Dunning / Last Chance Offers
Last Chance Offers
A final incentive to test near the end of a recovery campaign, for the subscribers who may be undecided.
A final reason to stay, for the holdouts
Most failed payments recover quietly, early in the campaign, through retries and the card update emails. A small group never comes back from those touches.
By the late emails in a campaign, a subscriber who still hasn't updated their card often isn't ignoring a billing glitch. They're weighing whether to keep the subscription at all. A last chance offer gives that group a concrete reason to stay before the window closes.
Treat it as a test, not a guarantee. It's one more lever to try on the customers that email and retries didn't move, measured on your own cohorts like everything else in the campaign.
What you can put in front of them
The right incentive depends on why that customer is hesitating, and a few options cover most cases.
- A discount. A simple percentage off the next order, claimed by replying to the email or through a Quick Action discount link the Churn Buster team sets up.
- A free gift. A small add-on in a later email, claimed the same way, for customers who respond to a perk more than a price cut.
- A skip or pause. Some customers go quiet because they have too much product on hand. Offering a skip or pause keeps the subscription alive instead of losing it outright.
- A benefits reminder. A plain restatement of what they'd lose, sometimes with the items in their next shipment shown by image and description.
Why it stays a last resort, not the opening move
An incentive offered too early trains customers to wait for a discount and gives margin away on subscribers who would have updated their card for free. That's why the offer sits near the end of the recovery window, after the quieter touches have had their chance.
Discounting also has diminishing returns. For some models a save offer is the wrong call entirely, and we'll say so rather than bolt one on. The goal is keeping a good subscriber, not buying back one who was always going to leave.
How an offer reaches the customer depends on your platform. Reply-to-claim works anywhere, while skip, pause, and one-click discount links run on Quick Actions that some platforms support and others don't. The Churn Buster team configures what's available for your setup and wires the links into the campaign.
Where to go next
Last chance offers are one of the escalations layered onto the email sequence once it's doing its job.
- Emails, the sequence that does most of the recovery work and where these offers live.
- SMS Nudge, a second channel for customers that email isn't reaching.
- Retries, the quiet recoveries that happen earlier in the campaign, before an offer is needed.
How the channels sequence together is covered in Adaptive Campaigns.