Hello, everyone, and thanks so much for joining us today. My name is Lina Tomp, and I am chief marketing officer here at Recurly.
I'm thrilled to be joined by two very incredible experts today.
Lily Baron, who joins us from Forrester, where she's a principal analyst.
Lily publishes research and advises clients on the payments and billing technologies, issues, and trends.
We also have Jonas Butler, who is our chief product officer here at Recurly.
Jonas leads product management, design, partnerships, and the data science team here at Recurly.
I'm thrilled to have them both here to share with us some of the key findings of a commission study report conducted by Forrester on behalf of Recurly.
The research investigated how the payment experience is absolutely critical to the consumer subscriber growth and retention.
And today, we're going to unpack how to solve the critical billing and payment challenges that completely blow back consumer subscription growth.
So Forrester surveyed over a hundred and sixty directors and above, adhered to consumer brands in the US and the UK, with at least fifty million total annual revenue and at least ten million of which is recurring.
Our initial assumptions were right.
Optimizing billing and payments goes far beyond ensuring you offer the right payment. Failed payments mean you lose sales, your customers lose confidence in your business, and you can negatively impact quite fast customer lifetime value.
So study finds to create sustainable subscription growth. Brands should choose billing and payment partners that are strategic, not just tactical. The ones that are guiding the way for you.
So that's why we're here today. Let's go ahead and dive in, and we'll start with Lily today. Thanks again for being here.
I'm so happy to be here. Thank you. This topic is so interesting because we often think about billing and payments as strictly tactical and rather than strategic. And I think what we'll see today is that that it's not.
It's actually quite strategic. And one of the things that I always wanna start with is subscriptions are everywhere. Right? And and our data supports this. So the vast majority the overwhelming majority of consumers in the US and in the UK, have a subscription. And in fact, in the US, nearly half of the population or the u of the online adults, forty eight percent have four or more subscriptions that they're paying for.
In the in the UK, they're almost equally as subscribed as it were. Right? So ninety three percent of UK consumers have a subscription, but they're collecting a a bit fewer of them. Just over a third or about thirty four percent have four or more, but still, what we're seeing is that subscriptions are part of how we buy and interact with products more and more today.
So, thank you, Lilian. And yes, subscriptions are really growing as a key business model and a key way to satisfy your business growth. Yeah, we see that a lot of subscription companies are struggling as they grow and as they apply subscription models.
And they have obviously a number of key challenges that they need to address. And in this study we've really looked into how billing and payments are critical in this process. And also how the lack of maturity in these areas, the maturity of technology and processes and how they apply this, really impacts the growth of these businesses.
And on this slide here you see a couple of the main challenges that merchants and subscription businesses are identifying.
Top of those is the expanding products or market. And that's a priority for seventy nine percent of all the surveyed businesses.
And still they find find it most of them find it challenging or even very challenging.
This is about opening up and having to have new payment methods for a new country. It could be about a new price point or a different price point that you need to launch in a new market or a variant of the product or subscription that you already have that you need to make a difference in the market. And the sort of the leeway and the challenges of launching those things in a timely manner, can be really challenging. There's also new regulations coming in when you go into a market.
How to manage communication with my subscribers? All of those things can be different as you expand or launch new product and go to new markets.
And if the platform and the company that you work with to do this is not able to support you, that could be a real struggle.
There are obviously other other thing, growth. Sixty seven percent says that sort of or or even more say that growth is really important. Sixty seven percent say they're struggling to achieve that goal. And those are similar things to grow. You want to offer new products, new price points. You want to offer promotions.
You want to drive discounts into the market. So if you have to rely on an old system or a homegrown system to do that, that will sort of mean you're less flexible and cannot iterate and try all these different price points.
And last but not least, obviously, it's costly. It's costly to operate these systems.
There are significant challenges making bill billing and payments and revenue operations more efficient.
You have usually a sort of pretty large engineering team working on these challenges.
And as you scale and go into the market, that complexity grows and then your team grows.
And all of a sudden you're burdened with a pretty high overhead to manage your business.
So I guess, in short, billing and payments are critical to subscription growth and can really hinder you if you don't have the right solutions.
