A CPO’s guide to The State of Subscriptions

From a product perspective, consumer preferences mean everything. With this kind of knowledge, you create a product or service that your ideal consumers truly want–and keep them loyal to your brand. And every year, consumer preferences change, and that is a weighty consideration for subscription businesses especially, whose goals include...

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A look into The State of Subscriptions: The evolving economy

The subscription industry has changed, and it will continue to evolve in response to the changing climate of the economy and subscriber preferences:  Complexity in maturity: As the industry matures, competition, commoditization, and more factors arise that complicate the existing subscription infrastructure. Simple subscription plans have transformed into variable plans...

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A CMO’s guide to The State of Subscriptions

As we embark on another year of subscriptions, a fresh outlook on marketing is mandatory. Consumers are conducting their annual evaluations of their subscriptions, and they are deciding if your subscription service is still worth the money. Whether you’re a streaming media subscription business or a SaaS recurring revenue service,...

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A CPO’s guide to building a frictionless subscriber experience

With subscription popularity soaring over the last few years, consumers increasingly demand a frictionless subscriber experience. If the subscriber experience isn’t optimized and personalized at every touchpoint, you increase the risk of losing new subscribers and retaining existing ones. From regular billing cycles and payment options at checkout to an...

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Learn how to accelerate subscriber growth and revenue in 2023 at this live virtual event

2023 is off to a great start in the land of subscriptions, especially with the announcement of our new partnership with Recuro, a Stockholm-based leading subscription business models consultancy. Combined with the technology and professional services of Recuro, Recurly will now be able to provide subscription businesses with the...

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How to elevate your growth strategy with subscriber insights

Customer insights are a powerful way to ensure a data-driven, subscriber-centric approach across your business. These insights result from thorough analysis and interpretation of valuable information in consumer interactions and channels. Download now: The State of Subscriptions report provides the acquisition, growth, churn, and payments insights you need to...

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Missed our 2023 subscription trends webinar? Here’s a recap

Led by Recurly’s CEO Dan Burkhart, CMO Theresa McEndree, and Director of Business Intelligence Brian Grier, the 2023 State of Subscriptions webinar unveils the biggest, most impactful findings in the subscription industry from the past year. With these discoveries, our in-house subscription experts have predicted the year to come:...

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Trends & predictions for the subscription economy in 2023

The subscription business model continues to experience major shifts in subscriber expectations and demands, the value of subscription services, and consumer experiences.  Amid challenging times of macroeconomic uncertainty and the revaluation of subscriptions, brands must get ready to grow at the same pace as the industry–expected to top $1.5 trillion...

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Chop churn by 73%: 5 effective churn management strategies

Churn is a reality in subscriptions. Businesses are constantly looking for new ways to identify, manage, and reduce churn.  Last month, Recurly experts Eric Holle, Senior Product Manager, and Jonas Flodh, Chief Product Officer, sat down with David Krauss, Vice President of Product Marketing, to discuss effective churn management strategies...

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Subscription Breakfast Series recap: How to navigate billing & payments with Findmypast

A genealogy website based in London, Findmypast is dedicated to finding family stories and bringing them to life. When it first started 65 years ago, Findmypast was solely dedicated to helping its customers locate records–a one-time, direct sales transaction. But as Findmypast grows and records have become digitized, the...

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Subscription Show 2022: Industry insights, fighting churn & a VIP dinner

From November 8 to 10, Subscription Insider hosted Subscription Show 2022 with FlexPay and keylight. Taking place in New York City’s Convene Conference Center this year, Subscription Show is “the leading subscription business conference for subscription-specific strategy and intel.” A few of Recurly’s...

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How to A/B Test for Subscription Growth in Video Streaming

What started as standard royal entertainment via tapes and documentaries blossomed into a full-blown on-demand streaming service devoted to Royalty worldwide.  In 2018, True Royalty TV started a direct-to-consumer play, eventually growing globally into six markets, with a major portion of its customer base in the U.S. The transition...

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Why churn analysis matters for your subscription business & how to do it well

Various studies have shown that acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. It’s a big number but hardly surprising; companies have to spend a lot of money on advertising and sales to acquire new subscribers. With that in...

