What is a dunning email?

A dunning email is an automated message sent to a customer after a failed subscription charge, asking them to update their card or retry payment before the subscription is cancelled.

Is Stripe's built-in Smart Retries enough on its own?

Smart Retries handles the retry schedule, but by default it doesn't send the customer anything. Without a dunning email prompting them to update their card, hard declines — which no retry can fix — go unresolved until the subscription cancels.

How many dunning emails should you send?

One well-timed reminder for cases that stall typically outperforms a five-email sequence. Repeated emails for the same failed charge tend to get filtered as spam rather than acted on.

Regainly

Blog Log in Sign up

Guide

Stripe Dunning Emails: Best Practices Guide

Published 2026-08-24 by the Regainly team.

Why retries alone aren't enough

Stripe's built-in Smart Retries will keep trying a failed charge on a schedule, but it doesn't tell the customer anything by default. That's fine for a soft decline that clears up on its own — insufficient funds today, funds available next week. It does nothing for a hard decline: an expired or stolen card will fail every single retry, no matter how many times you try, until the customer actually updates their payment method.

A dunning email is what closes that gap. It's the message that turns "the charge failed silently in the background" into "the customer knows their card needs updating and has a direct link to fix it."

Timing

Don't email on the first soft decline. If a retry is scheduled for tomorrow and has a decent chance of succeeding, an email today is premature and just adds noise.
Email immediately on a hard decline. There's no retry that will fix an expired card, so the email is the entire recovery path — sending it late just shortens the window before the subscription cancels.
Send at most one follow-up reminder for cases that stall past the first email, rather than a fixed multi-email drip regardless of whether the customer engaged.

What to put in the email

State the actual reason, not a generic "there was a problem with your payment." A customer who knows their card expired can fix it in one click; a vague message just gets ignored or deleted.
Put the card-update link front and center. Every extra step between the email and fixing the card loses a share of customers who would otherwise have acted.
Skip the guilt-trip language. Subscriptions lapse from expired cards far more often than from a customer trying to avoid paying — treat it as a routine fix, not a delinquent-account notice.
Say what happens next — when the subscription will actually be cancelled if nothing changes — so there's a clear reason to act now rather than later.

Common mistakes

The most common failure mode is treating every decline the same way: one generic email, sent on a fixed delay, regardless of whether the decline was a temporary bank hiccup or a card that will never work again. The second most common is over-emailing — five reminders for one failed charge trains customers to ignore the fifth just as much as the first. Decline-code-aware timing and a single well-placed reminder consistently outperform both.

See Regainly's automated dunning email sequence · What is involuntary churn?