Right. And when we look at the sort of, priorities that the things that these subscription businesses consider kind of important or critical for their businesses, it's no surprise that that subscription growth is is at the top. It may be a little surprising here, though, that subscriber acquisition is the top the the the top, priority or what they consider most important, rather than sort of optimizing the experience for their current subscribers and and retaining their current subscribers or boosting loyalty or lifetime value. We're still in the the kind of acquisition mindset, but but we're in a we're in a growth mindset primarily.
Right? It it is about product or market, you know, acquisition, product market expansion, improving the product, the the technologies that we're using to aim to to deliver these to the the subscribe subscribers and deliver the product. But what is interesting to me here is that when, you know, we that subscription businesses are saying acquiring new subscribers is is our top priority, I think what we we can't afford to overlook the opportunity for improving retention, improving lifetime value, you know, and and expanding the kind of product market fit, improving the product market fit for our subscription.
So I think that what we see here is we're in this kind of, this growth mindset certainly for subscription businesses.
It's mostly as as Jonas said in the in the previous data point where it's mostly by, acquiring new subscribers, but it's also there for, you know, expanding the the into new markets or launching new products, and and doing so by improving the technology, that we're using to do to to manage it.
And I think what we we start to see in the next slide, what I think we need to anchor first is that there's, there's always different stages of a subscription business. Right? Are we testing and experimenting?
Is this more important to our revenue, you know, our overall revenue than other business models? Are we in the optimization phase? And so we've sort of created a segmentation here of our of our, of respondents, Based on self selection, right, we described for them these types of businesses and what fit their, their business best. Right?
Are you, an expert? Are you an industry leading firm? Are you leveraging analytics in in a, you know, in a sort of mature way? Are you promoting, automation?
Are you working on personalization?
Have you thought about kind of optimizing your your technology for supporting this business?
And are you using industry benchmarks to evaluate performance and maintain sort of your competitive advantage? Right? That's what an expert firm was. Or are you not quite there yet, but pretty far along? Are you in this evolution phase where you're you know, you have a clear value proposition for your subscription and your subscribers. You're localizing kind of billing and and taxation. You're continually sort of onboarding more payment methods, more partners, but you're maybe don't have the you know, you don't quite have the the technology in place to to scale.
You you maybe have some strategy pieces or operations pieces, but and definitely some technology pieces that that are missing, to to get you to that expert level?
Or are you kind of in the intermediate level? You're certainly sort of improving your operational efficiency, aligning sort of the the the teams across the organization.
Do you have the flexibility or in your tech stack to to manage the growing subscription community and and subscribers in your customer base, you are, tackling those churn rates, like understanding why customers are leaving you, focusing on the right customers to keep. Maybe you're starting to explore something like a strategic churn, which customers are not quite right for your value proposition.
You're starting to you're you're kind of you've got an effective subscriber communication strategy, for example.
You are kind of focused here on starting to grow subscriber lifetime value, right, rather than just acquisition?
Or in an are you in an earlier stage, in an exploration stage where you're sort of you've you've launched this thing, but you're refining the processes. You're refining the skills that you need, the technology you need, to support growth. Maybe you've got, technology challenges or you've got high churn rates or maybe limited analytics, and you're having trouble kind of sustaining that lifetime value for for your subscribers. You're still sort of exploring what that value proposition is.
Or the newcomers. Right? How do you experiment? Are you in the experimentation phase where you're kind of using your preexisting technology or making tiny investments in simple kind of recurring billing solutions.
Maybe, you've got a a very simple model, pricing model. Maybe you've got the, you know, a universal business model across all of your subscribers.
Maybe you don't quite understand your customer pain points yet. Right? You're living and learning at this stage. You don't really know what the final value proposition is gonna be, and you're certainly very, very, very focused on acquisition rather than retention. Right? So we asked our respondents to self identify where they fit along this maturity cycle.
And so where did they fall?
It was great to see that there was a really nice kind of bell curve, along the along the our our along the maturity model as it were. Right?
Most or or close to half of our our, respondents were in this intermediate phase where they're, you know, committed to this model. They've explored it already. They've done the big pushes for acquisition, and they're starting to to, better align across the organization.
