Looking for a way to handle failed payments and recurring subscriptions, as well as the automated emails that go out for your subscription-based customers? You can stop worrying now because we created a Stripe Subscriptions Tutorial just for you!
It’s important to note that Stripe actually has automated bill collection features built in and you can manage your free trials, your emails that go out when the trial is over, your branding and failed payments.
Step One
Go into settings and then click on ‘subscriptions and emails’. If you can’t find it, you can do a search using the search bar at the top of the page. Once you’re in, you’ll be able to manage your free trial messaging.
There are regulations and card network requirements for free trials, and if you want to be compliant with that and you do offer free trials, you’re going to want to make sure to enable the ‘send a reminder email seven days before’ option.
You also can have a cancelation policy, as well as adding ‘a one-time trial over message to statement descriptor’. These options are all under the ‘free trial messaging’ heading. There’s also a ‘learn more here’ link to click to make sure that you are fully compliant based on your state or your country.
Step Two
What happens if your payments have failed? You can send an email about an upcoming renewal and send an email about an expiring card. Stripe knows if your client’s card is about to expire and it can automatically send your client an email
at the beginning of the month to remind them to update their card. Click on the ‘preview email’ and you can see how that will look. It’s pretty cool, right?
You can also customize the design: click on ‘customize design’ and it opens up a page where you can make changes. You can put your branding in here, your colors and so on. You won’t be able to copy and paste the colors over, so you’ll need your RGB details.
You can even add your logo by dropping it in from your personal folders, or you can add an icon if you want. You might want to change the color if your logo is the same color as the background so people can see it better, or even add an accent color. Click ‘save changes’.
Step Three
Another thing you can do is to manage your failed payments – the steps you would like to take when your customers payment method fails. You can do lots of things with this – all the options are further down the page under the ‘manage failed payments’ heading.
You can use smart retries, which will retry the failed payment. Now, obviously, if the card is expired, this isn’t going to work, but you can retry up to four times within either one week, two weeks, three weeks or a month, or even do your own custom schedule.
You can send emails when the card payments fail, and there’s an option to view how that email will look. If all retries fail, you can either cancel, mark it as unpaid or leave it as is.
Choose the best option from the dropdown box – for instance, you’ll want to choose ‘cancel’ if they’re not going to pay for the subscription. If all retries fail, you can either leave it as it is on the dropdown menu or mark it as uncollectible – that’s for the invoice section.
If someone disputes their payment, you can either cancel at the end, cancel immediately, or leave it as is by picking the best option from the menu. Again, up to you.
If you’re in Europe, scroll down the page to find the ‘manage payments that require 3D Secure section’ and use the options to customize the data however you want to meet the requirements.
You can manage your invoices, you can send them a finalized invoice or a reminder if an invoice hasn’t been paid. This is all in the ‘manage invoices sent to customers’ section.
If you want to keep reminding them and bugging them to pay their invoices, you can adjust the ‘subscription status’ options to send more reminders. You can also set up ‘pause all payment collections’ based on your needs.
If you have a subscription product, it’s super important to be able to customize this stuff. On my front end, I use HighLevel, which is an all-in-one platform that I use to replace all the tools in my marketing agency that I used to use before.
I don’t need paid funnels anymore. I don’t need ClickFunnels anymore. I don’t need ClickSend or CallRail or any of that. I can literally integrate Stripe in with my funnel inside of HighLevel and then I can actually nurture my leads, track my pipeline, send them campaigns, text and emails, all automatically.
If you’re interested in getting a free trial and my bonuses, you can use this link: http://ghl.nerdlevel.io/