Campaign optimization

Running Churn Buster for 90+ days will establish baseline performance so you can optimize as you go. This article will show you how to evaluate and modify your campaign for continual improvement.

While making changes to your campaigns, it's natural to look at Recovery Rate as the measurement for your recovery campaign performance.

Recovery rate is closely linked to your overall churn rate and customer loyalty. For example, a company with 5% monthly churn will often see a 50-60% Recovery Rate.

All companies experience swings in Recovery Rate due to external factors, even while recovery campaigns stay exactly the same. Keep this in mind so you don't give too much — or too little — credit to your dunning optimizations.

Foundational Steps

The first place to look for improvement opportunities is to verify that the foundational pieces are in place:

• Are email sender details accurate? (Click into the campaign emails and scroll to the fields below the email editor.)
• Have you authenticated your sending domain?
• Do you have proper settings in your subscription management tool?

Campaign Refinements

Go to your campaign timeline to see the recovery funnel.

Customers come into the flow when a payment fails, and exit at different stages as they either 1) are recovered from a retry or card update, 2) actively cancel their subscription, or 3) passively churn at the end of your Churn Buster campaign.

The first email is usually the best-performing, and performance naturally declines with each customer touchpoint that follows. A significantly underperforming email (compared to the others) may indicate the benefit of revising a subject line or email content.

• If an email is performing poorly (e.g. 10%+ lower performance than the emails before/after), try adjusting the subject line to boost open rates or the email body to improve action rates.
• Elevate customer engagement by adding a line in an email that invites customer replies, offers a special deal, etc.
• If the final email's Updated Card rate is above 2%, it may be beneficial to extend the campaign to give more recovery time between the final email and the End Campaign day. Contact the Churn Buster team to make this change, then keep an eye on the Daily Breakdown Chart (bottom of the Dashboard) to spot extra recoveries happening during the added days.
  

As a general rule you'll need to run an updated campaign at least a few months (with sufficient volume) before measuring impact.

Customer Experience Audit

Talk to the members of your team who interact with customers with billing issues. Does any customer feedback signal confusion points or undue friction? It can be helpful to monitor replies to the Churn Buster emails, or general feedback from customers trying to update their billing information.

Do a customer experience audit to evaluate the failed payment experience from a customer's viewpoint.

• Go to the Recovered list and find a customer who updated their card after opening at least one email.
• Evaluate the emails based on our email guidelines.
• Click the card update link and look at it through the customer lens. Is it trustworthy? Is it obvious who this is for and what they're expected to do? Does anything distract from adding a new credit card?

You could even sign up for your product/service as a test customer and run through common tasks, including failing a payment and updating your card.

Common Pitfalls

→ Don't get too hung up on subject line optimization. Customers can take action without even opening an email!

→ Don't treat campaign modifications as a controlled experiment—unless you have the analytical ability to control for all the common factors.

→ Don’t expect changes to be measurable right away—it takes the total length of your campaign simply to fill up the pipeline, tracking results from that day forward.