Subscription businesses benefit from the advantage of recurring revenue. Acquire new members and keep your existing ones. Sounds simple, right? We understand it’s not that easy. How do you keep your recurring revenue if your members’ credit card charges are declined? When you charge the credit card that you have on file, send the product or service, and then find out the charge was declined, that’s called involuntary churn. And, it sucks. It sucks out your revenue, and the hassle often sucks out the member’s subscription.
I met with Paul Larsen to discuss this challenge. In addition to a lengthy list of credentials and experience, Paul is the owner of PaulLarsenConsulting.com, a company with a focus on helping businesses conquer involuntary churn and increase their recurring revenue.
You will discover:
• Why “lowest price” merchant services firms can lead to increased credit card declines and decreased recurring revenue from existing members.
• Why you are getting so many credit card declines (and it’s not necessarily because your customer doesn’t have available credit) and what to do about it.
• Current trends in the credit card industry and how they impact credit card declines.
• Auto-updater services that get you credit card data when your customer receives an updated card with a new expiration date.
• How to identify a credit card processor that can help you get more charges approved each month and increase your recurring revenue from your existing members.
What are the Biggest Causes of Credit Card Declines?You see the recurring revenue of your existing members decreasing at a rate higher than your churn. This is what happens with involuntary churn. The charges on your members’ cards start getting declined. Incorrect card information is the biggest cause. When a member’s card information changes, you are not often notified. There are several unintentional reasons for the change, and the customer often fully intends for you to receive your payment.
Card information changes when members are issued new cards. This happens when they lose a card, experience fraudulent charges, change out their card preference for a new rewards program… and the list goes on.
An additional disruption in the system is occurring because every card in America is being reissued with chips. Almost all of them are reissued with new expiration dates if not new account numbers. “Because every card has a new piece of information, the old legacy information has been switched out on which the last charge for that subscription took place,” explains Larsen. “So, we've seen overall decline rates steadily rising over the past two years again, in large part because of this mass reissuance.”
“The period of great volatility has been about four years now because, even before the chips, there were the massive breaches at Target and Home Depot, so those two breaches alone caused 110 million credit cards to be reissued. Plus, we're all losing our credit cards it seems, at least once a year,” adds Larsen.
Companies who have merchant processors who don’t deal with this issue have seen self-involuntary churn triple in the past 18 months. And it’s not over yet. While most credit cards have been reissued with chips, still many hundreds of millions of debit cards are yet to be chipped.
At a time when you are doing all you can to keep your members, this problem becomes a huge hassle for them. They have to proactively update their information. It’s giving the member the opportunity to look at their subscription and decide if they want to renew or not. When often, a card that is regularly charged goes without their attention and the subscription continues.
In addition to changing card information,