Regardless of whether the payment method is card, MobilePay or Direct Debit, it may happen that we are unable to collect the agreed amount on an active subscription. The reason may be that the card has expired (applies to both card and MobilePay) or insufficient funds in the account (all methods).
Despite retention messages and notifications in, for example, MobilePay, we experience that payments often fail several times before the card is updated or the subscription is cancelled. A donor can quite literally take months to resolve the issue. This is exactly where it is important to take action: partly to ensure as many successful payments as possible for each attempted charge, and partly to prevent attrition before it is too late.
This article describes how to:
We recommend that you generate a new list of failed payments every month, for example on the 12th.
Organisations using HeyLoyalty, Agillic or similar
If you have a marketing automation solution where data on failed payments can be found, you can skip exporting and preparing data. Instead, you should segment your way to active subscriptions where the most recent payment has failed. If you run into issues, reach out to support and we will help with the task.
Extracting data on subscriptions that have failed within a given period
If you have a CRM system, you will often be able to find subscriptions here where the most recent payment has failed. If you do not have a CRM system, or if you are having trouble segmenting subscriptions that have failed within a given period, you can use the built-in Retention export.
You will find it in the module Export > Create export. Choose Dunning and maintenance / Retention – failed recurring payments.
Then select a time period for failed payments:
Once done, an export will be generated containing subscriptions whose payment has failed within the chosen period. It does not include cancelled subscriptions etc. – see our article on payment errors and states for more information.
Preparing data for sending
The best and simplest way to update a subscription is to contact the donor by e-mail and/or SMS and ask them to update their payment method. For MobilePay, for example, this means they re-confirm the subscription in the app with a swipe, after which an active card is attached automatically. If you have not already set up a dedicated page for renewing the payment method, you should do so.
The export file contains information about the contact, the subscription and the failed payment, so it can also be used for analysis. In this case, we will be communicating based on the data, and therefore only need:
Contact information for the donor, e.g. first name and e-mail address or phone number
These fields begin with contact, e.g. contact-emailA unique identifier for the subscription (as the donor may have several active subscriptions)
This is found in the field subscription-subscription_guid
You can advantageously delete the remaining columns to minimise stored data. You are then ready to import the data into the system you are using for communication – e-mail or SMS.
Setting up e-mail/SMS with a renewal link
The final step is to set up an e-mail or SMS with individual links to the page where the donor can renew the payment method. The link can beneficially be placed both as a text link and a button, and consists of three parts:
The link to the page, which can be found under Settings:
The addition
?change_payment_method=
This indicates the intentionSubscriptionGuid, the unique identifier for each subscription
A link could therefore look something like:https://www.myside.co.uk?change_payment_method=yyyyyyy-xxxxxx-iiiiiiiiii, where the final part is the subscriptionGuid. This last part is unique per recipient and must therefore be merged in, just as you would do with the donor’s first name or similar.
You can create additional merge fields in all e-mail/marketing automation systems. You can find the guide for Mailchimp here > If you need help with other solutions, feel free to get in touch.
Once you have imported the data and set up the e-mail, we strongly recommend testing the link. If you can see a form with different options, it is set up correctly.
For SMS, you can follow the instructions here >
Be aware of annual payments and memberships
Pay attention to the frequency of the donor’s subscription. When the donor renews their subscription, we will use the new payment method at the next scheduled charge. But if the agreed frequency is once a year, you will have to wait a year before the payment is due again. In these cases, you should consider whether the subscription should instead be restarted with a charge in the coming month, or supplemented with a one-off payment to allow the donor to keep their membership.
If you need guidance here, please contact support.
Consider using multiple channels
E-mail and SMS are good, relatively inexpensive channels for renewing a subscription. However, they can be beneficially supplemented by, for example, telemarketing if the donor does not respond to your contact attempts. Here, the payment method can also be renewed using an upgrade workflow (where the amount is kept the same unless otherwise agreed).