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Pause membership: A powerful retention tactic

Subscriptions are a top driver of loyalty and revenue growth for brands looking to grow. However, there comes a time when consumers may consider canceling their subscriptions. In fact, 31% of U.S. consumers say they plan to cancel some subscription services this year–after 46% canceled a subscription due to...

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Declined credit card: Meaning & solution to each message

“Declined,” “insufficient funds,” and “invalid card number” are some of the phrases subscription businesses fear most. And they’re not to blame–recurring billing can be complex.  For example, an error message alerts the buyer of failed one-time transactions, and they use another payment method to purchase. However, for recurring payments,...

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Understanding involuntary churn vs. voluntary churn & how they affect subscriber retention

Measuring and reducing churn is paramount to grow faster, smarter, and stronger. Every subscription business should be aware of the importance of churn and how retention can become a competitive advantage for subscription businesses.  Getting smart about nurturing your customer base is a true competitive advantage for subscription businesses. To...

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How to calculate churn rate: A better formula

Any business owners serving regular, loyal customers can stand at their window and estimate their company’s financial health by watching their customers. The questions they might wonder are:  How many customers keep coming back? What percentage of customers might not return? How much revenue is lost if the customer base shrinks in...

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How streamers win–and keep–customers

In a recent survey about the impacts of the pandemic and the overall sentiment of U.S. subscribers, Recurly found that 87% of respondents have a subscription to at least one streaming video service and 46% have a subscription to at least one streaming audio service. The increasing ubiquity of...

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Fighting churn: How to never lose a subscriber

Every subscriber matters. Especially when your business runs on a subscription model.  Of course, all businesses can expect to struggle if they don’t engage customers and keep them happy. However, a subscription company will feel this is a truism in their bottom line. Subscriber businesses, whether they’re B2B companies or...

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Expert’s Guide: How to reduce subscription churn

Getting new subscribers is on every sales team's agenda. While acquisition efforts matter, retention ensures business growth. But with retention comes subscriber churn. All subscription brands face customer churn–it’s inevitable. We’d be lying if we said that you could eliminate it; however, you can actively work to reduce your...

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Subscriptions explained: What is churn rate?

Subscription models continue to grow exponentially with no signs of stopping. Competition rises, shopping priorities shift, and prices change; yet one thing is certain: not all subscribers will stay with you forever. Enter churn rate, the number of subscribers who cancel your service during a specific period. It may seem...

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How to make the most of the cancellation journey

Customers canceling subscriptions are among the lesser desired situations for any subscription business. Contrary to what it may sound, providing an excellent cancellation experience fuels strong subscriber retention outcomes.  This article covers why cancellation journeys are crucial in subscription models, along with some best practices for a stellar cancellation...

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4 best practices for a frictionless renewal journey

Recurring payments form the lifeblood of subscription commerce. Therefore, subscription renewals are critical to driving stable revenue growth and profitability. Any friction during renewals trickles down to the bottom line, making these journeys crucial. This article discusses some of the best practices to incorporate for a seamless subscription renewal...

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DTC consumerism shift: What subscriptions need to do

The pandemic has paved the way for consumer re-evaluation, leading us to the direct-to-consumer (DTC) shift. Emerging consumer models continue to grow, bringing new consumer values, new buying behaviors, and new demands. As a result of this shift to a DTC, subscription-run commerce landscape, businesses must focus on their brand,...

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4 signs of subscriber churn risk & how to reverse them

As subscription commerce thrives on the recurring revenue model, ensuring the continuity and growth of subscribers forms the heartbeat of successful businesses in this industry. Acquiring new customers is always attractive, but retaining existing customers costs less and is a solid business objective to pursue.   Statistically, companies across the...

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Ecommerce personalization to reduce churn & how Recurly helps

In the last couple of years, especially during the pandemic, we saw the rise of new consumption preferences–personalization is one of these.  It’s no secret that personalization drives subscription success. According to Forrester, 77% of consumers prefer brands that offer tailored services and experiences, while 66% of customers...

