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December 16, 2024

How to Choose the Best Dunning Management Software: A Complete Guide

Looking for the right dunning solution? Learn how leading DTC brands evaluate and select dunning management software to maximize payment recovery and minimize customer churn.

💡 What to Look For:

  • Smart payment retry logic
  • Automated customer communication
  • Easy payment update options
  • Comprehensive analytics dashboard

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eCommerce subscription businesses are booming, with brands offering everything from beauty boxes to meal kits and fitness supplements. However, one persistent challenge for these businesses is managing failed payments. Failed payments can lead to involuntary churn, revenue loss, and negative customer experiences.

To tackle this issue, subscription-based eCommerce brands are turning to shopify apps with robust dunning management system. These softwares automates payment retries, notifies customers of payment issues, and recovers revenue that would otherwise be lost.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through how to choose the best shopify subscription app with comprehensive dunning management for your DTC eCommerce subscription business. We’ll also provide a list of top apps with strong dunning management features with Loop Subscriptions leading the pack.

What is Dunning Management?

Dunning management is the process of handling failed payments for recurring billing customers. It involves sending reminders, retrying payments, and offering customers an easy way to update their payment details. Without an effective dunning strategy, subscription eCommerce brands risk high churn rates and significant revenue loss.

Why Do Payment Failures Happen?

Payment failures typically occur for these reasons:

  • Expired Credit Cards: Credit card expiration is a leading cause of payment declines.
  • Insufficient Funds: Customers may not have enough money in their accounts.
  • Incorrect Payment Details: Mistakes in card details or outdated billing information.
  • Banking Restrictions: Some banks flag recurring payments as suspicious activity.

By using dunning management software, subscription eCommerce brands can address these issues before they lead to customer churn.

Key Features to Look for in Dunning Management Software

When selecting dunning management software for your DTC eCommerce subscription business, look for the following features:

  1. Automated Payment Retries
    • The software should automatically retry failed payments at optimized intervals.
    • Customizable retry schedules are essential for eCommerce brands, as customer buying behaviour can vary.
  2. Personalized Customer Notifications
    • The system should notify customers about failed payments via email, SMS, or in-app messages.
    • Personalized communication, including the customer's name and payment details, can increase recovery rates.
  3. Simple Payment Update Options
    • Offer a seamless experience for customers to update their payment information.
    • Direct links to update payment details should be included in email or SMS notifications.
  4. Smart Analytics and Reporting
    • Track key dunning metrics, such as recovery rates, failed payments, and churn rates.
    • Access insights to refine your dunning strategy and increase recovery success.
  5. Integration with shopify apps
    • Ensure the software integrates with popular DTC shopify apps.
    • The software should work with your existing payment gateways (like Stripe, PayPal, and Braintree).

If you run a DTC eCommerce subscription business, choosing the right dunning software can significantly impact your revenue and customer retention. Here are the top dunning management software tools that cater specifically to subscription-based eCommerce businesses.

1. Loop Subscriptions

Overview:
Loop Subscriptions has the ultimate dunning management features for eCommerce subscription brands. It offers all the essential features like automated retries, easy customer notifications, and a deep analytics.

Top Features of Loop Subscriptions

Comprehensive Payment Insights

  • Spot Payment Problems: Identify where payment problems arise before they happen.
  • Attempted vs. Realized Payments: Monitor and compare attempted payments to successful payments.
  • Revenue Recovery Analysis: Analyze how much revenue was lost and how much was recaptured.
  • Successful vs. Failed Revenue Trends: Identify the trend of successful payment retries versus failures.
  • Payment Issue Classification: Get a categorization of issues according to the source.

Smart Recovery Workflows

  • Custom Retry Settings: Retake full control of retries through flexible and customizable workflows.
  • Smart Retry Controls: Set the number of attempts, intervals, and retry cycles.
  • Post-Retry Actions: Automate actions like skipping, pausing, or canceling subscriptions based on the result of the retry cycle.
  • Recovery Performance Insights: Evaluate how well your retry strategies are working.

