Fundamentals
Recovery Campaigns
What a recovery campaign is, its four parts (retries, email, SMS, escalation), the card update experience, and what can or cannot be measured.
This page is about dunning recovery. A campaign is the recovery sequence triggered when a subscription payment fails. It begins with the failure and ends with one of the four outcomes. Cancel flows are a different frame; see Two Measurement Frames.
A recovery campaign is a structure, not a schedule.
What a recovery campaign is
A recovery campaign is a structured sequence that runs from a failed payment to a final state. It uses payment retries and customer contact to recover the payment while disrupting the customer as little as possible. It ends when the payment succeeds, when the customer cancels, or when the campaign reaches its scheduled end and the customer has lapsed silently. If the customer or merchant skips, pauses, or delays the underlying order instead, the campaign counts as voided and leaves measurement.
Every campaign belongs to the daily cohort of the date it started, permanently.
The four components
Payment retries
Retries are attempts on the payment method already on file. They come first because retries on soft declines run quietly before any outreach, and a meaningful share resolve on their own in that window (Failure Reasons). Retries stop being the lever when the decline is hard. A closed account or an invalid payment method won't clear no matter how many retries run, so the customer has to act (soft vs hard declines). Retries and customer contact run on independent schedules: a retry can run without an email going out, so the campaign isn't one message per failed attempt.
Email is the primary channel for asking the customer to update a payment method. A good recovery email says what happened, says what to do, arrives on time, uses the customer's name and subscription details, and links straight into the card update flow.
SMS
SMS is a second channel for customers who don't act on email: the address on file is secondary or unused, or the messages aren't reaching the inbox. It runs alongside email, not instead of it, and it needs a phone number stored with the subscription. Recovery SMS is transactional, not promotional.
Escalation
Urgency rises as the campaign progresses, and so does the reach: email first, then SMS where email isn't getting through, then a plain statement that the recovery window is closing. For high value customers, escalation adds a human touch before the campaign ends: an alert to your support team so someone can look into the billing issue personally.
The card update experience
When a customer does act, the path from the email to a saved new card is part of the campaign. Friction in updating a payment method turns recoverable failures into cancellations; every extra login, step, or unclear page is a place to give up. A good flow saves the new card to the subscription so the customer doesn't have to enter it again next cycle. When it charges the card depends on the business model. Digital products such as SaaS and online memberships capture payment right away. Subscriptions for physical goods often delay the charge so the customer can adjust the order before billing, anywhere from a short delay to the next scheduled charge attempt.
Different businesses, different maximums
A high churn consumer business and a low churn service running the same campaign won't post the same rate. Whether a customer updates a card, cancels, or ignores the emails depends on how much they want to stay, so recovery rate is partly a loyalty measurement (Natural Variance). The realistic maximum differs by business, and it isn't a published number; see Realistic Recovery Rate Range.
What moves a recovery rate, and what can't be measured
The levers that move a recovery rate: deliverability, decline-code handling, campaign length, and the card-update experience. Each has a full treatment on What Moves a Recovery Rate.
Retry timing to the hour or day is not a measurable optimization. There is no way to know whether a retry at a specific minute performed better than the same retry an hour later. The alternate version of that charge never ran. And transactional messaging has a narrow band of what good looks like, so a flat A/B test on copy, run on enough volume, usually means you're already inside that band and copy isn't the lever.
What "adaptive" means here
An adaptive campaign is one whose path differs by decline type and changes as the campaign progresses. A soft decline that becomes a closed account mid-campaign changes the path. It doesn't mean the process has found the best hour or day to retry, because that isn't measurable (Failure Reasons).
Campaign length
How long a campaign runs before you recognize passive churn is a business decision that depends on the model. An eCommerce business with a fulfillment window, a paid content service, and a SaaS product weigh the cost of a past-due customer differently. The most common length is around 30 days, and it varies.
Don't measure it this way
- Claiming a specific retry hour or day outperformed another.
- Rerunning messaging A/B tests hoping for a swing. A flat result on sufficient volume is the finding.
- Counting only the recoveries one tool's retry triggered. A successful payment is a successful payment, whether it came from a card update, a retry we ran, or a retry the platform ran. See The Four Outcomes.
The full list of rejected practices is on Practices This Methodology Rejects.
Prerequisite: Failure Reasons, why payments fail and why the first days are quiet.