A discount for the customers retries can’t reach

1. 1

   At the first failure

   Dunity emails and retries as usual

   The customer gets the usual failed-payment email and Dunity retries on its schedule, up to 5 attempts by default. Nothing about win-back happens yet.

2. 2

   When retries end

   The offer goes out

   Dunity marks the payment as failed and, if win-back is on, emails the customer once with your discount and a link to update their card. Retries end after the last attempt fails, or sooner when a retry comes back as a hard decline, like a stolen card. It needs an email address on the customer in Stripe, and your publishable key on the Connect page.

3. 3

   When they update their card

   The discount is credited

   The customer enters a new card in Stripe’s own card form, on Dunity’s update page. Dunity makes it their default card and credits your discount to the unpaid invoice as a Stripe credit note.

4. 4

   Straight after

   Dunity retries the smaller amount

   Retries start again on the new card, from the first attempt, for the reduced amount.

• On or off

  It is off until you turn it on in Settings and set a percentage.

• The discount

  A whole percentage from 1 to 100, the same for every customer. There are no per-plan or per-customer discounts.

• The wording

  You write the subject and the body, using the merge tags below. The body has to keep the update link, or Dunity won’t save it.

• Who is left out

  Customers on your VIP list never get retries or emails, so they never get a win-back offer either.

• The credit is a Stripe credit note on the unpaid invoice, for your percentage of the amount still due at that moment. You see it in Stripe like any other credit note.
• It needs the Credit Notes write permission on your restricted key, which is one of the eight Dunity asks for.
• Each invoice is credited once, ever. If its retries end a second time, Dunity won’t credit it again.
• The credit is applied when the customer saves their card, before the retry runs. If the new card fails too, the credit stays and the invoice still needs paying at the lower amount.

The permissions are listed, with the reason for each, in the Stripe setup guide.

• It only goes out once retries have ended, never at the first failure.
• Without your Stripe publishable key on the Connect page, Dunity sends no win-back email.
• The customer needs an email address on their Stripe customer record.
• It makes no offer on an invoice with a payment pending, which is what a card that needs the customer to authenticate leaves behind, because Stripe refuses a credit note in that state.
• One percentage for everyone: no segments, tiers or A/B tests.
• It only reaches customers whose payment failed. It isn’t a cancel flow for customers who choose to leave.

Churnkey’s Core plan and up include segmentation and A/B testing for its payment recovery; see Dunity vs Churnkey.

• Paddle’s study of SaaS discounting compared 55 companies that discounted little with 33 that discounted heavily, and found customers from heavy discounting had an average lifetime value upwards of 32.41% lower. That is a comparison between companies, not proof of cause, and it covers discounting in general rather than payment recovery.
• Churnkey’s article on discounts says research shows a medium discount, 5% to 20%, can raise a customer’s average future value by 20% to 25% compared with a high discount or none. It doesn’t name the research.

So start small: on a $100 invoice, 20% is a $20 credit and $80 still to collect. Raise it only if too few customers update their card.