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Subscription fatigue: Why do customers churn in DTC?

Subscription offerings in the direct-to-customer (DTC) framework are steadily rising, enhancing customer experience and simultaneous merchant control. Merchants are turning bullish toward this business model as they’re empowered to eliminate intermediaries from their supply chain, disrupt traditional monopolies, and sell directly to their end consumers. Moreover, with subscriptions, there’s an...

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5 tactics to nail the endemic customer experience with Recurly

The impact of COVID-19 on subscriber behavior has been drastic. Lockdowns and restrictions expedited the shift from purchases in brick-and-mortar stores to ecommerce–changing every aspect of the customer experience, especially in the subscription business. While some have seen a positive impact, others have faced more challenges than opportunities, forcing...

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What is & how to calculate net revenue retention

When running a subscription-based business, fighting against churn is one of your everyday battles. Even though customer acquisition is a major need to scale a business, the ability to retain existing ones is easier and less costly. Here is where tracking revenue retention comes in handy.  What is net...

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Negative Churn: Definition, formula & how to achieve it

Does hearing “negative churn” send you into panic mode? Well, it’s actually a good thing. Sometimes, closing the month in red numbers is synonymous with success, and this metric is the perfect example.  By the end of this article, you’ll fully understand what negative churn is, how to calculate it,...

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Make your dunning strategy a competitive advantage with dunning campaigns

Sometimes, to improve on a process or make a situation better, you need to look at it from a different lens. Take the recent invention of computational photography as an example. For over a hundred years, the quality of a photograph was primarily determined by faster shutters, more advanced lenses,...

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How to engage and retain a new generation of subscribers

It happens every six months like clockwork: brand marketers in every industry stop what they’re doing and turn their attention to the “Taking Stock with Teens” survey conducted by analyst firm Piper Sandler. The firm’s semiannual report helps companies gain insight into the habits and mindsets of young consumers,...

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Manually retrying payments? There's a better way

Involuntary churn strikes fear in the hearts of subscription businesses everywhere, and for good reason: over half of all churn is involuntary. And considering the fact that acquiring new customers costs 5 times more than retaining an existing one, nipping involuntary churn in the bud is critical for subscription businesses. ...

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Userlike to User-Love: Reducing Churn & Driving Conversions with Recurly

Userlike, based in Cologne, Germany, offers professional live chat software to help its customers raise conversion rates, promote customer loyalty, reduce churn, and pinpoint areas for improvement.  Userlike wanted to maintain its lean business model, but at the same time, recognized the importance of partnering with a reliable subscription...

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More BARK, Less Bite: How Recurly’s Technology Boosts Retention & LTV

Spoiling man’s best friend just got a lot easier, all thanks to BARK’s decision to partner with Recurly. BARK, the dog enthusiasts responsible for BarkBox, are leading the pack in subscription business. And they’re doing so by opting for the best technology to optimize their recurring payments and plans...

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The Impact of the Global Pandemic on the Subscription Economy

COVID-19 has taken the world by storm, changing our day-to-day existence in ways we could have never imagined. Back in March, when the pandemic hit the U.S. in full force, many consumers reacted by emptying store shelves of basic necessities including canned goods and toilet paper. Many people, not knowing...

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Refresh Cards Anytime with Account Updater Support for American Express

There are many ways Recurly helps subscription businesses recover revenue after a transaction fails. There’s the sophisticated Revenue Optimization Engine, which powers our custom retry strategy, as well as Recurly’s customizable dunning, which makes it easy to automatically reach out to subscribers with on-brand messaging on an optimal cadence. All...

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Finding a Flexible Fix for Failed Payments with FabFitFun

There’s nothing better than receiving packages in the mail. Now imagine those packages filled to the brim with full-size, brand name surprises. FabFitFun has taken this idea and run with it. The company, which originally launched as a female-oriented lifestyle blog and newsletter, bumped its subscriber numbers from the thousands...

