RECURLY ENGAGEMENT — ADVANCED PLAYBOOK
Five advanced retention plays
Tactics from the top decile of Recurly Engagement customers — ranked by leverage, with a setup checklist and a lift range for each.
Get the playbookTop-decile retention teams running advanced Engagement plays
Grow recurring revenue at every stage
Grow recurring revenue at every stage
Subscriptions
Subscription management for high-volume digital commerce
Play 1 — cohort-aware winback
The highest-leverage play, full stop. Segment by cancel reason, then send a different offer per archetype. Average lift: 14%.
Play 2 — payment-failure save flow
Pair Recurly's intelligent retries with a cohort-specific in-app prompt the moment a card declines. Lift range: 6–11%.
Play 3 — pause-instead-of-cancel
Inserted into the cancel flow with the right framing, pause converts cancels into deferred renewals. Lift range: 8–18% of the cancel cohort.
Commerce
Native subscription management app for Shopify
Play 4 — early-warning re-engagement: trigger an in-app or email path the moment day-7, day-14, or day-30 signals predict the cliff.
Support memberships, bundles, and prepaid plans with no-code setup, pricing experiments, and API integrations.
Offer subscribers a self-service portal to skip, swap, or cancel plans.
Engage
Personalized in-app subscriber prompts
Predict cancellations and trigger targeted flows that retain subscribers.
Build and test subscriber paths that drive product adoption.
Sync subscriber actions, like upgrades/downgrades to Recurly Billing instantly.
RevRec
Automated revenue recognition for recurring revenue models
Cut revenue compliance costs and time by removing manual, error-prone work.
Automate ASC-606 and IFRS-15 compliance.
Get real-time reporting and analytics in prepackaged reports built for subscriptions.
The five plays, ranked
Acquire and retain more
- Personalized acquisition and retention offers
- Real-time, in-product engagement
- AI-powered subscriber insights
Launch quickly, iterate often
- Flexible plan launches and testing without engineering
- Personalized journeys with unified billing + engagement data.
- Built-in retention tools and insights to prove impact
Simplify complexity, and scale securely
- Secure platform for billing and payments
- Low-code plan management for faster launches
- Seamless integration with ERP, CRM, and data systems
Automate compliance, improve forecasting
- Automated billing, invoicing, and recognition
- Smart revenue recovery tools that reduce churn
- Real-time reporting and forecasting
Stack them in this order
What the top decile runs
5+
plays run by the top decile
<2
plays run by the median brand
14%
avg lift from cohort-aware winback
3x
play count, top decile vs median
RECURLY ENGAGEMENT
AI that works for you
Recurly Engagement combines 15+ years of subscription expertise with your subscriber data — so you don't just retain customers, you stack the plays the top decile actually runs.
Explore Compass
Play 5 — pricing experiments
Run controlled price tests on cohorts surfaced by the engagement model. Lift range: 4–9% on net retained ARR.
Stack the plays in order
Order matters: winback first (highest leverage), payment-failure save second, then pause, early-warning, and pricing tests last.
Setup checklist per play
Each play in the playbook ships with a setup checklist, the cohorts to target, and the lift range to expect in the first 90 days.
Inside the advanced retention playbook
A breakdown of the five plays the top decile of Recurly Engagement customers actually runs — ranked by leverage, with a setup checklist and lift range for each, including:
- The “pause” dividend: How top merchants drove a 337% increase in pause usage to retain customers who would have otherwise canceled
- The AI-driven subscriber: Why 43% of consumers are now comfortable with AI managing subscriptions, especially for fraud prevention and content personalization
Download the playbook to see the recommended stack order — and which two plays to ship first if you only have a quarter to invest.
See the data
Five plays the top decile actually runs
Get the playbook the top decile of Recurly Engagement customers is running right now.
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