Colorescience took recovery from 27% to 46%
The mineral sun-care brand now saves 70% more subscribers from failed cards than it did before. No migration and no new hires. MaxLTV runs on top of the subscription platform they already had.
The leak
Colorescience sells daily SPF and skincare on subscription. It's a product people are supposed to use every day, which makes a missed shipment expensive. When a card fails and the charge isn't recovered, the brand loses that order and every order that would have come after it.
Before MaxLTV, Colorescience recovered 27% of failed subscription payments. Under 30% usually means the easiest money in the business is sitting on the table.
What changed
- Soft and hard declines handled differently. A card that's temporarily short gets retried. A card that's closed gets a customer update request instead of more retries.
- Retries timed to when cards clear. Early mornings and around payroll dates, spread over weeks instead of bunched up.
- Card updates before they fail. Subscribers get a prompt ahead of expiration, so fewer charges fail at all.
- No migration. MaxLTV sits on top of Ordergroove. The subscription setup stayed where it was.
Recovery rate, before and after
Share of failed subscription payments recovered. That's 19 more points, or 1.7x the subscribers saved. The dashed line marks 30%, where recovery stops being an easy win and starts being table stakes.
What a recovered subscriber is worth
Recovery rate sounds like a small operational metric. Put it in orders and it isn't. A recovered payment isn't one saved charge: the subscriber stays on the plan, and the orders after it come back too.
Lifetime figures from the MaxLTV dashboard. With a 90-day average order cadence, many recovered subscribers haven't reached their next order yet, so the multiple keeps growing.