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Webinar Recap: The Implications of COVID-19 for Subscription Businesses

Recently, Recurly Chief of Staff, Emma Clark joined Subscription Insider’s Kathy Greenler Sexton to discuss the impacts — both positive and negative — that COVID-19 has had on subscription-based businesses. If you missed out on the webinar, here’s the gist. COVID-19 has entirely reshaped the subscription landscape, as well as increased the economic uncertainty...

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Ruff Times Before Recurly: How PupBox Fought Churn with Pricing Flexibility

PupBox — like many of its puppy customers — was facing growing pains. No, there wasn’t any shortage of adorable consumers: the subscription box for puppies (and their human owners) has been a hit since 2013.  But PupBox did face high churn rates due...

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The Importance of Multiple Gateways for Subscription Businesses

In a recent blog post, we discussed why it's important for subscription businesses to offer alternative payment methods like PayPal and Amazon Pay. Today, we’ll share aggregated data insights to show why merchants should consider using multiple payment gateways to grow their business. In this post, we’ll discuss payment gateway usage...

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Managing Subscriber Churn During The Downturn

The disruptive force of the COVID-19 pandemic generated 17 million U.S. unemployment claims by mid-April, with the unemployment rate hovering near 15 percent — the highest since WWII. Record-setting workforce displacement and sluggish government response has left tens of millions of people virtually without funds and having to decide between...

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How Pausing & Postponing Subscriptions Can Retain Subscribers in Uncertain Times

COVID-19 has penetrated nearly every aspect of our lives and there is no precedence or template for how to respond to this ever-changing situation. Consumers are challenged with layoffs, shelter in place and quarantine orders, plus struggling with how to work from home while juggling the needs of their daily...

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Adoption of Hybrid Commerce to Better Serve Customers

In addition to being highly successful, innovative subscription businesses, what is another thing that BarkBox, FabFitFun, and Speedo all have in common? Answer: they all combine subscriptions with one-time offerings. This is called “hybrid commerce,” and it refers to businesses that have both a recurring line-of-business and sell one-time items. Regardless of whether...

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Recurly’s Account Updater Fights Churn in the Background

Failed transactions are an everyday part of e-commerce. As a merchant, the last thing you want to see is the error message ‘card declined.’ On average, B2C and B2B can expect a failed transaction rate of approximately 11.5%. One of the most common decline reasons is outdated card information. That’s an...

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Addressing Seasonality in Your Subscription Business

Software as a Service—also known as the SaaS model—was one of the earliest adopters of the subscription model concept. There are, of course, a multitude of compelling, strategic reasons to adopt a subscription model based on access rather than ownership: more predictable recurring revenue streams (and compounding revenue); improved subscriber...

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Increased Transaction Success and Subscription Scalability: Two New Case Studies From Recurly

Output is an LA-based company that develops innovative software products for musicians, composers, producers, and sound designers. The company’s focus is simple: groundbreaking concepts, new sounds, and new sources of inspiration. Output’s customers access different software products either via a monthly subscription or by purchasing a perpetual license. But, with...

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How Recurly Uses Machine Learning to Reduce Transaction Declines

One of the significant benefits of subscription commerce is the amount of data and related insights this model generates compared to one-time purchases. New data related to marketing, payments, and customer lifecycle events is generated regularly, at each new billing cycle. This data is invaluable for gaining insights and making...

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Event Recap: SUBTA’s Recur Conference

Last week, the Subscription Trade Association (SUBTA) hosted several hundred attendees in downtown Chicago for their annual Recur Conference. Recur brings together new Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) subscription businesses, industry veterans, and subscription vendors for three days of learning and networking. With nods to all six segments of the subscription industry, the event...

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Recurly’s Promotional Toolkit Supports Subscriber Acquisition and Retention

Subscription businesses, like any other business, need to continually attract new customers—and of course, keep their existing customers happy. When businesses exceed all expectations, they may find themselves lauded in the trade press over these results, as AMC Theaters and Spotify were recently. AMC’s Stubs A-List movie ticket subscription service reported...

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Dunning for the Win: Merchant Initiated Transactions and PSD2

Much of our previous content, such as our most recent PSD2 blog and our SCA Integration Guide, has focused on Customer Initiated Transactions (CITs), which occur when the customer is “in-session” or otherwise present during the transaction flow. In the subscription commerce world, CIT comes into play when someone first signs...

