Robert Skrob: Monthly Subscription Billing Checklist: Unless Your People are Doing This, You are Losing Money Every Month

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Through the process of working with several different membership marketers, Denise and I have discovered an alarming truth: few of their internal member relations teams are performing the basic systems necessary to retain members.

Their people often mean well—they have the best of intentions—but they just don’t know what is necessary to ensure they are collecting the full amount of membership due revenue each month.

Since publishing the offer last month for Denise McKinlay (within my office) to create membership reports, I’m happy to say that several people have taken me up on that opportunity.

Through the process of working with several different membership marketers, Denise and I have discovered an alarming truth: few of their internal member relations teams are performing the basic systems necessary to retain members. Their people often mean well—they have the best of intentions—but they just don’t know what is necessary to ensure they are collecting the full amount of membership due revenue each month.

For instance, what do you think is the most common reason a member drops a membership continuity program? If your answer is lack of value, in most cases you’d be wrong. For most membership marketers, the single most common reason members drop out is because of expired credit cards. The crazy part about this is how easy it is to create an automated system to address this problem.

In addition, your people must also review your “All Sales Report” for outstanding balances. The failed invoice report only records invoices that have been charged and failed. If a card has expired, Infusionsoft creates an invoice but doesn’t try to process the card, thus it never shows up on the failed charges report. This simple system helps you capture revenue and prevent the single largest reason members drop out of your program.

To guide you and your team, here is a quick checklist Denise pulled together of the simple systems your people should be doing to ensure you are receiving all the revenue from your membership program that you should. Review this report with your team. If anything is unclear, you may want to engage Denise for some simple training, it usually lasts less than half a day and ensures your systems are working properly. Send an email to me at Robert@AssociationMarketing.com with “Denise Training” in the subject line for more information.

Maximize Monthly Membership Revenue

☐ Check for payment failures monthly and have a process (campaign and follow-up sequence) in place to recapture cards and payments. This should contain at least three emails (four or five days apart) and a call.

☐ Have triggers in place to look for expiring cards. About 40 days before expiration, put a sequence/campaign in place with at least three emails and possibly even an outbound customer service phone call to let the member know the card is expiring.

☐ Balance payment transactions in Infusionsoft with the Merchant account and then the bank. The best automated systems will glitch from time to time. Verify you receive all of the funds Infusionsoft processes. Create a report verifying that all transactions processed within Infusionsoft were deposited into your checking account.

☐ Make sure the cancellation process cancels subscriptions, adds an end date to the subscription, and corrects any tags. An internal form is a fast and easy way to streamline this process and ensure all actions are completed accurately.

Everyone who has a tag has a subscription. It makes it easier to track discrepancies.

☐ Make sure that members and subscriptions match. Pull subscriptions that are active and make sure they are in the membership tag.

☐ Have one tag for members without any campaigns or functions attached to it. Use this tag to track all members and verify subscriptions whatever the varying subscriptions or campaigns may be. Too many membership marketers are using whatever tag they create for the campaign as a member tag. This means keeping track of multiple tags for members, make tracking, reporting and understanding more difficult and cumbersome—keep it simple.

☐    Provide an online mechanism for members to update their credit cards securely; however, make sure this mechanism always notifies someone on your team to prevent duplicate records and to ensure the charge goes through properly.

☐ Maintain a process sheet for employees so they can quickly reference what each tag and subscription means.