Proactive Customer Communication

  • Increase Recovery Rates: Inspire payment recovery through active outreach to the customer base.
  • Automated Payment Reminders: Automate sending of gentle payment reminders.
  • Email & SMS Communication: Communicate with customers to inspire payment behavior through notifications.
  • Easy Payment Updates: Enable one-click, hassle-free payment update directly from an email correspondence.
  • Custom Discounts to Effectuate Payments: This is to offer tailor-made discounts for payment updates from the customer portal.

Recovery Performance Analytics

  • Monitor Recovery Efforts: Tracking your subscription recovery efforts throughout the dunning process.
  • Retries Success Insights: Gain deeper visibility into the success rate of each retry attempt.
  • Recovery-Efficient Failures: Identify which of the payment failure reasons are the easiest to recover.
  • Root Cause Analysis: By monitoring major sources of failure, you can discover the premier cases of any payment failure. 

Why Choose Loop Subscriptions?

  • Built specifically for DTC eCommerce brands on Shopify.
  • Intuitive and user-friendly for both business owners and customers.
  • Streamlined automation for retries, customer notifications, and subscription management.

2. Baremetrics 

Overview:
Baremetrics is a subscription analytics platform that provides SaaS and subscription-based businesses with insights into their financial and customer metrics. By integrating directly with payment providers such as Stripe, Braintree, and others, Baremetrics delivers real-time metrics that help businesses analyze their performance against various company benchmarks.

Features: 

Subscription Analytics: Track metrics such as Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Annual Run Rate (ARR), churn rates, and customer lifetime value.

Payment Recovery: Lost revenue is addressed through failure charges and automated dunning processes, including payment reminders as well as easy payment updates for customers.

Financial Forecasting: Get real-time insights for accurate financial forecasting to help you in future planning and decision-making.

Customer Segmentation: Segregate and study particular user groupings to adopt the most effective engagement and retention strategies. 

3. Churn Buster

Overview:
Churn Buster is specialized in recovering payments, making it a reliable one for subscription-based brands in reducing passive churn. It integrates seamlessly with your billing system to monitor and follow up on payment failures, providing an excellent experience for the customer and higher retention rates.

Key Features:

Adaptive Campaigns: Once Churn Buster spots a failed payment, campaigns for recovering them are launched. They comprise retries, outreach to customers through emails and SMS, and escalation to either customer support or cancellation, all personalized through the use of customer attributes and decline reasons to increase recovery performance.

Optimized Retries: Churn Buster retries payments using a current method several times before contacting the customer directly. This methodology cuts down on needless customer communications and enhances customer experience significantly.

Personalized Customer Outreach: The series consists of progressively more urgent, pre-written, and editable email campaigns sent over multiple weeks. These emails will come directly from the company and will include a direct link for ease of updating payment methods for customers.

Advanced Analytics and A/B Testing: This feature facilitates tracking of payment recovery performance through detailed analysis of performance metrics, and allows for A/B testing to vet different recovery strategy methods. A data-driven approach puts the pedal to the metal to amply improve the positive output recovery strategies as per the condition of the firm. 

Which Dunning Management Tool is Right for Your DTC Brand?

For Shopify eCommerce subscription brands, Loop Subscriptions is the top choice due to its automation, Shopify integration, and ease of use. 

To boost your revenue and reduce involuntary churn, select a tool that automates retries, integrates with Shopify, and offers customer-friendly payment update options. Ready to take control of your DTC subscription payments? Start with Loop Subscriptions here.

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Written by
Emma Johnson
Head of Marketing

Emma Johnson is celebrated for her strategic brilliance and innovative flair. By seamlessly blending creativity with data-driven insights, she has propelled Loop’s brand to new heights, establishing it as a formidable force in the Shopify Subscriptions space.