How to set up a notification before autocharge attempt

In the billing automation section of the Ecommerce settings you can set up billing automation for failed and successful autocharges. What’s missing is any billing automation that runs before an autocharge attempt is made.

Specifically, I want to notify annually charged subscription customers 30 days before they are going to be charged again. I have some monthly subscription items that I would like to notify several days before autocharge is attempted. I assume this exists somewhere, but I don’t know where.

That is not part of the building automation inside infusion soft. You need to set up a campaign that triggers upon the successful payment of one of those subscriptions and then 335 days later and notify the customer that they were going to be billed again in one month

Thank you for the reply.

That’s too bad it’s not part of the billing automation, since it’s entirely sensible this should be classified as notification emails, not campaign. Opted out subscribers won’t be emailed.

There’s also the problem that I have existing subs. A few hundred. How am I supposed to accurately and programmatically drop them into the right time frame in this campaign?

Set up a custom field for Last Billed Date - this will be the ‘field’ that you use in your field timers inside your campaign.

If you run a subscriptions report (ecommerce - orders - view subscriptions), you will be able to extract that data.
You can download the ContactID and the ‘last billed’ date.

From there, you run ‘data cleanup’ (Under admin) and upload your data. Match up the ContactID to the ID you are uploading and put that date into your ’Last Billed Date’ field that you set up.

Then, put people into the campaign. Since you have a specific date listed, people will automatically get the updates at the right time.

Hope that helps.

Jeff

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That’s pretty clever, Jeff. Thank you.

It would be great if a campaign tie-in to a subscription date existed as a type of field timer already, but this will work for now.

I have one follow up question: When I select “Next occurrence” in the drop down in the campaign, does it assume this is an annually recurring field?

See the image below. Is that set up right (assuming “Last login” is acutally the date I want to target)?

The Last Login field will have some date that past sometime in the last year. The intention is that this timer will trigger at 31 days before 1 year from the date in the Last Login field. So if Last Login contained July 31, 2019, this timer will trigger July 1, 2020.

I always like to use the date in field option, and make sure that every time somebody is supposed to go to the system that we actually set a specific date. If you set the next occurrence option, if somebody goes thru your campaign, erroneously, then it could trigger that reminder a year in the future.