Highlights from Subscription Lifecycle Growth in 2025

From PDF converters to BMW in-car subscriptions, recurring products have revolutionized the way businesses interact with consumers. But as competition grows, achieving sustainable growth has become increasingly complex and critical.

During Subscription Lifecycle Growth in 2025, an event in partnership with Adyen, industry leaders shared their strategies for tackling key challenges while staying ahead of market trends: 

• Avi Sharma, Senior Product Manager (Growth) at Codecademy

• Shaheen Shaah, Product Leader, Payments & Monetization at LinkedIn

• Dmitriy Yakubov, Head of North America Strategic Partnerships at Adyen

• Dylan Hoeffler, VP of Product Marketing at Recurly

Check out the event on-demand, or keep reading to get the highlights. 

The challenges of optimizing the consumer lifecycle

Every subscription business knows it—acquiring subscribers isn’t enough. The real challenge lies in retaining them and ensuring each stage of the lifecycle contributes to their long-term growth.

At LinkedIn, I think acquisition wise, we're doing pretty good, and we've seen some, good growth. It's actually the retention that, we're trying to solve for. And, it's like that golden snitch in Harry Potter that everyone covets it, but nobody really gets it. It's really hard to capture that. And, what we've learned, in the recent years is, teams our teams tried to optimize for the bookings. I can't can we increase the price, so we'll get more maybe less customers, but then we'll be making more money.

But then we realized that the quality of the customers that we were acquiring was actually not good. We would acquire some customers, and then we'll lose them very quickly.

And so to solve for that, what, we did was introduce, like, a couple of strategies to measure our experiments to measure correctly that what's not just the acquisition or the sign up improvement, but also what is the retention for these different cohorts. So we started doing one of these two things. One is if we're doing any acquisition experiment, hold it for two weeks, make a decision to launch it or not, but then look at the customers that were acquired for those two weeks over a period of six to eight weeks to see how many of them survive, which is they go from free trial to a paid subscription, and then how many of them even renew after that. And that gave us a solid understanding on what acquisition and retention strategies were really working for us in the long term.

LinkedIn knows that optimizing for immediate sign-ups doesn't ensure retention. To address this, the company has experimented to identify the acquisition strategies that also support long-term renewal.

Codecademy focuses on delivering value in early stages. From the moment users create a free account, they’re guided through an onboarding experience that recommends resources tailored specifically to their goals with the platform.  

The common denominator? Tracking the right metrics. From initial signup to sustained engagement, the panelists highlighted the importance of data when optimizing their strategies.

The power of cross-functional collaboration

Subscription success is a company-wide effort. Coordinating teams and sharing accountability is essential to creating a seamless customer experience.  

For Codecademy, coordination means aligning all teams on a shared set of metrics, ranging from account creation to conversion and retention. Frequent cross-team touchpoints and transparent dashboards ensure everyone is focused on the same outcome, enabling quick reactions to changes.  

On the other hand, Shaah shares how LinkedIn has embraced partnerships to bundle offerings and reinforce their value proposition. By sharing KPIs across teams, they’ve boosted accountability and enhanced acquisition and retention strategies.  

Lastly, Yakubov iterates on the importance of maximizing the benefits of the product and how having the right infrastructure is key when delivering value.

The right approach to voluntary and involuntary churn

Churn is a reality for all subscription businesses, and tackling it requires businesses to be both proactive and responsive. 

LinkedIn, for example, uses advanced tools like account updaters to ensure payment information stays up-to-date. Machine learning helps them route payment attempts to processors most likely to approve them, all while a 30-day grace period ensures minimal service interruption during failed payment recovery.  

I think with any product where you have free trial leading to, an attempted conversion, you are gonna have involuntary churn. And we see that more frequently with certain geographies, than others. And, the reasons why, folks churn is also, varies. You have, you know, sub cards running into low funds.

You have some that are missing information.

Some have bank specific issues. So it's I think it's important to identify why exactly folks are, churning involuntarily.

Now what we've done to combat that is, we built out we extended our Dunning's life cycle period to be longer, actually similar to, what, LinkedIn has. It's close to thirty days. That gives our customers time to update their payment methods and resolve any issues that they might be having with their card. And And it also gives them an opportunity to reach out to our customer support and, you know, request a cancellation or a refund if they need to.