But very, very few are in, the expert phase. Right? Very few are in in the experimentation phase and in the expert phase and sort of meet them the meeting in the middle for the other two. This is a beautiful representation of of the the of the spread of our respondents, and so I think it gives really a a really good context for the rest of our data, how you know, where their where where their priorities are and where their challenges are. We'll see a really good representation of folks who are committed to this model, but perhaps struggling, to grow and trying to find the right strategies to to optimize and drive that growth in a sustainable way, but are still having challenges in figuring it out. And so you I I think that a lot of those who are listening will find, will find themselves represented in this data.
So when we look at the difference between some of the, you know, more mature organizations and subscription organizations and the less mature organizations, measurement and optimization are kind of the key differentiators in addition to having sort of the right technology. So when we asked, what are the, the the benchmarks, the KPIs that you're using when you're measuring and optimizing your subscription businesses?
It was kind of surprising to me that acquisition rate was was the top, that that the trial to paid conversion was a was a, rose to the surface, that they're, you know, only sixty one percent of subscription businesses are measuring their churn rate, which to me feels absolutely critical to understanding how to improve and how to grow.
So most subscription businesses, what this tells me is most subscription businesses are too focused on acquisition and use really, really basic KPIs to measure their business and and and and try to move forward.
And so I think that what we need to do is mature our measurement strategies, perhaps rely on our technology partners, to provide as much benchmarking data as we can get from them, start to shift our thinking away from not entirely away from acquisition, depending on where you are in the maturity curve, but complement the acquisitions metrics and measurement with retention ones.
Because a subscription business, as you grow and as the subscriber, you know, there's more tenure in the relationship.
When they renew, they're not renewing because of promises you're making about the future of your business.
They're renewing based on the actual experience they had with you.
And so this is really critical. This retention mindset is especially critical for subscription businesses above and beyond any other business.
So after years of focusing on acquisitions, we're gonna start you know, subscription leaders are gonna really start thinking critically about their retention and shift the organization to, a retention mindset. And then starts by measure you know, including retention KPIs in your measurement. And part of what happens in this retention mindset is that, payment functions start to become a strategic lever in in your organization, rather than just a tactical one.
Most of what we see in, the payments landscape, the technology and optimization levers that exist from providers who whose job it is to manage recurring payments is that they use, that there are a lot of levers that merchants and subscription companies aren't using, like, having a wallet, or a a backup payment method to cascade when a payment, you know, fails or dynamically modifying those ISO message, the messages that get sent through the transaction to the issuers for approval.
For example, instead of a five digit ZIP code in the US, you include the other, you know, the the the rest of them to have the full ten digit ZIP code because for some reason, that issuer likes the ten digit and tends to approve more, when that those ten digits are included.
Or, having a sort of gateway or orchestration function where you can reroute or cascade payment providers when one is down or one isn't performing at maximum capacity in order to mitigate some of this churn based on payment failures.
So there's a lot of technology out there that helps us, with payment approvals, which will certainly help with acquisition, but especially when there's a card on file scenario for a payment for a subscription, technologies out there that can help give us the edge on retention so that the customers that want to stay with us do stay with us because the payments aren't failing for technical reasons.
So it was clear from from the survey that that the consequences of of failed payments or payment as a whole is very important for our respondents, and that that corresponds to, Recurly's experience in this field as well. Like payments and how you manage payments is really important.
And and and and further, like the consequences if you don't do it well is really sort of impactful for your business. You can look at consequences in in in two different ways, and we'll do that on the on the following slides. The first one is obviously the maybe the most obvious, like the hard consequences of failed payments. Obviously you will decrease the sort of the customer lifetime value, a customer that you could have kept on the platform for several more months or even years.
You lose them at that point when the payment fails. And to win them back is going to be really difficult and expensive.
Lost revenue, obviously directly losing revenue upon the sort of when the transaction happens. You're not sort of processing that card or that payment method and the revenue is not coming in.
There's also a lot of costs related to it. You have this sort of failed payment happening. You need to figure out why, what we can do about it, how can we apply resources against solving those things. And if you don't have a partner or a system that you work with, like figuring out what to do with payments are really sort of challenging.
