Involuntary Churn represents the customers that weren’t able to pay Apple at the subscription renewal date and the following 60 days.
These customers are followed and reported under the label “Billing Retry” by Apple. As mentioned above this billing retrial period continues for 60 days after which Apple considers the subscription canceled. Some of these customers in “Billing Retry” status eventually end up paying and are recovered as subscribers.
This “Billing Retry” period is designed to reduce churn: without it, customers who failed to pay would be lost instantly. However, this creates a sneaky element for subscription management. With high Billing Retry rates your ItS numbers can seem artificially higher than they are and lead to wrong decisions on ad platform, package or country selection.
In a nutshell, all those new subscribers you have acquired, although still reported under active subscribers, could be non-paying customers that will eventually leave. Therefore having a good handle on Billing Retry numbers and those who are recovered could result in important strategic decisions like stopping marketing activities in a country, abandoning a package type for another or completely changing your marketing mix.
One of the most effective actions you could take is to remind those customers to update their billing information.
Please click to learn more about how to get your customers to update their billing information.
There is also Apple’s Grace Period feature that leverages “recovered” customers from Billing Retry. Based on your numbers, activating this feature could automatically uplift your Proceeds around 5%.
Please click to learn more about the Grace Period and how it works.