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Making of a Campaign: Multiple Gateways

The content we develop at Recurly is intended to be educational, useful, and approachable. We use campaigns to promote this content, which typically comes in the form of a digital book full of insights, knowledge, and tips for building a subscription business. As brand designers, our role is to work...

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Tailor Brands and Recurly Deliver a World of Powerful Branding

Tailor Brands was founded on the belief that powerful branding should be accessible to everyone, regardless of skill level, background in design, or budget size. The company describes its platform as the world’s first automated branding agency—providing AI-software that creates unique brand identities and elements on the spot. Based in...

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Strategies to Understand Decline-Rate Data and Reduce Involuntary Churn

In our previous blog post, we summarized the common decline reasons for failed transactions and the messages that the gateway delivers. We also talked about Recurly’s Revenue Optimization Engine which helps recover failed transactions. In this blog, we want to discuss some strategies that subscription businesses can utilize to avoid payment...

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Revenue Optimization Engine’s New Machine Learning Model Improves Prediction Accuracy

In a previous blog post, we talked about how Recurly uses machine learning to optimize subscription billing for our customers and prevent involuntary churn. As part of our goal to help our customers maximize their subscription revenue, we introduced the Revenue Optimization Engine in 2018. When a recurring transaction fails, this...

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The Value of Utilizing Multiple Payment Gateways

Subscription businesses that want to optimize their payment process and gain an edge over their competition should consider integrating with a second payment gateway. A second gateway can offer increased operational efficiencies along with a variety of other benefits. What are some of the advantages of having multiple gateways? Can...

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Improve Transaction Success With Recurly’s Account Updater

If you’re an e-commerce business, two of the most dreaded words you’ll hear are “card declined.” When a credit (or debit) card is declined, the sale can’t go through and you don’t earn that revenue. If you’re a subscription business processing a recurring payment, a declined card can also result...

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Subscription Benchmarks: Top Payment Decline Reasons

There are so many factors that can cause a recurring credit card transaction to be declined: out-of-date or inaccurate card information, insufficient funds or temporary hold, gateway issues, and fraudulent activity, to name just a few. When payments are unsuccessful, subscription businesses can lose subscribers to involuntary churn. It’s important...

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New Subscriber Churn Benchmarks and Why Managing Churn Is Critical

In the last few weeks, the headlines around subscription commerce have centered on two main players: Moviepass and The New York Times. Moviepass, the trendy disruptor to the movie theater business model, continues to grab attention for its questionable pricing and product changes following an initial spike in new sign ups....

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How Recurly Supports Subscription Box Businesses

The subscription box segment was an early winner in subscription commerce. Whether based on a carefully curated selection of goods or the regular receipt of necessary consumables, subscription boxes have become an enduring success story. But what you put inside your box is only one piece of the puzzle. To...

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How to Address Subscription Box Fatigue and Retain Subscribers

The popularity of subscription boxes has been a boon to subscription commerce. But this popularity can be a double-edged sword. While recipients may love their different boxes filled with delightfully curated products or regularly needed essentials, sometimes this becomes too much of a good thing. Subscription box fatigue can happen...

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Credit Invoices Help Support Streamlined, Accurate Billing and Accounting

On the surface, subscription billing may appear straightforward: just bill the same amount each billing cycle. The reality is that the subscriber lifecycle can involve a number of complex billing scenarios such as upgrades, downgrades, adding or removing additional products, changing quantities, or any combination of these billing events—each of...

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Pause Subscriptions to Minimize Voluntary Churn and Maximize Revenue

In either fixed or indefinite pause scenarios, you have the option to resume subscriptions  manually before the end of the pause term, at the subscriber’s request. Streamlined billing When subscribers request to pause their subscription, the subscription remains active until they reach the end of their current billing period, at which...

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Increase Customer Retention and Expand Globally With New Multilingual Emails

Global marketing involves more than simply selling a product in other countries. You need to speak to subscribers in their preferred language and ensure that their experience signing up and paying for your subscription product or service is streamlined and optimized. Recurly is pleased to announce support for 11 different...