So, this is, sort of, maybe obvious, but really important impact on the payment side. And as you, have failed payments the future impact is very serious. I think that's the thing. It's with subscription business, like growth and success is obviously compounding and you grow.
But also if you keep losing customer every month or every subscription cycle that will be a very difficult thing to recover from. So that's on the hard side. But you should remember, as well that sort of, having failed payments have other consequences. So if we go to the next slide, we can look at some of the soft consequences of failed payments.
Yeah. So in addition to the hard consequences that we went through, there are other consequences of payments that you might sort of not think about. So breaking up and sort of not getting your service renewed.
And you're usually as a subscriber you're usually not there. Your payment method is already registered with a provider. You expect the service to discontinue the next month and you'll be able to access the services and tools or experiences that you're subscribing to. And all of a sudden that that doesn't happen and it's really sort of hidden for you. Why? So your relationship with that brand obviously is then sort of damaged. And from a subscription business is you lose a better relationship with your customer.
Once again, having lost subscribers, winning them back is really challenging and costly. So you know, you have a you have a chance of of providing an experience that a subscriber think about. And when you get failed payments and and things are not working, the your brand reputation with those subscribers can be damaged and then winning them back is so much, so much harder. So impacts like that across are all coming from failed payments.
As Lily mentioned, if you there are sort of solutions, I think, Recurly alone last year helped businesses, avoid up to one point two billion euros in lost revenue due to recovering payments through making sure that payment instruments are up to date. You can actually go out to the card networks and the payment gateways and make sure that the payment instruments that you have on file as a subscription business are up to date.
You can do that before you try to transact them.
You can look at expiration date of the cards and make sure that they are up to speed. If there's actually is a failed payment, you can have strategies around how do I how do I retry that payment method? Like when do I retry it? And in what way? And then also, have an effective strategy of reaching out to subscribers in an easy way for them to update the billing information and be aware.
And then obviously, more sort of behind the scenes solutions that Lille was mentioning. Sort of If their failure is because of a payment gateway is down, having backups and having other methods of doing that. But those methods are really impactful.
And as sort of hopefully outlined in this slide, they both sort of guard your revenue short term, but also guard your sort of subscriber relationships and brand in the long term.
Another topic that we sort of looked at with our respondents was about what are the biggest barriers to sort of subscription growth and what are your barriers in the subscription management and technology that you're using today?
And, and a sort of the main answer that was responded by sixty nine percent was the lack of flexibility. Lack of flexibility in the current technology and the subscription management solution that you're using. And I think this is something that we currently see a lot. Like the ability to actually iterate and try different things to make your subscription business grow. Because we don't all know exactly what are the subscription offers, what is the right value balance between sort of price points and the content I'm offering and so on.
So having the flexibility to be able to try out different price points, different type of plans, different type of billing solutions is really important.
And when your platform that you're using, homegrown or external, is not allowing you to do that. Maybe every project to launch a new plan or a new price point become an item on a roadmap and it takes a month to do there, you're really sort of hindering yourself from launching the optimal plans and pricing out there in the market.
So, we see this a lot with our current base. And obviously, this is sort of then also mirrored in the research here that that's sort of the lack of flexibility of being able to trial out all these different things. There's also obviously flexibility in terms of the another wallet another wallet. So like all those things where you can understand from the all the way from the sort of offering or the price to the checkout and then mention that. If that can be sort of flexible and you have the ability to test things out, that will allow your business to grow in a much more sort of powerful way than otherwise.
Yeah. And I think just one of the things I think our last the, you know, the conversation that we just had about sort of what happens when a payment fails is a perfect example of perhaps an oft under, emphasized strategy. So for example, the the you know, we we might talk about kind of the flexibility in pricing and bundling as a big area, and that's absolutely true. But when you even as you mature, mature, you might exert or want to exert some flexibility in more nuanced ways like when a payment fails, how long does the customer still have access to their subscription?
Or how do I degrade service slowly? Or do I shut it off immediately? Or what what grace period do I have? Those are kind of areas where the flexibility you know, as soon as you mature, the I think the reason part of the reason that flexibility comes out as so obviously a top a top challenge, with with the current tools is that it is needed at every maturity level. Right? It's just what is flexible or where that rigidity is causing pain, for the customer or for the subscription business differs based on that maturity level.
