4
1 Comment

Tip: Reduce involuntary churn by retrying failed subscription payments

Failed payments can cause users to churn when they don't want to. Avoid needlessly losing customers by automatically retrying payments when they fail.

Failed payments can have a big impact on your revenue, especially if you're using a subscription model. Just ask Segment, where 50% of churn is involuntary. While it's important to hedge against involuntary churn with email reminders about approaching card expirations, notifications about failed payments, and so forth, don't forget about the basics: Run it again. It turns out that over 20% of failed payments are fixed simply by retrying the payment. So set up automatic retries. If your payment platform allows it, customize them so that they occur during the day, as refusals are higher at night. And since refusals are also higher at the end of the month, it may pay to wait until the 1st in some cases. But whatever you do, don't retry a charge more than four times, as that may get it flagged as potential fraud.

More 30-second growth tips?

We share a tiny, bite-sized tip for growing your business a few times a week. Click here to see more and get Growth Bites in your inbox 👌

on December 22, 2020
  1. 1

    Full disclosure: I'm Avery Lin (avrlin). I've been packaging a Stripe Dunning Email Pack ($29 — failure-reason matrix + calm retry copy) with AI assistance, so take this as adjacent interest, not neutral advice.

    The retry mechanic in this tip is the foundation — I keep seeing the leak on the email side: one generic "update your card" blast for every decline. Soft declines (insufficient funds) need a different ladder than expired cards or fraud holds. Mapping the failure reason to short, specific retry copy recovers more than a single template plus a blind retry.

    Curious — for Stripe/SaaS involuntary churn, do you branch dunning by decline reason, or is it still one template + auto-retry for everything?