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Why does a customer have their dunning campaign inactive?

When managing failed payments, it's important to understand why a customer's dunning campaign might become inactive.

Lucas Soares avatar
Written by Lucas Soares
Updated over 5 months ago

Key concepts

What is a Dunning Campaign?

A dunning campaign is an automated email sequence designed to recover failed payments. There are two perspectives to consider:

  1. Company Level: The configured email sequence template that defines:

    • Number and timing of emails

    • Optional discount offers

    • Smart Retry settings

    • Email content and branding

    • SMS notifications (if enabled)
      ​

  2. Customer Level: The actual instance of the campaign running for a specific customer, including:

    • Scheduled emails and SMS messages

    • Smart Retry payment attempts

    • Campaign status tracking

Example:

Your team configured the Primary Dunning Campaign in Churnkey's dashboard:

  • 3 emails (immediate, day 3, day 6)

  • No discount

  • Smart Retries enabled with Payday strategy

  • Optional SMS notifications

When a customer's payment fails on January 1st at 9:00 AM, we'll create campaign as:

  1. First email sent immediately (Jan 1st, 9:00 AM)

  2. Second email scheduled to January 4th

  3. Third email scheduled to January 7th

Precision Retries will take action in the optimal times for best success rate. Checkout the details here: https://docs.churnkey.co/failed-payment-recovery/payment-recovery#precision-retries

Deactivation Reasons

If any of the following events happens during a campaing, we'll be deactivating it immediately.


1st Payment Recovery Through Retries

The campaign deactivates when payment is successfully recovered through any of these retry methods:

  1. Payment Provider Retries

    • Automatic retries done by your payment provider. E.g. Smart Retries from Stripe

    • Follows the provider's default retry schedule
      ​

  2. Churnkey Auto Retries

    • Optimized retry attempts managed by Churnkey

    • Synced with campaign communications
      ​

  3. Precision Retries

    • Churnkey's own mechanism of retry

    • Automatically handles the retries

2nd Subscription Status Changes

A campaign automatically deactivates when a subscription enters any of these states:

  1. Cancelled

    • Applies to both immediate cancellations and end-of-term cancellations

    • Stripe status: canceled

    • All scheduled actions are cancelled
      ​

  2. Incomplete Expired

    • Occurs when initial subscription payment fails

    • Applies when Stripe's payment behavior is set to default_incomplete

    • Stripe status: incomplete_expired
      ​

  3. Active

    • When the pending invoice is paid (through Stripe or ChurnKey)

    • Stripe status: active

    • Campaign success is tracked for analytics
      ​

  4. Ended

    • No further retry attempts or emails will be sent

    • Note: ChurnKey doesn't perform post-cancellation charges

    • Stripe status: ended
      ​

  5. Deleted

    • When subscription is removed from customer's profile

    • Stripe status: deleted

3rd Invoice Status Changes

The campaign also deactivates when the associated invoice status changes to:

  1. Voided

    • When invoice is explicitly voided

    • Stripe status: void

  2. Uncollectible

    • When marked as uncollectible by Stripe or manually

    • Stripe status: uncollectible

  3. Deleted

    • When invoice is removed

    • Stripe status: deleted

  4. Paid

    • Regardless of the way it was recovered

    • Stripe status: paid

    • Success is attributed to the appropriate recovery method

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What happens with our current emails scheduled if we deactivate a campaign?

After disabling a segmented Campaign, we only stop the creation of new email sequences. The current emails scheduled will stay in place to be delivered!

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