Subscription signup: unlocking hidden revenue streams
more signups
top line revenue
LTV impact
in sign up conversion rates
in CAC
Onboarding new subscribers takes work. So does maximizing revenue.
Whether you're building and marketing a recurring SaaS subscription, digital service, or consumer goods, it requires a solid team effort.
Much has been written about how to drive a company's marketing wins and increase sales.
But what about recovering subscription signup losses?
Marketing, customer success and business execs understand the painstaking effort involved in guiding potential consumers through the funnel and investing time and resources to garner subscription signups.
Which is why nothing is more frustrating than watching those potential consumers arrive at checkout, and hand over their credit card details, only to have their payment declined. Potential subscription is lost.
It’s disheartening, and in many cases, it can be avoided.
The hidden cost of failed subscription signup
Here's a fact: 15% of potential subscribers get rejected at signup due to card declines.
Simply put, for every 100 customers that enter their credit card details and hit “Subscribe”, only 85 will become paying subscribers.
That’s an astounding financial loss at the moment of conversion, especially when considering this next fact.
More than half of signup payment rejections are in fact valid subscribers.
Of the 15% of subscribers that were rejected at signup, more than half (!) were in fact, valid consumers.
They were blocked or flagged and couldn’t complete the purchase, although you would be happy to have them as your subscribers.
This could be avoided and overturned with Bounce, which can take up to 30% of your signup declines and turn them into absolute wins.
Recovering lost revenue with Bounce
How does that translate into lost revenue?
It's about 5% of your top line.
5% of revenue, which, if not for a payment failure, would be part of your company's core revenue.
At Bounce, we help merchants recover failed subscription signups by seamlessly identifying and approving them in real time.
Our AI-powered engine uses machine learning to analyze tens of thousands of data points, identifying the good deals that were wrongly flagged as bad and instantly approving them.
With our integrated subscription win-back policy, valid users are auto-approved at the subscription checkout.
No wait time. No checkout friction. No-risk. Your lost signup subscribers are saved and enjoy a flawless signup experience.
From a company growth perspective, the wins don’t just stop at checkout.
They trickle down to many other areas, affecting a wide host of KPIs. Let’s have a look:
Company growth: the Bounce impact
- Top Line Impact - Losing deals during subscription signup means less total revenue. These deals should’ve been yours.
- Cost of Acquisition (CAC) - After investing in acquiring a new subscriber, facing a failed signup checkout means starting over and increasing the Cost of Acquisition. Less conversions -> higher CAC.
- Retargeting Expenditure - Once these customers are declined, they are not going to come back easily. A failed subscription signup will result in spending additional marketing funds on retargeting campaigns to bring your consumers back.
- LTV (Lifetime Value) impact - Negative experiences at subscription signup checkout directly decrease the overall Lifetime Value (LTV) of customers, as they will probably not come back, and will, of course, not reach the next payment cycle.
- Conversion Rates Setback - Losing customers during subscription signup means lower checkout-to-paid conversion.
- Purchase Size - Rejections at signup may lead prospects to rethink the size of their purchase. Even if they complete their transaction with another payment method, they’re far more likely to opt for a lower-priced product or service.
Improved KPIs
more signups
top line revenue
LTV impact
in sign up conversion rates
in CAC
Further reading
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"
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.