Challenge

Noom was preparing to expand its digital health platform around the globe when the team noticed a large number of credit card declines were preventing new customers from signing up for Noom’s services. “We had a significant issue around credit card acceptance,” said Brian Wright, Noom’s VP of International Growth and Operations. “We saw double-digit credit card decline rates when people were trying to sign up for Noom.” Noom recognised that this friction in the sign-up process not only resulted in a poor experience for users, but would significantly impede Noom’s global expansion and revenue growth.

It became apparent that Noom’s existing payments provider didn’t deliver the data Noom needed to better understand the poor performance. “We knew that we would never be able to scale the business without fixing this critical challenge,” said Wright.

Solution

Noom launched an A/B test between Stripe and its existing payments provider to see which delivered the best credit card acceptance rates. For three months, Noom ran an even split test for users across the US and UK. The differences were stark. “Based on the experiment that we ran, we saw a high single-digit improvement in our overall credit card acceptance rates with Stripe,” said Wright.

Encouraged by the results of the A/B test, Noom decided to transition all of its payment volume to Stripe. The process to migrate their billing data took just a month and was especially smooth thanks to Stripe’s intuitive documentation and strong customer support. “Migrating payment information is a sensitive process. Stripe really took a consultative approach to help us make sure we did it right,” Wright said.

Results

Higher acceptance rates lead to revenue lift

The higher credit card acceptance rates Noom experienced with Stripe were made possible by Stripe’s modern acquiring platform. Stripe Adaptive Acceptance uses machine learning to optimise authorisation messages and make smarter retry decisions instantly, which helps Noom accept as many legitimate transactions as possible and generate revenue with no extra effort. With this powerful payment intelligence, Noom could improve its customer experience by reducing unnecessary declines. Plus, because Adaptive Acceptance works globally without additional integration work, Noom could confidently double down on its international expansion.
“As we continue to work with Stripe to streamline payment processing, we expect to see marked improvements in revenue as it relates to payment processing,” Wright said.

Reduced monthly churn increases customer lifetime value

Because Noom operates on a subscription model, Stripe’s impact extended beyond just the initial customer sign-up. By utilising Stripe Billing, Noom is able to automate recurring payments from subscribers who opt-in to multi-month plans. Stripe Billing helps Noom reduce involuntary customer churn caused by missed payments or declined cards through features such as Smart Retries and Card Account Updater. With Smart Retries, Stripe retries failed payments at the optimal day and time in order to improve the acceptance rates of recurring payments. Stripe also works with card networks to automatically attempt to update saved card details whenever a card has been replaced. This means customers can continue using Noom’s platform without interruption even if their credit card number has been updated. Smart Retries and Card Account Updater work together to reduce churn and improve Noom’s customer lifetime value.

Greater customer reach with more country and payment method coverage

It was Noom’s international expansion plans that first spurred it to examine its credit card acceptance rates and make a change. Noom needed strategies for navigating a complex global environment of local currencies and variable payment methods, such as EPS, Ideal, Sepa Debit, Bancontact, Giropay, and SOFORT. In Germany, for example, Noom discovered that direct debit was a higher priority for consumers than credit cards. With Stripe, Noom could accept direct debit payments more easily than with other processors.
So far, the results have been so successful that Noom plans to continue expanding how it works with Stripe. With Stripe, Noom will launch tests on new local payment methods and create more payment flexibility for Noom customers across the world.