How to send renewal reminders for Paddle Billing

What are Renewal Reminder Emails?

It's easy to overlook important dates and deadlines like subscription renewals. Sometimes a company might not even know about an active subscription until it renews.

Sending a brief reminder email a couple of days before the renewal is due is a good practice to avoid having to deal with support and refunds after the fact.

Include a information about:

the subscription plan they are on,
the number of licenses purchased, and
any one-off charges on the next invoice

Additionally you might want to include:

a link to your product website explaining what the software does (keep in mind the recipient may be a billing recipient and have no idea what it is),
a link to the app login page so users with the credentials can login right away, and
a reply-to email address (or link to the help desk) in case the recipient does not have login credentials, so they can reach out.

But should you always send a reminder email? Let's take a look at different strategies.

Choosing different strategies depending on the billing interval

Receiving a monthly reminder of an upcoming renewal, followed by the renewal confirmation and possibly another email with the invoice, isn't beneficial and just leads to information fatigue.

But if you're using usage based pricing and the invoice amount changes every month that's a different matter. The Boathouse renewal reminder emails for Paddle Billing include a line by line item of the upcoming invoice including the base subscription fee and any one-off charges your system includes.

The most common reason to send renewal reminders is if the time between payments is large, for example on an annual plan. Then it's a good idea to give your customer a heads-up for the following reasons:

1. Customers can check if the payment method is up-to-date

Credit cards expire and updating them is a error prone task and often services are overlooked. If you're considered an essential service by your customer, a reminder will nudge them to check that the payment method is still valid when it comes time to renew.

2. Customers can check if the payment method has enough funds

The renewal amount on an annual plan can be quite large or significant usage have increased the amount. The reminder email should therefore also include a brief overview of how large the payment is scheduled to be.

3. Customers can check evaluate if your service is still needed

Depending on your moral compass you might be thinking: "Now, wait a minute. I don't want to remind my user they're still paying for something they don't need. They'll just cancel and I lose money."

But if you think about it, it actually makes business sense to give the customer the opportunity to reconsider before hand.

If they discover the charge after the fact, you'll most likely get a support ticket and have to refund the payment anyhow and possibly incur transaction costs you can't recover. But in general you'll just leave a much better impression by being transparent and proactive.

4. Zombie accounts are discovered

More often than not an employee purchased your software on the company credit card only to leave the company and not cancel the subscription when they leave. Reminder emails to the employee's old account will either be forwarded to someone else where the subscription will be discovered and taken care of before the payment. Or the renewal email will bounce and you will receive notice about an email address that doesn't exist anymore and can take action based on that.

Doesn't Paddle Billing have built-in Pre-Billing Notifications?

The old version of Paddle (called Paddle Classic) did have the option to send customers an email when their subscription plan was up for renewal. The setting could be enabled on an account level, not on a subscription plan level. So if you had mixed monthly and annual plans every customer would get the reminder email.

The newest version of Paddle (called Paddle Billing) doesn't have this option anymore. But the good news is, you can not only get that feature back with the Boathouse Paddle Billing Add-On. It's also more flexible, letting you choose reminder settings for each plan you've setup.

TL;DR & Steps to send renewal reminder emails for Paddle Billing

Reminder emails are such a simple way to avoid support tickets and adopt a transparent business practice. Using the Boathouse Customer Portal for Paddle you can easily send reminders with just a few steps:

1. Sign up for Boathouse

If you haven't already, create a Boathouse account and connect it to your Paddle Billing account.

2. Connect your Postmark Account

Head to the Emails page in Boathouse and if you haven't already done so, connect your Postmark Account.

3. Activate and customize the renewal reminder for any of your plans

Choose which plans to send a reminder email for and select how many days in advance. Then select the email template to use from your Postmark templates.