Subscription Box Answers

Using Stunning To Lower Your Churn Rate And Make More Money!

• Liam Brennan

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In this episode of Subscription Box Answers, I’m sharing how we are testing a new dunning tool in BusterBox called Stunning. The results so far have been very positive, and it has helped us recover a lot of money.

Passive churn can account for up to 40% of overall churn, so it’s crucial to have a process in place to manage it effectively.

You can check it out here https://stunning.co/

If you have a question you want answered on the show, head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com and join the free facebook group and post it there.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the questions, you ask the questions, you ask the questions. Liam gives the answers. It's as simple as that.

Speaker 2:

Welcome back to a brand new episode of Subscription Box Answers and, as always, I hope you're having a very good day and I hope your business is going well. On today's episode, I want to bring up a tool we have been using over the last few months and the name of the tool is Stungin Okay, and I'll put a link to the tool in the show notes so you can check it out if you want. So this basically helps with failed payments. Okay, it's a done in tool to help win back as many failed payments as possible. Now, failed payments are massive for any subscription box business or any subscription business in general. It doesn't matter if you're running a subscription box, a SaaS company, a membership, whatever a gym. If you have a subscription, failed payments are going to be a pain for you, and ProfitWell actually estimates that up to 40% of churn is due to failed payments. This is called passive churn. Active churn is when a customer goes in and cancels themselves, and passive churn is when you just can't charge them anymore, mainly because the card isn't good or they're out of money or the bank has blocked it or something. Stunning helps with this.

Speaker 2:

Now let me give a bit of background about stunning. So when we launched BusterBox all those years ago BusterBox all those years ago I was obsessed about subscriptions and the subscription business model and I spent a lot of time reading into it and I could see that failed payments could potentially be a problem. So I looked for a solution very early and I came across something called Stunin. Now, back then Subli worked kind of differently. All subscriptions were hosted in Stripe, but Subli was obviously the platform okay, so Stunin was compatible with Stri, so I just plugged it in and it worked really, really well. We recovered a lot of money because of Stunnin. We got a lot of customers back. Now I can't remember the exact figures, but it more than paid for itself.

Speaker 2:

Subli changed things up a few years later and they moved the subscription inside of Subli and Stripe was just used to take payments. And they obviously did this because they wanted to improve the platform and to do that and add new features like funnels and stuff. They had to do it pretty much and that was fair enough. Stunning would no longer work anymore and I remember at the time I was speaking to Stefan, who obviously is the CEO of Subli Stefan, who obviously is the CEO of Subli and he was open to get Stunning working on Subli as soon as possible, and I went to the owner of Stunning, richard, and they just couldn't find the time to do the development work to bring Stunning to Subli back then. So we stopped using it for a number of years.

Speaker 2:

But over the last year I reached back out to them. I spoke to Subli. Stunnin had more bandwidth and they managed to do an integration. I think we were the first company that were integrated. They set it up for us manually but as far as I'm aware, it's now available in the Subli App Store. So we got set up on Stunnin and over the last few months I can give you the results okay, it's recovered €13,326 in December, which is 541 customers. In January it recovered 13,387 euro, which is 558 customers.

Speaker 2:

Now I don't know how much of this is due to stunning or how much of this is down to Subway. I don't know if those customers would have come back anyway. Okay, it's nearly impossible to figure that out, but what I do know is I keep a record of all of our past due customers throughout the year, of our past due customers throughout the year. I have an Excel file and I go in pretty regularly, at least once a week or sometimes even more, and I write down how many past due customers we have in Ireland and how many we have in the UK. Now I can see we are down 2% on past due customers compared to this time last year At the exact same date Now. Is that a coincidence or is it down to stunging? It's very hard to know, but I can see people are updating their cards pretty regularly through Stunnin' so it's not far-fetched to believe it is having a pretty decent positive impact. Now I'm going back and forth with Subli and Stunnin' to try and get some more information so we can really see the difference it's making. And when I get that information I'm happy to share it here. Now, from my previous experience with using Stunin and from what I've seen so far, I am pretty confident that it's having a pretty big positive impact on our failed payments.

Speaker 2:

Now I'm going to explain why Stunin can potentially work really well for your subscription box business. I have their features section open here in front of me now. They have many different features. I'm not going to go through them all because they're not relevant, but I'm going to pick out a couple which I believe makes it worth it for the majority of subscription box businesses, and the first one is smart retries. This is what they say. Some failed payments can be collected successfully if you just retry them at the right time. With smart retries, stunging goes beyond Stripe's retries. It intelligently retries your failed payments at times that have the best chance of recovering revenue, based on your customer base and what's best for your particular app. It does it over a maximum of 21 days for maximum recovery potential. So that's really important. It's not just brute force anymore when it comes to your retries. They actually have smart retries and they've collected a lot of data over the years, so they claim to know when the best times are to charge particular sets of customers, and that's that's really really important.

Speaker 2:

And the next one, which makes a massive difference is the payment update pages. Dungan provides secure payment update pages with Apple, pay Pay, with Google and Payment Request API support. You link to them in your Dungan emails so that your users can easily update their payment info without logging in. You can even use them on your own domain. So this makes such a big difference, and if you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time or I think I even wrote about this in my book as well.

Speaker 2:

Giving your customers the opportunity to update their cards directly from your emails will make a big difference. If your customers have to log in to your platform, remember their password, go searching for the payment update section put in the card. You're going to lose some of them because people forget passwords, people are lazy, people simply won't do it, even though they may have the best intentions. If you make it really really easy for them, way more people will update their cards. So with stung in, you literally click the link in the email and a page will pop up and they just put in their card info and it's updated there. And then it's really powerful and you can also log into stung in and send your customers those individual links if you want. Say, if they're going back and forth with your support staff about something and they mentioned they need to update their card, your support staff can just share that customer's individual link and it makes it really easy for them to update their payment info.

Speaker 2:

Okay now just looking at this and stunning has worked with some pretty big companies. I I see on their page they've got Microsoft there, they've got Typeform and they've recovered. I believe they have this somewhere on their page. Yeah, they've recovered over 10 billion since 2012. Now do I think you should use this? I think you should potentially test this and see if it makes any difference to your failed payments. Obviously, there is a fee involved. It's a paid software, so it will probably depend on the size of your company and how many failed payments are coming back if it's going to be worth it or not for you, but I definitely think you should consider it now.

Speaker 2:

I'm not endorsed by stung in. I'm not being paid by them. They don't even know I'm recording this podcast. This is just a tool we have used over the years which has worked quite well for our business. So, yeah, I would recommend giving it a go and seeing if it's going to work for you.

Speaker 2:

Anything that can bring down your churn is a good investment, because you have to remember as well, when you recover somebody, there's a good chance they are going to make more payments in the future.

Speaker 2:

So it says it recovered 13,000 euro in revenue. A good proportion of those customers are hopefully going to stick around for longer and they're going to make more payments, so over time, it can actually compound and end up saving you a lot of money and making a big difference to your overall profitability. Now we'll be back next week at the exact same time. If you have any questions you want answered on the show, head over to SubscriptionBoxResourcescom, join the free Facebook group and post your question there. And oh yeah, subscription box experts is still open, but it won't be open for much longer. So if you want my help to make 2025 the best year yet in your subscription box business you can actually learn how to scale up and make your business a success. I highly recommend heading over to subscriptionboxexpertscom and join it. That will be closing soon. Thanks very much for listening and chatting next week. Bye.