proactive Notifications:
the underestimated weapon against churn!

photo auteur emmanuel pasquet

EMMANUEL PASQUET

Approx. reading : about 8 min

How dunning management helps you fight subscription cancellations!

Your customers love your service. They use it every day. You bill them each month for the services they consume.

Suppose one of your customers’ payments failed.

What are you doing in this situation?

It would be counterproductive to cancel the subscription just because the card was not accepted or the payment was rejected. You also can’t afford to forget about the fees that failed payment incurs.

You might be wondering why can’t I just contact this client and make arrangements with them? Of course, this seems like a good option when you only have one default to deal with.

But what happens when your customer base grows and you face multiple payment failures? It is not possible for you to keep track of all card failures and to track each one manually. If not carefully supervised, these anomalies could lead to a wave of unintentional unsubscribes.

Let's see what the unintentional churn rate is and how you can avoid it.

Unintentional churn occurs when the business stops providing services to customers due to non-payment and is not the direct result of the customer’s decision. One of the main sources of unintentional opt-out is payment failure.

According to Spreedly’s Gateway Index, an average transaction fails more than 17% of the time.

Transactions can fail for a number of reasons, including:

Fortunately, these problems can be easily resolved with the help of the dunning management that is found in any good subscription management software.

Proactive Notification (so called Dunning Management) is the tool you need!

Notifying negligent or abnormal customers is an automated process that kicks in whenever a recurring payment fails. He informs clients of the failure with the intention of recovering overdue payments.

Usually, this is accompanied by a new payment attempt, during which the system attempts to charge the customer’s card again, depending on how often you choose.

The number of attempts depends on the type of subscription billing system you are using. A minimum of 3 attempts is recommended with a frequency of 3 to 5 days in between.

For the expiration of the card, it is recommended to inform customers a few days before the expiration of their cards and also the day of expiration.

Ideally, your subscription billing software should be able to identify cards that are about to expire and send automated email reminders to your customers.

How can proactive notifications help your business?

Let me give you an example of how automated stimulus management can help a business like yours.

Say you are an organization that produces traditional music and then sends its latest albums to the members of your monthly subscriber program, all musicians.

So far, you’ve used spreadsheets to track member details, and you spend a lot of your time manually tracking payment failures, retrieving card information to keep it current or valid.

The management of reminders can help you in the following way:

With such built-in dunning features, you will be able to mitigate the unintentional churn rate by being proactive about payment issues instead of waiting for it to happen to react; and especially not to act too late!

What should you take away from this article?

One of the biggest challenges in running a subscription-based business is retaining customers.

Your business depends on your regular customers for income. Retaining your existing customers will lead to a more stable source of recurring income.

Gartner, an IT research firm, suggests that a company that retains 20% of its current customers will provide 80% of its future revenues.

With such a huge percentage based on your existing customers, it’s probably worth taking more care of them and not canceling their subscription because their card payments have failed. This is exactly how the stimulus can help.

If for you this question of automated management of reminders is new and you discover its importance here, here is a summary to remember:

Dotsha delivers a subscription-to-cash platform that integrates advanced features for managing proactive customer notifications. You will be able to easily set up recovery scenarios adapted by customer and by type of subscription or anomaly.

About DOTSHA

Dotsha delivers the first subscription-to-cash automation platform designed to put every subscription-based or usage-based business on autopilot … from early subscription to cash collection!  

Your business can scale fast without turning its back-office into a mess! 

Keep growing faster… we’ve got your back !

All-In-One platform that unify {Pricing}+{Check-in}+{Billing}+{Payments}+{Dunning}+{Reporting} while the MRR just keeps growing, Dotsha’s plaform is an easy to use and quickly implemented cloud-based platform that augment your existing information system with robust API integrations in order to deliver optimal automation with minimal code. You will forget we are there!

photo auteur emmanuel pasquet

EMMANUEL PASQUET

Approx. reading : about 8 min

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