We are super excited to announce that our new suite of emails for Dunning Management has arrived!

So what exactly is Dunning Management and why should you care as a merchant who sells subscriptions?

Great question!

This is a type of system in which email notifications go out to your customer to alert them about different events in their subscription lifecycle.

Okay, so what does that mean?

Basically, if your customer who has a subscription has a declined payment on their credit card, they’ll be notified via an email with a link to the customer portal where they can update their payment details.

This is a huge improvement, as it will help recapture payments that would otherwise be lost. Every time your customer has a declined payment, they’ll get notified.

They’ll be told the reason they have had a declined payment, as there are lots of different reasons why a payment might not be successful.

It could be an expired card, not sufficient funds in the bank account, etc so it’s important to let the customer know what is going on with their financial institution so they can update their payment details.

Once they update their payment details, the Ongoing system is smart and will attempt to re-bill the subscriber again and recapture that payment.

Did you know that 40% of payments typically fail? Yup, it’s a very high number.

That’s why it’s so crucial for us at Ongoing to capture these payments for you through this system of dunning management.

Instead of the subscription product not being paid for, and eventually canceled due to reaching the max amount of billing attempts, we will re-bill them again and again until the payment is successful.

So how does this work?
The way it works is we have a max billing attempt set up on Ongoing which is defaulted to 3. You’re welcome to make this more or less, but three is recommended as the sweet spot.

If a billing attempt fails, Ongoing will send out an email notification to the subscriber with a notice that their payment failed and how to fix it.

Ongoing will wait 24 hours and then try to bill the subscriber again.

If there is another failed billing attempt, we will send out another email, and wait another 24 hours before we attempt to bill the subscriber.

Lastly, on the third failed billing attempt, we will send out a final email to let them know the subscription contract will be set to “failed” (which is essentially canceled).