So so this is, I think, is a really important point for the subscription businesses is to determine as you're looking at your, you know, your your potential partners and and your requirements building, what flexibility do you need? You know? Don't make it a yes or no question. Sort of where is it in that customer journey or in that product sort of sales and retention cycle? Do you need more optionality, more configurability, more insights in order to then drive action? What what is that? What does flexibility mean for you?
Hundred percent. That yeah. That's That's a very good point, Lili. And and also, I think our experience is that quite a few businesses don't even know before, like, the flexibility they actually need. And they're like you sort of post when you launched, then you realized, hey, like, this is things I want to test. This is things that you can change. And so it's really important to look at that aspect in the beginning.
That that makes such a good point on, like, the partner that can guide you along the way. I think, you know, it's been so evident that, you know, no matter the maturity, how much of an expert you are, and you have a partner that is guiding the way for you ahead, I jumped in in there because it's it's a topic. You know? I was with some of our customers merchants, just a couple of weeks ago in New York City, and this was their biggest challenge. They were like, look, no matter how long I've been doing this, the the ability that I have to to connect with the consumer is so critical, but I also don't know what I don't know.
And and I looked for my partner on what selected for this to really guide the way for me, not Yeah. To guide the way on my own.
And in and in two ways too because the providers have and, you know, this is a this is truly a differentiator between different providers in the landscape because they you have to have, in your terms of service, the ability to use in your SaaS environment as a provider, your merchants, your customers' data in order to aggregate and and and display things like benchmarks. So excuse me.
So that ability to actually aggregate data and and display benchmarks is is truly differentiating because it's it's about it has to be sort of in the company's DNA, and they have to be able to harness that data and potentially you know, and figure out where they need to provide and inject that data, either into the dashboards and the reporting, or make it accessible via API, or where that sort of consultative and strategic guidance comes in too.
And truly, I think that and it's a great point, Linda. Like, this is this is such a big pain and where there is a lot of activity now, in the market to help merchants get the sort of strategic guidance that they need in addition to the sort of technical functional flexibility.
Great. Thank you.
The next thing that that our respondents reported was the sort of the lack of the, and friction created by payment and payment orchestration. We just talked about a few slides back about sort of the importance of payment and how payment impacts the subscriber experience. And here we have sixty three percent of respondents reporting that this is an area that we really struggle with. Like how can we execute payments in a good way? How can we sort of make sure that payments are happening and we have the required flexibility?
So it's clear that you need to work with a sort of a partner that can really help you in this area. How can I understand what are the payment methods I should offer? Like, how should I how should my checkout be, be optimized? Like, what are ways that I can set up my entire payment infrastructure and my payment partners in a way to drive payment success all the way through. So so, this is really where you should look at a partner that have experience in this area and can sort of provide you with sort of all the different types of relationships and solutions that you need to manage payments. So that came across clear.
We also had a lot of respondents reporting the struggle with lack of churn management capabilities, the ability to scale, and unlimited analytics and reporting that we just mentioned, like the importance of having data and insights that you can understand and that you can act on at your hand from from from from these, platforms is really important. We talked about churn and churn management and the importance of retention and keeping your customers alive. They're so much more efficient to stop people from leaving you, providing the value once they are, as long as they are your customers, versus losing them and trying to win them back.
So, we'll talk a bit more later here on about how platforms like Recurly can help you both scale and provide insights and manage churn. But these are clearly some of the main problems that our respondents are struggling with as they are growing their subscription business. So now we've talked about some of the main challenges and struggles that subscription businesses face when they're starting to grow. There are obviously many ways sort of advanced subscription management and recurring billing can help and should help you drive your business forward.
So that's what we're gonna cover in the coming sections.
Yes. And I think it's no surprise based on the the priorities that we've we've heard the the respondents say that they have and the challenges that they're facing, that expertise.
When we ask them what, you know, what is important or critical in your in your selection of a of a a subscription platform partner. Expertise came out on top. They want providers that have expertise in subscriptions, in consumer subscriptions, in, subscriptions perhaps in their industry, the benchmarks and insights and adding sort of that strategic value, to the brand came out on top. And then and then they need the flexibility to be able to execute on that, strategy that the expertise helped them build.
