Credit Card Declines are LOST Revenue from failed payments

I'm reading more from Recurly's website, here's some info on loss from recurring credit cards that get declined.  There are strategies to address the likelihood of credit card declines both prior to trying to run the credit cards (ie updater) and after they've been declined (what's this called again?)

Credit Card Account Updater

The account updater is a service for vendors that run a monthly billing subscription service.

This is a service provided by some credit processors that tracks changes, such as new expiration dates, and updates the records before the attempted billing fails.  It works on  MasterCard, Visa, and Discover cards. 

An account updater usually has some costs associated with it. They run the updater across all the cards and either charge per card monitored or by changed made.  It works on both   subscribers credit and debit cards.

This is one way that companies improve their processing and results for recurring transactions.  

Dunning

Recurly sent out a great newsletter and I learned a new term: Dunning.

Dunning stands for Delinquent User Notification. Generally, it refers to sending emails or other communications, on a predetermined schedule, to subscribers when their payment fails.

Different businesses or different subscriber segments will have different responses to dunning, so it's important to constantly test and optimize dunning schedules and email content. In general, subscribers are more likely to respond to dunning emails that are customized to match the brand’s voice. Conveying urgency in each subsequent dunning email and presenting a clear call-to-action are also important for encouraging the subscriber to update their payment method.

To maximize its effectiveness in recovering revenue, the dunning process should function independently from the retry process.