Don't miss an opportunity to convert

There is one service I like to connect to for all my projects, it's Customer.io.

It allows you to send events that trigger a campaign with specific workflows and works wonderfully for many areas, such as onboarding, upgrades, and churns.

But there is also another way you can use Customer.io to improve your conversion.

I recently realized that it could happen that a few users on PDFShift would try to upgrade to a paid plan, but had issues because their card was refused (for a number of reasons). Up until then, this was left as-is, and if the user wouldn't retry again, I would not know about nor try to learn more about why they finally dropped it.

(When you think about it, that's kind of crazy. You have a user that is interested to pay for a product and tries to upgrade but their bank is refusing the payment, so they drop it and go somewhere else. You definitely need to have actions in place here to catch them before they leave! That seems so obvious when you think about it!!)

So here's what I did. I created a new campaign on Customer.io that would be triggered by an event, and every time a payment would fail on Stripe, I would receive a webhook event.

On my server, upon receiving that event, I would check if the payment is from a new customer (no previous successful payment), in which case I would send the event `first_payment_failure` to Customer.io.

(I have other actions set up when a recurring payment fails)

Then, over at Customer.io, I created a campaign based on that event's trigger, that would wait for a few hours (I choose 2 hours), then it would check if that user hasn't upgraded in between. If they are still a free user, I would send them an email asking them what happened, and how I can help.

Of course, the sender would be my personal email. That way, when they respond, they get into my inbox directly and I'm the one responding, which shows that I'm invested in helping them.

This doesn't bring too much work; it's not often that a user can't upgrade and decide to leave (thankfully) but when this happens, Customer.io has my back and I can still try to win that customer!

More broadly, you need to be aware of any areas where you could be losing a conversion (being a customer, a subscriber or anything else). If you can find a way to track them and then find ways to reach out to them to see how you could help, it could be a great way to show how you are motivated to help them, and it could make a difference. (Of course, never be too pushy or reach out if they haven't shared their email to you voluntarily).

Good luck :)