If You Only Knew - How Much Your Relative Churn Rate Matters

Churn is one of the most sensitive variables impacting the value of a subscription business. Your business is in a "drag race" with competitors to come out on top. How your churn rate differs from your competitors' can tell you a lot about the relative health of your business and...

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Verizon Says “Holistic Approach” Needed for PCI Compliance

According to PricewaterhouseCooper, security incidents have grown an average of 66% per year for the last five years running. While breaches at retailers and entertainment companies make headlines, all kinds of organizations are affected. So a new report from Verizon Enterprise should soon be found in the briefcases and backpacks of...

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How to Improve Subscription Renewal Rates

Hyper-targeted ‘lifecycle marketing’ promotions are well worth the effort Monitoring your subscriber churn rate is a basic requirement for any subscription business. Managing the “flip side” of churn – your subscription renewal rate – is the next tactical function for any subscription...

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Learning From Hulu's Subscription Cancellation Flow

After all of our postings on limiting customer churn, every subscription business must face the fact that your customers will choose to unsubscribe at some point. It happens. However, there are some simple things that can be done to influence the decision-making process as your customers choose to leave you....

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Making Elasticsearch Work Better in Recurly

Recurly’s customers rely on our search functionality to find accounts, transactions, and other information so they can solve their customers' problems. By March of 2014, however, Recurly’s search functionality had become an example of tech debt: it worked well enough to ignore, until it didn’t. We’d been planning on rebuilding...

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Churn's True Cost

In our previous post, we described churn as an all-too-neutral term for what it really describes - losing customers, often quite quickly. Now, we take a look at what churn can do to your business.   Your customers are your most important brand ambassadors. Think for a minute about the...

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The Real Meaning of "Churn"

“Customer retention rates ultimately determine whether your business is growing profitably or not.” - Dan Burkhart, Recurly CEO, November 2011 Here at Recurly, we do all we can to combat churn among your customers. After all, the typical Recurly customer saves more by recovering revenue - which contributes strongly to...

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GHOST vulnerability (CVE-2015-0235) in popular Linux library glibc allows remote code execution

At Recurly we constantly monitor mailing lists, forums, IRC channels and many other places for vulnerabilities that may cause software we use as part of our platform to be insecure. We update software every day, usually within minutes of vulnerabilities being discovered. Today was no exception. We had our production systems...

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Understand Your EU Pricing Strategy & VAT Registration Options

The joy of taxes! Not only do you have to levy them, you have to report them.  Merchants will be required to register for VAT in all EU countries where they sell a digital service. With VAT, you’ll thankfully have registration filing options, but you may want to review your...

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Navigate the New EU VAT Data Compliance Requirements

We’ve talked about the new EU VAT rate changes for digital services, which will now be based on the purchasing customer’s country.  Where things become more complex for merchants is in the area of compliance. Two Main Points of Consideration for Merchants Merchants will need to maintain, have access, and...

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