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Minimize Churn, Maximize Revenue: a New E-Book From Recurly

Churn is a key metric in subscription commerce, tracked closely by the most specialized Box of the Month businesses to multi-million-dollar enterprise SaaS companies. This is because even slight differences in churn rates can have a significant impact on revenue growth. Understanding how to minimize churn and increase subscriber retention...

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Live Webinar: Reduce Churn and Maximize Subscription Revenue With Machine Learning

Subscription businesses can lose the happiest of subscribers because of involuntary churn. Even slight variations in churn can have a significant impact on revenue, so it’s critical to address involuntary churn—and now machine learning can help. Join our latest webinar and you’ll learn: The power of dynamic retry logic, to boost...

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Subscriber Acquisition, Retention, and Loyalty

Subscription success demands a laser focus on providing subscribers with consistent value which leads to predictable recurring revenue. We recently explored the topic of subscriber acquisition. Now, in our newest e-book, we outline techniques, tactics, and best practices that subscription businesses can use to increase subscriber retention. One way to...

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Improve Transaction Success Rates and Reduce Churn With Recurly’s Revenue Optimization Engine

Every subscription business encounters credit card declines. These declines increase churn, reduce your revenue, and can negatively impact your subscriber relationships. But, with the right subscription management platform, you can minimize their impact. Recurly has the advantage of working with thousands of subscription businesses which come from a wide range of industries....

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How Effective is Your Dunning Strategy? Recurly Analytics Has the Answer.

As we have discussed in the first and second blog in this series, dunning is a key process for maximizing revenue, and Recurly offers flexible tools to help you develop and manage your dunning strategy. In particular, Recurly users can set: the length of their dunning cyclethe number and cadence of emails...

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Dunning Best Practices & How Recurly’s Dunning is Different

In today’s blog, we’re continuing our discussion about dunning. As a reminder, dunning is the process of communicating with customers (usually by email) to try to collect payments due. In effect, discussions about dunning are really discussions about these customer communications. In our last blog, we described how the dunning...

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How a Flexible Dunning Schedule Improves Transaction Success Rates

Subscriber churn is a key concern for subscription businesses. When subscribers leave, the business loses both current and future recurring revenue. Of course, some churn is “involuntary”—occurring as a result of a failed payment rather than a subscriber cancelling deliberately. This post describes how Recurly ensures that the dunning process...

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How to Ensure That Price Changes Don’t Add Friction to the Subscriber Experience

In our previous post in this series, we discussed the importance of reducing the friction that occurs during the subscriber lifecycle in order to promote and support continued revenue growth. We focused on free trials as a way to reduce sign-up friction in that post.   But friction at sign-up...

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Using Machine Learning to Optimize Subscription Billing

As a data scientist at Recurly, my job is to use the vast amount of data that we have collected to build products that make subscription businesses more successful. One way to think about data science at Recurly is as an extended R&D department for our customers. We use a...

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Curation and Consumables: Two Keys to Growth in the Subscription Box Market

For consumers, one of the most popular subscription type is the subscription box—that curated collection of goodies that subscribers receive on a regular basis (often monthly, but not always) which the box purveyor hopes will delight and surprise its recipient. Beauty boxes such as Birchbox were an early success story, along...

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On Beer, Germany, and the Importance of Customer Retention

Recently, we wrote a blog that involved a London pub’s innovation in beer drinking that enabled a friction-free experience for its customers during the busy holiday season. The goal of course of frictionless commerce is to make it easier for your customers to shop, pay, and receive their purchases, and in...

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Recurly’s Account Updater Service Increases Revenue, Reduces Churn

What do you think caused 5.5 million people in Britain to cancel their credit cards last year? If you guessed fraud, you’d be right. Those 5.5 million people comprise a full 12% of the population—one million higher than last year and evidence that cybercrime has gotten worse in that country and...

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Why Sittercity Relies on Recurly: A New Case Study

In many communities, finding a babysitter or nanny is hard. Sittercity realized the challenges parents and others faced and launched a website to solve the problem, providing parents with a better, more effective way to find childcare. Founded in 2001, the service—which is accessed via a monthly subscription fee—has connected...

