We will have a series of blogs over a couple of weeks focused on how to freshen up your subscription billing world. We’ve essentially created a checklist for your Spring Cleaning (you can thank us later).

First up on your list – Automatic Retry Logic aka Dunning Management

Is your business having trouble managing declined credit card payments for your business? Is the manual review process for contacting your customer to discuss these declines becoming overbearing? If you answered yes to these questions, you probably are not aware of dunning management, or are not aligned with a payment processor who uses this logic.

So, what is dunning management you ask? It is a retry logic that kicks in when a payment for a recurring order fails. Once the payment fails, the system will send a notification to the customer that their payment has failed so that they can update their information. Meanwhile, the subscription billing system will automatically retry their payment every specified length of time (often around 5 days) until it is successful or ultimately fails after multiple attempts. This saves you time and money by automatically rescuing failed transactions.

 

Still not convinced? Here are the benefits of dunning management laid out for you:

1. Lower churn and increase revenue

The less payment errors you have, the less churn there will be. By notifying customers of their payment failure, you are doing a service not only to yourself but also to your customers so that they don’t see a disruption in service.

2. Saving time and effort

Tracking down each failed payment by yourself can be quite a pain. Using a billing engine that uses dunning management will increase efficiency and lead to greater payment success.

3. Managed communication to customers

Sending out a personalized manual email to each customer each time their payment fails could potentially lead to errors in communication and lost sales. Using a processor with dunning management automatically contacts customers so that no one is missed.

4. Metrics tracking

With dunning management capabilities, your processor should be able to help you track key subscription metrics – such as the number of declines, number of renewals, and accounts that are no longer working. This will help your business by understanding the stuff behind the scenes that may be affecting your subscriptions.

 

During spring cleaning, don’t throw things out just because they may not be working correctly – recycle! Use dunning management to capture things that may be broken, and turn them into successes.

If you are still struggling with subscriptions and are interested in how to optimize your subscription services download our subscription train infographic to encounter:

• Train Token(ization) – PCI Compliance
• The Self-Service Dining Car – Experimentation with Subscription Plans
• Going Global – Selling Internationally
• A Free Ride – Free Trials and Coupons

Happy Spring Cleaning! Check off the next item on your checklist in the next volume of this blog series.

 

Have any more questions about dunning management and how it can help you? Click here to chat with us!:

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