Involuntary churn
Reduce involuntary churn: the checklist
Involuntary churn is the customers you lose because a payment failed, not because they chose to leave. It's the easiest churn to win back: they still want the product.
In Stripe
- Turn on Smart Retries (Billing → Revenue recovery → Retries). Stripe recommends 8 tries in 2 weeks.
- Choose what happens after the last retry deliberately: cancel, mark unpaid, or leave past due. Compare them.
- Collect payment methods that renew well. Enable the payment methods your customers use in Checkout and the customer portal.
- Let customers update their card themselves through the Stripe customer portal or the hosted invoice page.
In your emails
- Write per decline reason. An expired card needs “add your new card”; 3-D Secure needs “confirm the payment”.
- Four emails in about a week, the last one with a clear date.
- Your brand, your reply-to. Customers answer when they recognise the sender.
- Stop as soon as it's paid. Nothing loses trust faster than a reminder after payment.
Measure it
Two numbers matter: the amount stuck in open invoices with a failed charge, and the MRR of subscriptions cancelled for non-payment. The free scan gives you both for the last 90 days; the calculator projects them over a year.