Challenge: low renewal rates
WooCommerce sells extensions which need to be renewed each year.
The renewal process is manual for customers. They essentially get a notice to renew, and need to go click to go to the site, then go through a checkout flow, re-enter their credit card details and so on.
The result was relatively low renewal rates.
Solution:
To make things easier for customers, and to improve renewal rates, I led a project to implement autorenewals. The key changes were:
- Moving to a new payment system, which included storing credit card information and automatically charging renewals on the subscriptions expiration data
- Designing new screens for showing the saved credit card information, and allowing customers to change it
- Updating the checkout process, to inform customers about automatic renewals
- Writing two sets of new email notifications – one encouraging customers to opt-in to autorenewals, and another informing customers about an upcoming renewal
- Designing the logic of the autorenew system, including how to retry failing cards and opting in users who make a new purchase
- Launching reporting for autorenewals, to understand how successful the project was
Results:
Within a year, shifting to automatic renewals double the renewal rate, and we received no negative feedback from customers about the change.
