Dunning Strategy: Cutting Down on Passive Churn

Losing valued customers due to payment failures, also known as passive churn, can be frustrating. To tackle this, dunning strategies are essential.

Recovering failed subscription payments can be done in two main ways:
1. Retry the existing credit card.
2. Request a new credit card from the customer.

Even small errors in recurring payments can significantly affect growth due to the compounding effect of lost revenue.

Who are we? Churn Buster has been helping subscription companies fix their billing problems since 2013, working with some of the fastest-growing E-commerce and SaaS companies in the world.

While safeguarding billions of dollars of subscription revenue, we've learned exactly what works and what doesn't.

In this guide we’ll show you how to reduce involuntary churn like a real pro.

1. Skip Pre-dunning.

Pre-dunning used to be a dunning best practice.

Years ago, companies sent warning emails to customers 30, 15, and 3 days before their card expired. These pre-expiration emails were called “pre-dunning.”

Today, Stripe, Braintree, and other payments platforms will automatically update cards that have an upcoming expiration date. They communicate directly with the card issuing bank, and the results are impressive.

Over 70% of upcoming expiration dates get updated behind-the-scenes.

Consequently, pre-dunning often results in unnecessary customer tasks due to false alarms. Instead, focus on value-adding communication and let card updates run their course.

2. Optimize email timing ✉️

Basic dunning setups will send emails each and every time a payment fails.

This is the entry point for most businesses, and provides little control over optimizing the recovery process.

However, it benefits companies of all size to decouple emails from payment attempts. It's possible to build this in-house, or more advanced tools like Churn Buster can do this for you.

An average of 21% of payments are resolved within the first few days—simply by retrying the card-on-file *before* sending emails.



Right out of the gates, that means 21% fewer emails being sent every month. This often adds up to thousands of customers who are happily unaware there was a (temporary) billing issue.

Side benefit: By allowing time to resolve payments via reattempts, your recovery metrics will actually make sense. When emailing right away for a card update, there is no way to separate necessary card updates from frivolous ones.

The success of the subscription model relies on continuity.

Doing nothing when payments fail isn’t an option, but waiting for the right time to intervene… that’s a best practice. This is why we've made passive recovery via card retries priority #1 at Churn Buster, treating card updates as a last resort.

Churn Buster offers frictionless churn recovery with custom dunning emails, support escalations, SMS messaging, and more.

3. Simplify Card Updates📱

When someone signs up for a subscription service, the expectation is automatic payments that they don’t have to concern themselves with.

In order to gain positive responses from your update requests, you want to make the experience of updating card information seamless and easy for the customer.

  • Make the page mobile-responsive: Most of your customers will update their cards using a mobile device. In fact, we see over 70% of updates happening on mobile devices. They will read your dunning email, click through to the page, and (if you’ve got it set up well), quickly input their information. Done deal. If your card updating page is not mobile-friendly, you risk losing these people to simple frustration– and that’s just not worth it.
  • Bypass the log-in: Again, simplicity and ease of use are key on your card update pages. The less friction you add into the process, the more likely your customer is to input that information. If your customer clicks through to update their card info and then is prompted to input a password, you’ve established a real hurdle for them. Most people won’t know the password off the top of their head. Some will guess, get it wrong, and feel frustrated. Neither is a good experience, and neither results in a recovered customer. Simply put, if you ask for a password, and they don’t think you’re worth the time to find it, they will churn.
  • Check-in on your pages: It’s easy to forget about card update pages as your company grows. But as site changes are made, things can break. You never want to send a faulty card update page to a customer; it’s a massive load of friction on their experience. Create a schedule to check the functionality of those pages and avoid a massive headache.

4. Personalize your emails

When we’re talking about dunning, trust is key. Consumers are more aware than ever of phishing schemes and credit card scams. This makes people weary about clicking on links that are requesting credit card information. How can you combat this mistrust? Personalization. You might be thinking this means inserting first name variables or crafting compelling copy to increase conversions, but it’s all about establishing trust, and often it’s subtle changes that help most.

Keep in mind, these are transactional emails you are sending to established customers. The copy in the email is important, yes, but ensuring those customers can trust who the email is coming from should sit higher on your priority list.