We have also implemented an in house, on platform reminders for folks that, failed a payment. We were running it to the case that a lot of people didn't realize that their payment method failed. And, you know, before we had those on platform notifications, people wouldn't be able to tell that this had happened. So having that notification with an easy link to update their payment method, really helped us how we capture, some of these stale payments.

Codecademy fine-tunes their approach by identifying specific reasons behind churn, whether they’re external (e.g., card issues) or internal (e.g., unclear product value). They’ve implemented  smart dunning cycles and thoughtful reminders across channels to encourage users to update their payment details.

Referring to voluntary churn,  Adyen’s data shows that customers stay loyal when they perceive value tailored to their specific needs, making personalization a core strategy to sustain engagement effectively. 

The strategies to improve engagement

Keeping customers engaged is critical for staying competitive, increasing loyalty and retention—and our panelists know it well. Yakubov reinforces why creating personalized experiences should meet the unique needs of subscribers. 

LinkedIn continues evolving its services by introducing AI-powered features that strengthen the distinction between free and paid memberships. Even during cancellation, they share personalized usage data to remind customers of the value they’d be giving up if they suspend the service. 

I think there's two levers to monetary churn. One is, providing ongoing value through engagement, which will be most effective in helping people decide not to churn. And then there's a second where when people have decided, what can you do to recapture them? On the first side, in terms of providing engagement, what's worked for us is allowing people to set goals.

For example, if they want to sit down and have three learning sessions a week, they can set that goal, and we can send reminder emails, reminding them to come back to our platform and start learning.

So helping them engage and reminding them is one way to combat it.

Another way is to, be able to reward their progress.

Folks want to, be get that feedback from as they progress through using your subscription. And, for us, what's worked is, gamifying some of that experience. So as someone completes a lesson or creates a course, we provide them XP towards progressing on a leaderboard. And being able to measure their progress relative to other folks is both a motivator and, an encouragement tool.

Furthermore, Sharma explains how Codecademy motivates subscribers with gamified experiences like progress rewards and leaderboards. They also send email reminders to help users stay on track with goals, further reinforcing the perceived value of their platform. 

The challenges of navigating global expansion

The growth potential of new markets comes with its own set of hurdles. From regulations to consumer preferences, expanding globally demands flexibility and foresight.  

And from our side, it's it's really interesting because our core mission is to add value through payments to our customers. Right? So we continue to do two things. One is optimize what I call the payments triangle, which is author rates, cost of acceptance, and fraud, and continue innovating that space to make the lives of our clients and partners as easy as possible.

And second is really following the customer journey in how they wanna interact with the various clients, merchants that they use. So, for example, like, in the subscription billing, a lot of it has been in e com, but can we bundle that in the in person experience? So if you're at a store, let's say, you know, you walk into, prep and you wanna subscribe to a coffee plan, then you could do it at the point of sale, right, to loyalty and lifetime value of that customer beyond just that, online transaction into the in person relationship. So we're continuing to innovate with our partners in that space to continue delivering new products and services and and new innovative ways to deliver that personalized experience, downstream.

Adyen understands the importance of allowing subscribers  to pay how they want. By offering local payment methods like digital wallets and dynamic pricing, they ensure frictionless checkout experiences while stabilizing their global footprint.  

LinkedIn emphasizes the need for regional nuance,understanding each market stage, and customizing brand efforts accordingly—from localized pricing to navigating regulations. Codecademy  targets specific key markets as well, localizing pricing and keeping an eye on taxes constantly to build trust before scaling further. 

The trends that are reshaping the industry

Our experts all agreed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the market, no matter your industry:

• Codecademy is integrating AI into their personalization flow to recommend targeted features and content to enhance the  learning experience. 

• LinkedIn is leveraging AI for upselling, offering dynamic payment methods, and routing transactions to maximize approval rates. 

• Adyen is leading the way in innovating payment processes for seamless transactions— from improving authorization rates to reducing fraud risks.

As competition heats up, subscription businesses must prioritize consumer lifecycle engagement and tailoring their strategies to meet market-specific needs. Leveraging technologies like AI and data analytics will help you deliver better value and experiences to subscribers.  

Want to get even more insights? The 2025 State of Subscriptions report is launching on January 16th. Join the waitlist to get your copy before anyone else.