So they need to have, the ability to to configure, not code, but maybe code if they need to. But rather, you know, there's more and more sort of no code, low code configuration capabilities, support for nontechnical business users to configure, the use cases and scenarios and processes and workflows that they need to be actually able to execute on the strategy that they that they've built. And then, the the the last sort of top piece, the or the top the, you know, rounding up the top three was scalability. And this is an interesting one too because there's the actual kind of the ability to manage the volumes, of subscribers or peak events.
Right? This sort of, the actual processing power necessary. But there's also sort of a globalization piece here, The ability to manage a global business, which includes, you know, the the relevant permissions and and kind of data walled gardens, to be compliant in that in that you know, enable a compliant scalability across the globe.
And when we look at the next three, right, so those are the top three when, other major factors included dashboards, an ability to kind of self-service, the the ability to get those insights and that expertise that came out as the top requirement in a self-service capacity, something that is easy to read, easy to navigate so that it is helpful in making better business decisions.
And this is where kind of the technology and the design come together where where and something that is intuitive and a delight to use makes all the difference, but it has to also be sharing the most, insights and actionable insights and helping helping customers, the users, excuse me, sort of understand and get prompted and alerted, about what needs to happen or what needs attention.
And payment orchestration, where the the majority of firms also said that this was important, the ability to kind of manage the exact right payment process and payment flow, for to to meet the merchant or the customer needs, to handle outages and potential, technical failures, the ability to have accurate and compliant payment processes, all of this kind of wraps into this orchestration story.
And, you know, last but not least, rounding out the top kind of characteristics of a great subscription platform partner is the ability to manage, revenue leakage, revenue, you know, payment failures, manage the recovery of of failed payments, and the revenue that will come from it, and to manage to and mitigate, unwanted churn.
So this is the the sort of essential capabilities that that the providers are are that the merchants, subscription companies are wanting from providers in the landscape.
So we've thrown a ton of research at you. There's a lot more. And of course, we cherry picked what we thought were some of the really juiciest bits of data here, but there's a lot more where that came from. So make sure to click here where you see on the screen so you can access your copy of the research, and and see the rest of the stuff that we have in there.
But I I want I I know Jonas has, more stuff to go through to see sort of how, the Recurly story kinda complements the research that we that we've presented so far.
Thank you. Thank you, Lily. Yeah. So there's been a a lot of a lot of, data here presented and and really sort of, a lot of insights brought us from this study. So some key takeaways here is obviously failed payments doesn't just hurt your revenue. It actually impacts your entire business and your relationship with customers.
And it's really important to mature your subscription strategy on all levels to be able to hit growth, like in the platforms you use, in the platforms you use, in the practices you use, in the processes you apply.
So maturity really matters. And then as you saw on Lily's scale, we have a nice distribution. But there's a lot of companies that are in the subscription business that are not yet matured, that don't feel they have the right sort of platforms and the right sort of partners to drive growth. And that clearly the technology they're using is stopping them from growing the way they could and should. So, maturity really matters.
And we need to sort of help businesses sort of grow that maturity curve faster.
As Lilia has mentioned retention matters. There's a lot of focus on acquisition and acquisition tactics and how do I win my customers. But keeping customers through payment approaches to other retention approaches, making sure there's value there in every subscription cycle is really, really important. And that in the long term is one that can make your business profitable and growing. Like keeping the customers you win and then you win new ones are really the way forward. So once again, like having partners, platforms, processes that helps you drive that retention and understand the value that you're providing.
And last but not least, obviously, expertise matters.
You have the platforms, you have your customers, but you're looking also for a provider that can help you understand how you should act. What are the products and plans and price points I should look like? What are the dunning strategies? What are the retention strategies I can apply? What are others doing in this industry that's working or not working? So how can I, beyond just having to learn on my own time, how can I leverage, like, the industry and what the industry is doing to move forward faster? So having a partner that can provide that insight across the industry and help you grow faster as a business and learn faster as a business is something that a lot of our respondents are looking for as well.
Something I'm super happy to announce or we have announced in twenty twenty four is the sort of the launch of our built in benchmarks within Recurly.