Here are a few quick tips that can increase personalization and trust:

  • Keep your branding consistent: If your marketing emails have your logo on the top left corner, make sure your transactional emails do too. Ensuring your branding is consistent and evident on your dunning emails will give customers peace of mind. That being said, Churn Buster recommends including one plain-text email in your campaigns, just in case your customer has a dedicated filter against HTML emails.
  • The “from name” is recognizable (and from your organization): When dunning management providers don’t supply you with a DKIM DNS record to connect to your domain, any emails they send on your behalf will show in the inbox as: “From: Your Company via dunning-provider.com” or worse, “From: your-company@dunning-provider.com”. This can quickly increase customer anxiety and reduce recovery. In the end, it’s up to you to decide who the email comes from. The right choice usually depends on your current customer communication style. If your customers are used to, or would appreciate, receiving emails from “Name at Your Company”, make sure your dunning emails fit the bill. If they are not quite used to that personal touch, you can send from “payments@yourcompany.com” or “support@yourcompany.com”. Only you know your customers best, so think carefully about this decision; the from name carries a lot of weight when it comes to customer trust.

Hot tip: Try changing the sender as the urgency of your emails increase. If the first emails come from a less recognizable individual in your organization, try sending the more pressing ones from the CEO (or someone easily recognized by your customers).

  • Spice up the copy: Your dunning campaigns should include multiple emails, and each email should have its own content. The copy should reflect an increase in urgency as the customer gets closer to cancellation. In addition to changing up the copy for each email, make sure it lines up with your current style guidelines. If your company’s writing style is formal and straight-forward, don’t send overly conversational or witty transactional emails. This all goes back to trust. Your customers will recognize your tone and messaging when it’s on brand–and they’ll also recognize if it’s off.
  • Limit your links: When it comes to dunning emails, getting the coveted link click from your customer is your #1 goal. Limit the number of CTAs, links, or promo within the email to ensure your customer doesn’t get distracted. There should only be one path for them to take, and that is to update the payment info.
  • Create a system for replies: If a customer replies to your dunning emails, you want to make sure that reply lands in someone’s inbox (and that the person receiving the replies knows how to handle them). Even if you are sending your emails from “CEO at Your Company”, make sure the reply-to email is set to someone who can handle those responses. Missing out on customer engagement is never beneficial, especially when it comes to failed payments.

5. Make sure emails get seen

If you’ve ever handled marketing emails, deliverability is a huge concern. What good is your weekly newsletter if it never even reaches your customer’s inbox? While ensuring deliverability is a no-brainer for marketing emails, many companies fail to consider this key aspect when it comes to transactional emails–and it’s costing them.

Transactional emails often carry a much heavier weight than your marketing emails. Everything from password resets to, yup, you guessed it, dunning emails, are extremely important to your bottom line. What good is your card update request if it never even reaches your customer’s inbox?

Extra reading: What Happens When Your SaaS Transactional Emails Bounce?

When it comes to dunning management, ensuring email visibility should be top priority. It doesn’t matter when the emails send, what they say, or how optimized your schedule is if the customer never even receives the email. So what steps can you take to ensure visibility?

  1. Use an email delivery tool  that only sends transactional email. Mixing with your marketing ESP is a surefire way to ruin your performance.
  2. Set up SPF/DKIM records to build trust, improve deliverability, and help you get paid. (Learn more about SPF/DKIM records here)
  3. Set up alerts for bounced emails so your team can take necessary steps to get in the right inbox. For Churn Buster customers, this can be done via Zapier, Slack, or webhook notifications.
  4. Automate spell check on signups. Use Mailcheck in your signup flow to reduce the number of email misspellings (such as name@gmil.com) that make it into your customer list.
  5. Ensure email updating is easy for your customers. If their email changes, or if a new email takes over the account, make it simple for the customer (or your support team) to update the information. After that, make sure that when an email is updated on your platform, the data is shared across every channel so the customer data is fluid and no issues arise.

6. Reach out personally when appropriate

Automating processes is all the rage–as it should be. However, with every automated system you have, you should set up some checks and balances to make sure things continue to flow correctly. And the same goes for your dunning.

Whether you’re running basic or extensive dunning protocols, there is a time to step in and reach out to customers. You’ll want to set up a system to track non-responsive customers, customers not opening your emails, and high-value customers at risk of churning.As your campaigns run, the urgency for customer action should increase. Have you sent 5 emails and not a single one was opened? Maybe the point of contact for your customer has changed. This may take some manual work to find the right contact information, but if it’s a high-paying customer, it’s worth the effort.

Is a high-value customer at risk of churning, but have failed to respond to your card update requests? Consider stepping in and sending a personal email (preferably from someone recognizable in your company) and try to get on their radar.

Note: Make sure you get notified of high-value failures. If every failure looks the same to your automated system, a $10 account and a $10,000 account will be treated the same. Set up systems to notify you of high-value failures so you know when to bring in resources and customer success team members to make the save.

Automation is wonderful, and has greatly increased the efficiency of businesses everywhere. But as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. When it comes to dunning management, that responsibility is knowing when to manually step into the process.

