Best practices for
subscription retention.
10+ years of experience measuring, analyzing, and optimizing failed-payment recovery — distilled into the playbook we use every day.
Definitions
Glossary of Recovery Measurement Terms
Every term Churn Buster uses to measure failed payment recovery and cancel flow saves, with the formulas for recovery rate, save rate, and natural variance.
The Four Outcomes of a Recovery Campaign
The four final states in dunning recovery, why all four stay in the recovery rate denominator, and how voided campaigns leave the cohort.
Daily Cohorts and Complete Cohorts
Learn how daily cohorts group dunning recovery campaigns by start date, and why no recovery rate is published until every campaign in the cohort has resolved.
Recovery Rate: the Formula
How Churn Buster calculates recovery rate: recovered campaigns divided by all campaigns in complete cohort days, with cancellations in and voided campaigns out.
Fundamentals
Failure Reasons
Why recurring payments fail, how soft and hard declines differ, when to retry silently before email, and how far to trust a decline code.
Recovery Campaigns
What a recovery campaign is and the four parts it's built from (retries, email, SMS, escalation), plus the card update experience, what moves a recovery rate, and what can't be measured.
Analyze
Active vs Passive Churn
Learn why active churn has such a big impact on passive churn performance, including how 3 of the 4 outcomes are largely impacted by active customer decisions.
Rolling Analysis
How to build a rolling recovery rate from daily cohorts, why rolling windows beat calendar months, and how to read the two resulting charts.
Natural Variance
How to calculate natural variance in a dunning recovery rate, read recent performance against your band, and use segmentation to narrow it.
Comparing Recovery Rates Across Periods, Tools, and Migrations
How to compare dunning recovery rates before and after a settings change or tool switch using consistent formulas, complete cohorts, and variance.
Practices This Methodology Rejects
Thirteen ways a dunning recovery rate gets distorted or stripped of context, each with the rule it breaks and the page that teaches it.
Want a hand putting these into practice?
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Talk to our team about your current dunning setup.
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Walk through the rolling-analysis report on your own data.
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No pitch deck — just a working session on what's worth changing.