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The Holy Grail of Subscription Commerce

These days, most entrepreneurs and investors are quite clear about the merits of the subscription model. From a business perspective, recurring revenue is a wonderful concept. When a subscription business is firing on all cylinders, recurring revenue compounds beyond the costs of customer acquisition, and the world is the proprietor’s...

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Using Recurly Data to Fight Churn

In our previous post in this series, we talked about the difference between cancellation and churn. The post outlined the different actions you can take when a customer cancels to try to prevent them from churning and how Recurly helps to identify these customers. Because we know you can’t prevent all...

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Best Practice: Automate the Revenue Recovery Process

Credit cards are an extremely convenient way to pay for online purchases. However, subscription businesses can face challenges in successfully completing recurring payments via credit cards. This is because after the initial payment at signup, various factors can cause the recurring payments to fail. The most effective way to repair...

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Cancellation vs. Churn: What’s the Difference and Why It Matters

Do you know what your subscriber churn rate is? How about the median churn rate for your industry? Do you know the difference between churn and cancellation? And perhaps most importantly, do you know what you can do to try to prevent a customer who has cancelled from churning? Our...

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Key Terms Related to Churn, Defined

“If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.”  ~ Voltaire Next week, we’ll be launching the first of several blog posts about data—specifically about how our customers can use their data in Recurly to improve and optimize their business. Our first post focuses on churn, which is always...

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How ReturnLoads Delivers Competitive Advantage With Recurly

Returnloads.net is an online freight exchange in the UK. They connect haulage companies who have empty vehicles with businesses that need goods moved—helping to reduce costs along with the number of empty trucks traveling throughout the U.K. ReturnLoads is also a Recurly customer and one that’s so happy with the...

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Tips for Minimizing Signup Friction When Using Credit Cards

In the world of subscription commerce, one key to success is providing a frictionless signup experience. Once prospects decide they’re ready to subscribe, you want to make sure that the process is as easy as it can be for them. Removing steps that aren’t necessary and ensuring that your signup...

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Build a Retention Process Not a Cancellation Process

We recently came across a great blog from Profitwell which discusses how to turn a cancellation into an opportunity for you to take action and understand better why some customers choose to leave. While it’s written with software as a service (SaaS) in mind, the concepts are applicable to nearly...

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From Upstart to Unicorn: How Dollar Shave Club Hit it Big

There can be no doubt that Dollar Shave Club’s phenomenal success can be attributed to many factors—its irreverent and hilarious viral ads, its exemplary customer service, efficient manufacturing and distribution, and its incredible ability to scale, and (perhaps most importantly) its business model. Yes, there were many things that led...

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How to Use Webhooks to Recover Customers

As noted in a previous blog post, there are different ways to get information out of Recurly, and each option has different pros and cons depending on the specific objective. Using the right tool for the task at hand ensures an efficient use of resources and an improved experience for...

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Minimizing the Impact of Declined Transactions

In today's blog post, we'll explore best practices to minimize the impact of declined transactions. We’ll also share tips for benchmarking and iterating on site configurations to improve transaction decline recovery and drive revenue. Benchmark For merchants concerned about their decline rates, the most important place to start is by...

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Benchmarking & Minimizing Credit Card Transaction Decline Rates

Many merchants are concerned about their transaction decline rates and want to ensure that the rates are within what is normal for their industry or segment. Their concerns can be amplified by seeing large blocks of declined transactions, multiple attempts to collect on a single invoice, and numerous customer updates...

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Reduce Churn and Increase Revenue: Enable Recurly’s Account Updater Service Now!

“Card declined”—two words that subscription businesses hate to hear. Credit card declines result in the loss of revenue and increased churn, impacting your bottom line. Some number of declines are unavoidable, and as discussed in a recent blog post, some payment events—such as the widespread issuing of new EMV cards...

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Analyzing and Increasing Recovered Revenue for Subscription Billing

In subscription billing, you get paid over time, not up front - so having a stable payment method is crucial. However, credit cards and debit cards, the leading payment methods for subscription billing, often suffer payment declines. Card declines cost you revenue and are a leading cause of customer churn....