7. Track the right metrics 📊

Performance visibility is usually missing from any in-house build.

And for those with dashboards provided, poorly attributed metrics can create a misleading picture of where value is being created.

Note: for services charging fees based on performance, you should understand how performance attribution works. Without a clear picture of what's happening, optimization becomes extremely difficult as you grow.

Churn Buster gives you deep visibility into every customer and their campaign history, so you can recover as much as possible, especially when manual intervention is required.

dunning best practices retry logic
dunning recovery rates

And beyond performance stats, it’s important simply to know what’s going on with your customers experiencing payment issues.

Here are some good things to know:

  • Who is currently past due? (failed a payment and has not been resolved or considered churned)
  • Where is each person in your “funnel?” (i.e. emailed 3/5 times, next email on Friday)
  • When a funnel ends in a “win,” what was the cause? Did they update their card? Was that before or after you emailed them? Was it reattempted successfully?
  • Are emails getting delivered/opened?
  • Are your card update pages loading reliably?

These metrics won’t always be immediately actionable. But over time you’ll get to know your business better and that’s always a good thing.

For example, if you see a gradual drop in card reattempt successes, you may want to drill down to a root cause. Are more customers signing up with prepaid debit cards? Are banks flagging your charges as high-risk for some reason?

Or if your emails aren’t being opened. Have you set up DKIM/SPF records to authenticate the emails? Are your subject lines too aggressive, or too passive? Are emails being flagged as spam?

In addition to understanding your business better, and having the ability to drill down into potential issues, you’ll be able to trust that the system is working as expected without relying on blind faith. When you’re emailing thousands of people about billing issues — you‘ll enjoy knowing that things are working as expected.

8. Prioritize regular maintenance 🔧

A basic system can be fun to build as a one-time project, but who will keep the gears greased?

With all this revenue at-risk month after month, simple oversights can be costly when they take months to discover.

Once you’ve set up your system, routinely watch for broken links, pages that aren’t responding, deliverability issues, updates in your payment processor API, etc. What’s measured can be improved, so when you notice a failure point you’ll be able to jump in and fix it.Automated monitoring systems obviously can help take the load off your team.

Slack alerts are a great way to monitor your process and get notified of issues ASAP. Again, just make sure someone is watching the alerts.

Beyond basic maintenance, here’s an example of something to watch for: Customer updates card, card gets declined, customer doesn’t try again.

Depending on your setup, you may automatically reset and start emailing them the same messaging all over again. Or you might see a card update and remove them from future outreach. In either case you may want to jump in and offer help to this customer who is making an effort to pay you.

If it becomes a regular problem, tune up your system so customers are treated to the right experience automatically.

Churn Buster offers frictionless churn recovery with custom dunning emails, support escalations, SMS messaging, and more. Try it for free.

9. Set up emergency handling

UX issues aside, some leaks will sink you more quickly than others. These are stop-everything moments that you want to know about immediately, instead of next time you check in on things.

Establish a process of alerts for your payment processor API uptime, and monitor your dunning system for critical failures.

  • Did a recent code push take down your card update pages? Can you detect who tried to access those pages during the downtime?
  • When your email service provider has downtime, or their queues back up…are emails still getting sent out?

If these kind of hiccups routinely happen without emergency handling, you will routinely miss out on opportunities to renew subscriptions.

10. Follow up!

If you ask Steli from Close.io to give you one tip, it’d likely be, “Follow up ’til you die!!”

And he’s right, too many people give up early whether they’re sending sales emails, or retention emails.

Our brains tell us that the person we’re working with is no longer interested, they think we are harassing them with too many emails. But it’s rarely the case. With dunning emails, you can expect a spam rate of well under 0.05%.

We see card updates come in at every stage of our process, and we’ve had to lengthen our recovery funnels to retain a higher percentage of customers. People have long to-do lists, they go on vacation, they require approval to use the company card, they are waiting on a reissued card, they get distracted…and all they often need is a nudge.

Wrapping Up:

Failed payments can be a silent killer for your company, if you don’t handle them properly. Involuntary churn may start small, but without proper dunning management set in place, it can quickly become a huge problem and drastically shrink your bottom line. Luckily, you just read 10 sure-fire strategies to improve your failed payment systems today.

If you’re looking for a service that covers all of these bases, you’re in the right place. Your business is unique, so automating workflows to collect past due payments can’t be one-size-fits-all. And that’s what we’re here for. Here at Churn Buster, we provide a proven set of tools to help you regain control of your churn by resolving failed payments and delivering automated support to your customers.

When you’re hustling to grow your customer base, it’s frustrating to churn customers.

Book a demo with one of our churn experts and see how Churn Buster can help your business recover more money.