How Bounce improves card authentication
lift in
Authentication
lift to
top line
more LTV
in CAC
The authentication process and its effect on your KPIs
Card authentication declines happen more often than you think.
At Bounce, we wanted to get to the bottom of it.
While mapping hidden and obscure spots of the payments industry, we uncovered something quite incredible -
up to 30% of online credit card authentication processes are denied.
This scenario frequently occurs when you allow your customer to try the product or service before paying for it. Within the context of free trial subscriptions and sign-ups, failed card authentication is a common occurrence.
During a trial sign-up, a merchant authenticates the user's card while allowing them to try out the product or service before payment.
Sadly, due to false payment declines, the merchant can inadvertently block the customer during the authentication step. This occurs after the customer has made the crucial decision about your product, provided the payment details, and all that remains is for them to complete the authentication process.
But it's precisely at this critical moment that you are losing them, and possibly for good.
The authentication process is both an opportunity and a challenge.
If the customer fails the authentication for no good reason, it will tarnish the customer's experience.
On the other hand, when done right, authentication gives the seller an opportunity to bypass certain customers who are less likely to become paying customers, thereby increasing conversion and top line.
Essentially, this process increases the percentage of users that ultimately become paying customers.
Over the years we learned that many companies are not even aware of how many good deals they’re losing due un-authentication rates.
Many don’t see how common the problem is and how it affects a business’s performance and the marketing team’s KPIs:
- Top-line - False authentication declines lead to lost customers, deals, and loss in revenue.
- Cost of Acquisition (CAC) - Getting a successful user registration is a massive step, especially after all the marketing resources you spent on getting them there. An unauthenticated credit card deal puts you in a position to retarget and repeat the process, causing your CAC to spike.
- LTV, retention and repeat customers - The negative effect of declined authorization process has a clear impact on LTV. The customer’s bad experience will result in them not coming back. In the case of free trial, they will clearly not turn into recurring revenue, as they are not even starting their journey with you.
- Conversion rates - Losing customers during the authorization process not only affects the specific authentication conversion rates but hinders the whole conversion - Leads/ Visitors > Free trial > customers.
How Bounce improves authentication rates
Here at Bounce, we've learned to identify false authentication authorization declines,
enabling us to save an average of 20% of deals that were wrongly rejected.
This results in a 7% increase in the total number of users progressing to the next stage of your funnel.
Our ML algorithm quickly identifies and approves good deals in real-time, saving the transaction and ensuring users can smoothly transition to become paying customers after authentication, without any roadblocks.
By perfecting the authentication process, you can filter out unwanted leads and ensure you only allow leads with conversion potential to move forward.
It’s about balance - you need to make sure these good users are moving forward, while identifying those that are not going to become paying ones.
Unlike other marketing, growth or optimization tools, Bounce doesn’t require any additional budget or extra work after implementation.
There is no customization, monitoring, or any additional set up needed - All you have to do is relax and enjoy the absolute wins.
Improved KPIs
lift in
Authentication
lift to
top line
more LTV
in CAC
Further reading
How Bounce improved authentication rates for Lingopie and lifted their entire business KPIs
Lingopie is the world's only language-learning application that uses real TV shows and movies to help its users learn a new language. They make language learning fun and as simple as watching your favorite TV show.
One of Lingopie’s amazing achievements is their long-lasting relationship with their users.
While joining their subscription service, Lingopie users go through an authentication process before starting their free trial. The purpose of the authentication process is to prevent fraud and attain a valid form of payment from the user.
Having a reliable, smart and efficient authentication process that validates the users is key to achieving long lasting relationships.
Before Lingopie started working with us many of their potential users did not comply with the authentication process.
We got to partner with Samuel Medalie, CFO of Lingopie and found that many users were failing the authentication stage due to faulty declines. These users could have been approved but were not making it past the initial authentication.
We integrated with Lingopie’s current authentication process, keeping the existing user journey. Putting our solution to work, our ML algorithm identifies good users who were about to be blocked by card declines. These good users were able to smoothly pass the authentication process and move on to the free trial phase, ensuring a positive experience.
After joining Bounce the number of new users completing the authentication process increased, allowing more users to initiate their journey with Lingopie and transition into paying customers.
"Bounce increased our authentication rates by 8%. Customers are automatically approved, so the user experience is seamless."
This has a huge impact on Lingopie’s subscribers, which increased by 5% as well as other KPIs such as top line, LTV, conversion rates and retention.
"Bounce helped us provide our new users with a smooth authentication experience. More users start their journey with us and stay for a longer time”
While improving Lingopie’s authentication process, we were also happy to advise them with other payment-related decisions they faced, such as optimizing their subscription process. We simply see our customers as partners and their success is also our success.
Simply (formerly JoyTune) is a global subscription service that reinvented how people discover, learn, and share creative hobbies. The company’s mission is to spark joy and creativity by empowering people to “fall in love with new creative hobbies''. With millions of learners in over 180 countries and fast revenue growth, Simply has become a global subscription service. Yet despite their fantastic success, their conversion funnel had an issue: a large percentage of failed Piano app subscription signups were failing to convert.
20% of users that already downloaded the app, and tried to sign up, pay and use the app, were declined due to a payment issue.
