Your dunning cheat sheet for success

Here's a cheat sheet you can refer to when it comes to building your dunning strategy based on real world experiences with our work with merchants:

1. Split your dunning campaigns by billing frequency

Monthly subscribers need a shorter window, around 27 days, so a failed invoice doesn't bleed into the next billing cycle and stack two failures at once. Annual subscribers can go 49 to 60 days. One campaign for everything is almost always costing you recoveries.

2. Fill the communication gaps

If your email schedule looks like Day 7, Day 22, Day 42, you're leaving customers with failed payments for three weeks without hearing anything. Nearly 50% of successful payment updates happen on days an email is sent. More touchpoints, not just a longer window.

3. Rotate your CTAs across every email

If a subscriber ignored the "update your payment method" prompt twice, a third one won't land either. Try varying the angle: urgency first (your plan will pause), then value (here's what you lose), then price anchoring (if you let this lapse, you won't keep your current rate). You don't know which one will hook them, so give them different ones.

4. Stop retrying hard declines

Soft declines (insufficient funds, temporary holds) are worth aggressive retries. Hard declines (closed card, invalid account number) are not. Retrying a card that no longer exists wastes retry attempts and can hurt your issuer relationship. Check the decline code before queuing another attempt.

5. Send failed transactions for recovery within 24 hours

Recovery rates drop significantly the longer you wait after a failure. Funds shift, customers notice, cards expire. Whatever retry logic you're using, your own or a third-party tool, the 24-hour window after the initial failure is when it works best. Waiting 48 to 72 hours and wondering why recovery is low is a very common trap.

Merchants who have tuned these five things tend to sit 20%-30% percentage points above the default recovery rate. None of it requires ripping out your billing stack.