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Improve Your Dunning Emails for Subscription Billing

Recurly software uses card updates and automatic retries to recover revenue without intervention by merchants or customers. Recurly recovers an average of 7% of your customer revenue with automatic card updates and automatic retries. If these efforts don’t pay off, the software starts to send dunning emails to your customer, on a schedule 

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Reduce Credit Card Declines with Automatic Retries and Dunning Techniques

For many merchants, the #1 feature of Recurly software is the ability to recover revenue and stop churn that would otherwise be lost to credit card declines.  As I described in my previous post, Recurly software updates the card information that’s sent into the processor, in ways that prevent many...

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Identify 'Sneaky' Revenue Churn In Your Subscription Business

Understanding the true cost of subscriber churn is one of the most critical KPIs any SaaS business can measure. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to identify the ‘true’ cost of churn because customers churn in different ways. Simple ‘Binary’ Churn Example In the simplest example, Company A charges $15...

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Tune In. Turn On Account Updater. Get More Revenue!

As I described last week, Recurly generates outstanding amounts of recovered revenue for our merchant customers. Account Updater is a key part of this capability. Recurly added Account Updater last May. Over time, customer billing information you have on file might become outdated - cards are lost or stolen, or...

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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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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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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...

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Revenue Recovery: What Has Recurly Recovered for Me Lately?

Recurly's revenue recovery functionality has always provided merchants with peace of mind in reducing credit card declines, expired cards and other issues related to collecting recurring invoices.  Even so, merchants frequently ask, "What has Recurly recovered for me lately?"  Now, merchants can have that information right at their fingertips. Today,...

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Get Results: Account Updater for Recurring Billing

Results: Account Updater Reduces Credit Card Declines Disproportionately for B2C Merchants It is no secret that in the world of recurring billing, credit card declines are the bane of your existence. We recommend pursuing all available tactics to ensure that your decline rates are held to a minimum. However, when presented...

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All About Dunning

Tired of chasing down customers for failed payments? Have spreadsheets tracking declines and email communications and promises to pay? Take advantage of Recurly's dunning management to save time, worry, and money! Dunning (or Delinquent User Notification) is a period of time in which a user's payment has failed and both...

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Credit Card Declines: Time of day is critical

DID YOU KNOW? Credit card decline rates increase 44% to 55% every day during the 'Wee Hours' of the morning? In the world of payment processing, there is a very predictable pattern of 'galloping' transaction volume throughout the day. This pattern of transaction volume also comes with a very predictable pattern...

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Email customers when a subscription renews or trial ends.

We’re pleased to share that merchants can now email customers both subscription renewal and trial ending reminders. Just set it up and let Recurly automatically remind your customers. Turn on reminder emails Both renewal and trial ending email reminders can be activated on a per-subscription plan basis. Simply check the...

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Why Bizness Apps Loves Recurly

Guest blog post brought you by Bizness Apps, a Recurly customer providing a fast & easy way for small businesses to make Mobile Apps. Every customer payment we take in over at Bizness Apps is paid using Recurly, so it’s safe to say that Recurly...

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Credit Card Declines Crush Your Subscriber Economics

Over the past two years, Recurly has developed a unique approach to solving one of the nastiest challenges confronted by ALL businesses with recurring subscription models. Credit card errors and declines. Credit card errors drive subscriber churn All subscription based businesses experience unwanted credit card errors. We typically see between 5% and 15% of...

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Subscriber Economics: Why Customer Retention MATTERS

Internet marketing for most companies centers around the economics of customer acquisition. For most companies, it is thought of as a 'one-time event' leading to a conversion or sale. Subscription-based companies have the added benefit of receiving revenue over a longer period of time. In the financial world, a predictable...

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How To Reduce Customer Churn With Better Payment Processing

Q: Who in your company is responsible for customer churn? If you had to pause and ponder the answer, or if you felt that it was everybody’s responsibility…then you’re not alone. When I was with eBay, it was far easier for marketing teams to...

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