General
PUBLISHED ON 18th October 2020
Alongside LTV (Life Time Value) and CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) the biggest metric to measure for a subscription club is attrition rate or churn.
Churn is when active subscribers cancel their subscription in a certain time frame.
There are two types of Churn:
Voluntary Churn
Involuntary Churn
Voluntary churn is when a customer actively cancels their subscription. The reasons for voluntary churn are endless, from a change of lifestyle, too much product or maybe switching to a new brand. We all know that life happens and things change, or heaven forbid, they no longer see value in your products.
Involuntary churn occurs passively. Otherwise known as delinquent churn, voluntary churn happens when a subscribers’ payment attempt fails or has billing issues, ending in cancellation of their subscription.
Because subscriptions work on recurring payments, issues with billing are likely to occur. How? Expired cards, lost cards, insufficient funds or fraud alerts leading to cards declined by the bank.
There are many tips and tricks to reduce churn rate from:
- Delaying next shipment to reduce drop off
- Changing products through positively engaging with your brand
- Switching pack options (upgrading or downgrading)
- Renewal notifications
- Upcoming expired card notification
- Smart failed payment retries
- Manually retry a payment (admin)
How the above can be managed through the Mypik Customer Portal
Once Mypik has been set up and synced to a store, a user portal is injected into the My-Account page of the website. This creates a new tab named My Subscription Pack where subscribers can manage all aspects of their subscription.
It is within the customer portal that Mypik employs some of the above tactics to reduce churn. Whether you are using Mypik as wine club software, health food subscriptions, or other consumable goods, these methods work for many business and product types. Our entire aim is to allow subscribers to optimise themselves. If they are optimised, they will stay.
Delaying to reduce drop off
This is a smart tool that helps prevent cancellations. Giving your subscribers the opportunity to change their next payment/delivery date provides a simple solution in case the subscriber has situational issues such as finances are low, they are away or, they need a break. By allowing subscribers to defer their payment provides an incentive to stay in your subscription program. We are also about to add in a Skip Next Payment button and include some settings such as only allowing a subscriber to skip x times in a calendar year – for example.
Changing products for (positive engagement)
If you have a Custom Pack on offer for your subscribers, you have provided the ability for them to select their own products. Even if subscribers are on Fixed Packs, they can switch to the Custom Pack and select the products that suit them.
Product changing is a key ingredient for keeping loyal and long term subscribers. The customer portal provides this ability in a clean and intuitive user experience. Even the less tech-savvy subscribers can easily change products and packs.
Switching pack options (upgrading or downgrading)
A key feature of the Mypik Subscription platform is the ability for subscribers to not only change products, but if you have set up a tiered or optional subscription program, for your customer to upgrade or downgrade quantity or frequency options.
By customising each shipment, subscribers are more likely to stay long term. Wouldn’t you if you could optimise what products you get, how often you get them and be able to change whenever you wanted?
Renewal notifications
This is an important piece of communication. Informing your subscribers that their next payment/shipment is approaching allows for changes to their packs and products. It is also a perfect time to get them to check their credit card is up to date.
Upcoming expired card notification
This is a new notification that is currently in development. This reinforces the renewal notification which can include – ‘is your credit card up to date’ content. But, this specifically tells the subscriber their card is about to expire hopefully prompting quick action.
Automatically update expired cards
Mypik automatically updates expired cards. Our payment gateway only works with the major cards so some cards will still fail if expired. Either way, we still want to send as much communication to subscribers as possible so we can avoid having to manually chase up subscribers.
Smart failed payment retries
Once a card fails, then what? Unless it is manually followed up, nothing will happen leading to involuntary churn. That’s why we have added this crucial piece of the puzzle.
- Automatic recurring payment fails. Mypik will:
- schedule a pending retry event to occur after a set period of time
- set the status on the subscription
- set the status on the order
- email the customer
- email store managers
- When the scheduled time for the retry event arrives, Mypik will retry the payment if:
- the retry still has a status of pending
- the order still requires payment
- status on the subscription is not active
- status on the order matched the status of the subscription
- If the payment fails on this retry attempt, steps 1 and 2 are repeated until there are no more retry rules.
Retry emails (dunning) are key communication events during this period. When a retry fails, an email is sent to the customer continually reminding them that their payment has failed and action needs to be taken.
Manually trigger a payment
In addition to the above, Mypik has a feature to allow the store manager to trigger a payment for a subscriber manually. This may be used if a subscriber updates their card and they want the store manager to fire off the payment. This tool is also useful if you have a subscriber that contacts the shop manager asking for their payment to be triggered earlier than the next payment event.
All of the above tactics aid in keeping your subscribers engaged, informed, and happy. At Mypik, we will be continually researching how we can develop more tools to aid in reducing both voluntary and involuntary churn.
