uk-netmarketing Archive (2011-2015)

This is a common issue in subscription businesses. If you send people emails to ask them to actively renew a large percentage will just not open the email or because you require them 'to do something' will let it lapse when they would be fine with an automatic renewal. Your user base will decline much faster. You could say 'well these people stopped using the service anyway and had effectively unsubscribed' - but its easier to warm up a base that still has a subscription in place than re-win unsubscribes. And there is also the revenue to consider.

I worked with a social network and once shared an office with Match.com, the auto-renew was a large percentage of calls to customer service in both cases. The standard policy was to stop the payment going forward but not to refund missed payments. The call centre guys had some latitude to make ex gratia refunds in case of hardship or special circumstances (say the guy was out of the UK for 3 months or in a coma and couldn't read bank statements).

I think you do enough to warn people that it will renew. Perhaps you could send a welcome email that also reinforces this but I can't see what else you can do. If people don't check their bank statements each month then its their fault. I assume that the payment is clearly labelled on their statement so there is no confusion. If not make sure it is.

You could also send an email afterwards saying 'thank you - your automatic subscription has renewed'. This is also an opportunity to remind them of USPs etc.

The fact that they did not log in is not your fault, they have access to the service and can log in at any time. You could, as a business policy, email people that have not logged in for a period of months and try and re-engage. 'Hey we noticed you haven't logged in for a while, is there something we can do?' and re-affirm the USPs, list new features, ask for feedback. But the reality is a large percentage of those emails will be ignored.

If the payment is monthly and the user can cancel at any time then I think you are fine to leave it 'as is'. I had a case with a large financial services information provider who waited until we had missed the deadline to give notice to send an email saying 'hey we noticed you haven't logged in for a while' - in fact nearly a year. The people that set up the contract had left the business and no-one used the product as it was a rubbish news service. The contract renewed for one year at £15k and the sneaky sales guy tried to insist that we had to pay the full year for a rubbish product. Now that is what I would call unethical behaviour. In the end the CEO agreed that we could pay just 3 months to end the contract.




________________________________
 From: Caroline Bottomley <caroline at radarmusicvideos.com>
To: uk-netmarketing <uk-netmarketing at mm.chinwag.com> 
Sent: Monday, 26 August 2013, 12:07
Subject: [uk-netmarketing] Refund policy
 


Hello All,


Another question for your collective wit:

We run on subscriptions - directors pay £12.99 a month or £40 for 6 months to access and pitch on music video briefs.
When they subscribe, it clearly says on-screen it is a renewing subscription and if they want to cancel the renewal, they can do that in the settings are of their account.
7 days before renewal, we send a reminder email with date of renewal, that we will be taking money from them and if they want to cancel, go to settings page.

We still get emails from directors asking very nicely if we would refund the payment just taken, they didn't realise it was renewing and that if we look at their account, we'll see they haven't logged in for xyz/ a long time.

At the moment, we say no refunds. I think we make it very clear and I think that's playing fair.
BUT
I know sometimes email don't always get through, even though our site logs show it left and even though they say it's not in their spam/junk filters.
And I worry that having a no refunds policy is not customer friendly.

Would it be better to take a hit on refunds (maybe £150-£300 a month) and benefit from the possible goodwill and maybe word of mouth we would get from making refunds within say 3 days of payment taken?

If there's anyone on here with wise words and /or experience of running subscription services I'd be grateful for your advice
thank you

Caroline






Caroline Bottomley
Managing Director
Radar
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