How Payment Recovery works
Payment Recovery is the process of managing failed subscription renewals during the dunning window. This window begins when a payment fails and ends when the subscription either successfully renews or is canceled. It is a critical opportunity to prevent churn and recover recurring revenue.
Payment Recovery expands on traditional dunning by introducing flexible retry logic built on Skio’s newest data model. Instead of relying on a single retry limit, you can create adaptive recovery campaigns with multiple retry phases, each configured with its own number of billing attempts and retry intervals.
Access the Payment Recovery page in your Skio Dashboard by navigating to Retain, then selecting Payment Recovery.
Understanding retries
Payment retries occur throughout your recovery campaign and can be configured differently at each phase. After a payment fails, we recommend attempting multiple retries on the card on file before contacting the subscriber. A significant portion of failed payments can be recovered automatically without customer action, about 15 percent on average. This reduces the number of emails you need to send, lowers cancellation risk, minimizes support requests, and creates a smoother subscriber experience.
If you are just getting started, a good default is to set your first retry phase with a 3 day retry interval and a total of 7 retry attempts.
Optimize retry timing with Smart Retries
Smart Retries automatically optimize when billing retries occur to improve subscription recovery. Using Skio’s data model, Smart Retries identify the most effective time of day, day of week, and day of month to retry failed payments, giving you the best chance of success. When Smart Retries are enabled, Skio determines the timing of each retry during the dunning process. Your configured total number of retries is always respected, but Skio may adjust the retry interval if a more effective schedule is identified.
For example, if a retry phase is set to attempt billing every 1 day for 3 total retries, Smart Retries may space those attempts further apart, such as retrying after 2 days, then 3 days, and then 4 days, before moving to the next phase.
To enable Smart Retries, navigate to the Payment Recovery page and enable the toggle next to Enable Smart Retries.
Subscriptions recovered through Smart Retries are labeled in the user table under the Smart Adj. column for visibility and reporting.
Analytics
You can view analytics for each retry phase in your campaign under the Results tab on your Payment Recovery page. Within each phase, there are 3 key metrics to give you an overview of the performance of your dunning campaign:
Subscriptions currently in phase: The count of subscriptions currently in the retry phase.
Subscriptions recovered in phase: The count of subscriptions that were recovered in the retry phase and did not move to the next phase.
Subscriptions progressed to next phase: The count of subscriptions that failed all retry attempts in this retry phase and moved to the next phase in your campaign.
For more granular insights, use the Dunning Dashboard in the Analytics section.
Best practices
Enable Smart Retries
One of the most powerful features of Payment Recovery is Smart Retries, which allow Skio to optimize when retry attempts occur. When enabled, Smart Retries improve subscription recovery by using subscriber behavior patterns to determine the most effective times and days to retry failed payments.
Discount code
Apply discount codes automatically during specific retry phases. Discounts increase the likelihood of a successful billing attempt and can also encourage subscribers to update their payment method.
We recommend creating discount codes with a usage limit of one per customer. This ensures that discounts applied through Payment Recovery can only be used once and helps prevent misuse. Be sure to create a discount code rather than an automatic discount.
Set up multiple retry phases
We recommend configuring your first two retry phases with multiple back-to-back retries, then offering a discount in a third retry phase. See the following example:
Integrate with Klaviyo to notify customers
We recommend using the Klaviyo integration to notify customers when payment recovery requires their action. To maximize the number of issues resolved automatically, send these notifications only after multiple retries to the payment method on file have been attempted in the first and second retry phases.
Skio sends a Billing attempt failed metric to Klaviyo for each failed charge. You can use this metric to build flows that notify subscribers when a payment fails and prompt them to update their payment method. The metric also includes the error code and error message, allowing you to create conditional splits in your flow.
For example, you may choose to send a different message for failures caused by insufficient funds, letting subscribers know the payment will be retried instead of asking them to update their card.