Hi Laurence,
We have developed an Infusionsoft add-on membership center (called CustomerHub) that automatically manages both the content protection as well as the ongoing billing management issues (expiring credit cards, declined payments, profile changes) that result naturally from selling a recurring membership product.
Reason I tell you this is not to get you to use the product (although it does sound like a perfect fit for you so go here if you're interested:
https://www.infusedsystems.com/products/customerhub - I realize the information is a bit sparse right now which is why we'll be releasing a product-specific website in the next week or so). Rather, I just want to let you know that we have a lot of experience dealing with these matters.
Here is what we recommend to our users:
1.
Don't use a follow-up sequence in tandem with your triggers---this will only dilute the process and breed additional confusion and work (i.e. it would require you to build in more triggers to stop the follow-up sequence after a successful payment has been made). Rather, make sure to correctly set your default number of retries and number of days between retries in the order settings, then simply utilize the technology already built into the triggers to follow up with the right message at the right time.
For example:
Trigger 1 for payment failure #1 (day one) - email telling the customer that a payment has failed and, in the case of using CustomerHub, giving them the login information to go ahead and take care of the payment on their own.
Trigger 2 for payment failure #2 (day three) - email telling the customer that the payment has failed multiple times and not been resolved and warning them that they'll be losing membership access/benefits if they do not take care of payment in the next 48 hours.
Trigger 3 payment failure #3 (day five) - email telling the customer that their outstanding balance still has not been resolved and that their membership access has been shut off.
You can and should also set up similar triggers for credit card expiration notices.
For both types of triggers, you can see an example of a few email templates that we give to our CustomerHub users here:
http://support.customerhub.net/faqs/resources-2/email_templates (granted these are pretty generic but at least they'll give you a starting point)
2.
Automate as much as possible. As you've probably already figured out, handling all of these issues MANUALLY can become a huge chore - especially if you have more than a handful of members
.
The good news, as mentioned above, is that the entire process from membership sign up to handling failed payments and expiring credit cards to shutting off membership access or reinstating someone's access can be handled automatically by CustomerHub (that's one of the primary reasons we built the product).
However, even if you don't want to use CustomerHub to store your membership content (or be your membership site), you can still use it to greatly reduce your workload by handling only the collections and billing issues associated with offering a membership.
In summary, here's a link that shows a screenshot of the default recommended order triggers in Infusionsoft (of course you can customize these to your hearts content):
http://support.customerhub.net/faqs/setup-tutorials/order_triggersGood luck and I hope this information was helpful! Let me know if you have any questions about the details.
Best,
Kyle