While the growth, marketing and UX teams were hard at work driving new subscription sign-ups, hundreds of potential valid subscribers were being rejected monthly.
That's when Roie Shiloah, Head of Growth, started the process with Bounce.
"We knew we were losing tens of thousands of dollars in potential revenue each month. We needed a trustworthy solution to optimize the signup subscription process."
We worked hand-in-hand with Roie and the Simply team to understand the lifecycle of their subscribers, the payment issues encountered, and how to optimize their sign up processes.
We then implemented our ML-powered solution to identify incorrectly flagged signup subscribers. Users that previously would have been rejected at sign up now enjoy a seamless subscription experience, and the Simply team’s top-line revenue enjoys a marked boost.
But the process didn’t stop there…
Bounce transforms Simply's free-to-paid conversions
To garner interest and gain new subscribers, Simply offers Piano registrants a free trial of their app. Simply users register and provide their credit card details to begin their free trial. When the trial period is over, Simply then processes their credit card and converts them into a paying user. If for whatever reason the payment transaction failed, Simply would then retry the charge using one of their payment provider’s existing solutions.
The challenge:
Even after retrying to charge the failed transactions, 30% of Simply’s free trials were still being declined. The marketing team had worked so hard looking for learners with passion to learn Piano, nurture their interest with compelling retargeting ads, drive them to Simply’s sign-up page, and convert them into free trial learners, all the while ensuring a fantastic onboarding experience and the ultimate in customer care.
But then, at the pivotal moment of conversion from free-trial to loyal brand learners, Simply’s learners were experiencing false declines. ROI lost. Marketing investment wasted. Revenue crushed. The results were seriously hampering the company's growth efforts.
The solution:
We analyzed thousands of failed end-of-trial payment transactions to understand which, if any, could be recovered. We discovered that 5% of the deals that were not recovered by Simply’s current process can still be recovered and converted by Bounce. That means a 2% lift to their free trial conversion.
Given the large number of free trial users that sign up for Simply each month, the recovered free trial conversion translates into a grand additional user revenue.
“Bounce is a ‘growth secret’ - our total signups revenues grew by 5% and our end-of-trial charges/renewals grew by 2%. The uplift is immediate, requires zero risk or budget, and doesn’t require any work after implementation.”
The Simply team feels safe to consult us with any questions or problems they might have, and we at Bounce learn a great deal from this collaboration and develop new ways of problem-solving. We are always brainstorming new ways to increase Simply’s revenue and conversion rates, amplifying the growth impact of our partnership.
“Bounce transparency enables complete trust. We recommended Bounce to colleagues from other b2c companies.”
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Scale is a California based, tech-driven company. They build next-generation health, wellness education, and products that address some of the world's most common health issues. They sell their products online as a subscription base or as a one off purchase and have a checkout process in place.
They knew they had challenges around checkout and subscription conversion and were hoping to find a solution to mitigate that.
We partnered with Hannah Blum, Head of Marketing Strategy, and Chris (Christapor) Arzoumanian, Senior growth product marketing manager, two industry experts.
Diving into Scale’s processes
Scale offers various types of supplements, in 5 different brands, both one-time checkouts and subscription refills. When reviewing Scale’s system, we ran a comprehensive analysis of their payments, to see which failed payments could be saved. Through our ML system, we found that 20%-30% of their customers were being wrongly rejected at the time of subscription refill/ renewal (and could be saved), due to a variety of reasons totally out of Scale’s control. We got to work and implemented our solution.
Shortly after, by cutting out a portion of those card declines, we saw a stream of steady and increased revenue, overall raising their KPIs.
As more deals were seamlessly approved in real-time, a number of things took place. Customer satisfaction levels grew, retention rate improved, and even the ticket size per transaction increased, thanks to frictionless payment experiences.
“We grew our subscription retention rate by 2.4%.”
Bouncing up lost checkout deals
Renewals were just the beginning - while analyzing Scale Media’s checkout transactions, they realized how many of their customers were actually unable to complete their purchase - 10% (!) of their customers were being rejected at checkout, due to different reasons.
We applied our proprietary machine-learning algorithms on Scale’s data, using millions of data points, and identifying which declined checkout transactions should be recovered. With our real-time ML model and zero-risk policy, we were able to recover a full 30% of Scale’s declined checkout transactions. Bounce’s auto-recovered checkout deals lift Scale’s top line by almost 3%.
As Scale’s checkout experience improved, the average user purchase size and total number of purchases increased. Instead of losing potential users to failed checkout processes, Scale was now retaining its leads and customers at much higher rates.
“We work closely with bounce and see bounce’s team as partners. We constantly consult the team with any payment related decision”.
What it’s like to partner with Bounce
Every decision related to payments is a multifaceted process for any company. At Bounce, we thrive on collaboration to enhance your company's payment experiences. Our approach is to seamlessly integrate with your processes, providing valuable insights and guidance.
The successful collaboration with Scale's talented team has driven the desired results – improved metrics and happy customers. Together, we were able to showcase the power of a collaborative approach in transforming payment experiences.
"As for the decision to work with Bounce, it was a pretty straightforward one. We took zero-risk and saw an uplift of 3-5% on our checkout generated revenue"