So we have launched a number of benchmarks across the payment ecosystem. How are my payment success going?
What is my acquisition rate? What is the sign up decline rate? What is my churn looking at? What is my dunning looking like?
So and this is important for a for a number of reasons. One, it's very important for businesses to understand how they are performing versus others. A lot of businesses don't even know, like, what is a good invoice paid rate? What is a good churn rate?
What kind of retention should I have? How am I performing against my peers? Where are the biggest opportunities to actually improve my business? Like where should I start this sort of wide array of challenges that I could attack?
Benchmarks and knowing where you sit on that is an excellent starting point from that, defining sort of the ways that I should attack it. And then in addition to benchmarking understanding how you're performing, we also help provide our customers with playbooks.
And these are things you can actually do to impact your renewal invoice paid rate. Or these are things you can do to impact your churn rate. So practical examples, guides, what should my Dunning Window be? Which should my messaging be to my subscribers?
When should I reach out to them? How should I reach out to them? So really providing both the map or how my business should perform in these different areas and then also guides to how you can get there. And I think that's, that's and then sort of obviously together with the platform that actually allows you to take that action.
So that's why I think benchmarks are so powerful because it gives you sort of the tools to where to start, drive improvements and growth in your business. So we're really sort of excited about that and for Recurly to be an expert partner in that sense. And with that, I'll send it back over to Lina to tell about a few words about Recurly and our sort of study we've done together with Forrester.
Yeah. Thank you, Jonas. And thank you, Lily, again.
I look. Looking from the outside in, when you think of where the industry is going, it is like a very exciting time for the industry.
What a emboldening, fast industry we have right in front of us. To find, you know, as I was listening to Lily when we read the study first, but even today, once again, is to see the the opportunity within every level of the maturity is something that is not as common, actually. Normally, when you see those maturity models, you say, well, your opportunity is, like, at the far right or the far left, and the opportunity is all over wherever you look at it. To see that merchants are actually, pushing and almost requiring in a way for some of, these benchmarks to be available. They're craving it really because it's really what it's going to answer that that question that they have on growth. Where do I go next?
What does it look like in the future?
And, look, I I enjoy seeing also the the top priorities for all of them. Right? Like, they say, look, I need expertise, flexibility, scalability.
But it's not like thirty percent of them said that. It's like seventy, eighty percent. These are, like, big numbers on what they're expecting from us to deliver, which it makes it a a tremendous opportunity. But, also, I think, from Recurly's perspective, it's it's an exciting time here knowing that we are fully committed to answering, some of these questions ahead.
Benchmarks is a perfect example, but also the commitment that we have as a partner, as a partner that will guide the way there no matter in what stage of of the maturity you're in. One other thing that I really truly enjoy within this study is just the, beyond those threes on expertise, flexibility, and scalability. They also talk, you know, the importance of having an intuitive and the life ball, I think, is what Lily mentioned on the platform. Absolutely critical. Right? Like, show me the benchmarks that I'm looking for in my next stage of growth, but make it easy for me. Make it easy for me because when I'm concentrating on concentrating on this payment experience, then everything else that you do for me is very important if you're making it easy.
I think overall, having this opportunity where consumer preferences are really shaping, financial decisions and subscriptions benefits all over the world is is an exciting opportunity for all of us and for the industry.
And, you know, what we're finding here currently is that our merchants grow faster with an eight point six revenue list within year one. We've also, grow smarter using revenue recovery strategy that total one point two billion of our customers on year twenty twenty three. And finally, merchants grow stronger with twenty twenty three average. I arrived fourteen times for all active merchants.
So, I think we're doing the right things. But what I think is very special about Recurly right now is that we don't sit and say we're doing the right things today is that we're always looking at the future and how the industry is guiding what they need from us so that we can continue to evolve to provide that value. So once again, the our ability to adapt to that and to provide those answers is going to be critical, and and I'm thrilled to know that that just by running this study, it it's an answer to to what merchants and customers out there are looking for. So once again, I wanna thank you, Lily, for being part of this, and then obviously, Jonas, for taking us through everything in-depth.
Today, it's title limit here. Subscription is fun.
