Customer retention

Customer retention is the ability of a business to retain its customers. Retention is measured by the percentage of customers a company keeps over its total number of customers within a specific timeframe.

In this article, we’ll unveil why customer retention is important, explore statistics and benefits, and compare customer retention and loyalty. We’ll also show you how to calculate customer retention rates and discover some excellent examples.

Why is customer retention important?

Customer retention relates to the number of new customers acquired and the existing customers who leave by not returning to purchase, canceling subscriptions, or closing contracts. That said, by calculating the customer retention rate, companies can determine how loyal their customers are and the effectiveness of their customer service. In turn, if there is a need, a business can devise ways to improve their customers' experience.

Customer retention is essential to a brand for several reasons. Let’s highlight some of them.

Saves marketing costs

Acquiring a new customer costs 5x more than retaining a customer. As such, customer retention saves a company money and reduces its marketing expenditure by keeping existing customers interacting with its products and services. Additionally, since existing customers are already familiar with a brand's offerings, marketers spend significantly less time on customer support, further enhancing efficiency.

Fosters repeat sales

Existing customers are more likely to buy new products or services from a company. However, customers will only buy again if they believe the brand offers a better shopping experience than competitors.

Benefits from word-of-mouth advertising

Loyal and happy customers give a business the advantage of word-of-mouth promotion at no cost. Existing customers are more likely to tell their family members and friends about an enterprise, its products, and its services. And given that customers, especially those who are still prospects, respect the opinion of people who are close to them, they will be convinced to make purchases from a specific business.

Have a look at these statistics: 46% of customers in America get brand information from family members, while 45% get info on potential purchases from friends. Moreover, 92% of customers trust the opinion of friends and family more than other marketing strategies.

That said, the bottom line is that an existing customer is more likely to make referrals. New customers a business gains via word of mouth cost much less to acquire and have a significantly higher lifetime value compared to customers acquired in other ways.

Allows to get useful feedback

Existing customers give valuable feedback, which, if implemented, can enable a business to run more efficiently. By interacting with a business over time, existing customers are in a better place to give feedback about the areas that need to be improved. Repeat customers are easily approachable, and their suggestions for improvement can help at any time. Implementing customer feedback can help a business benefit from new opportunities that increase sales and retention rates.

Earn profit on premium-priced products

Existing customers are less conscious of the prices of products compared to new customers. Loyal customers already value a company and are ready to pay a premium fee to access the services or products the business offers.

If you are still unsure about the importance of customer retention for your business, let’s discover some statistics that provide you with real proof presented in numbers.

Customer Retention Statistics

Customer retention is a valuable metric that directly affects your business, profitability, and success. Here are some important statistics that support this statement:

• customer acquisition is from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining existing clients;
• the increase in customer retention by 5% brings an increase in profit by 25%;
• the probability of selling to existing customers ranges from 60% to 70%, while for new clients, it is only 5% to 20%;
• 61% of small businesses report that over 50% of their revenue comes from repeat purchases rather than new clients;
• the order value of a repeat customer is 67% higher than a new client;
• loyal customers bring 50% more people than new clients;
• repeat customers are 50% more likely to buy new products;
• customer acquisition costs associated with traditional retail companies have increased by 54%;
• 17% of companies consider implementing loyalty programs to improve retention;
  clients spend between 31 and 36 months with a company.

In addition to the advantages mentioned above, customer retention contributes to proper communication, sales, and growth. In the next section, we will explore all these aspects in detail.

Benefits of Customer Retention

Customer retention has pros for companies. It significantly drives profitability, growth, and overall business performance. Here are the main advantages.

• Drives better revenue. Retaining existing customers means more profit as buyers already have faith in a brand and are, therefore, more likely to spend more. Using customer loyalty programs to increase retention boosts returns significantly.
• Saves money. Implementing customer retention strategies costs less than attracting new buyers. It costs 5x more to land a new customer than to nurture an existing one. As such, focusing on retention can help cut down marketing costs since existing customers are already familiar with the business.
• Allows you to get valuable data. Existing customers are more likely to participate in surveys and, thus, provide a business with useful data. By acting on this data, a company can offer a more personalized experience to its customers and create effective targeted marketing campaigns.
• Build strong relationships with customers. Customer retention strategies, such as loyalty programs, make customers feel appreciated. In turn, they develop emotional connections with a brand and will be patient in case of mishaps. Marketers can increase customer appreciation by offering rewards or points during special occasions, for instance, customer birthdays.
• Boosts sales. By leveraging the data gathered through surveys, marketers can make better consumer suggestions, increasing the probability of purchases. It will result in higher sales in the near future.
• Measures your marketing strategy's efficiency. By analyzing customer retention metrics and reports, businesses can determine the effectiveness of their marketing strategies. Some of the vital retention metrics marketers need to pay attention to include repeat sales, loyalty program engagement, and purchase frequency.
• Provides effective communication. Repeat customers are more comfortable to communicate with, especially during emergencies such as recalls. Businesses can quickly match purchase dates and proceed to send messages to affected customers rather than sending a general email, which most likely will be ignored. Moreover, it is easier to relay sales, special events, and new product information to existing customers.
• It’s self-sufficient. Once a business sets up a customer retention strategy, little input is required from marketers as the programs are often self-sustaining. The only action a company has to take is to monitor various customer retention metrics. All the while, the retention strategies will be running on the initial settings.
• Helps gain new customers. Loyal, existing customers are a brand’s best advocates. They share their good experiences with a company, thus reassuring customers with doubts while also introducing the brand to new people.
• Encourages growth. Customer retention presents a chance for expansion. For example, if a brand needs a stock of consumer photos when launching a new product, existing customers can help with it. After all, clients are the best promoters because they are already familiar with what the business offers.

Now when the advantages are clear, it’s time to calculate customer retention rate for your company and find out whether it’s good.

Customer Retention Rate

In this section, we’ll unveil customer retention and why it’s essential for every business to track it. Let’s start by defining the customer retention rate.

What is a customer retention rate?

Customer retention rate (CRR) is a metric that assesses the percentage of customers a company retains during a specific timeframe. It shows a business's ability to make existing clients stay with it and perform repeat purchases. Businesses strive to establish customer loyalty by providing enticing offers and creating loyalty and referral programs that lead to higher customer satisfaction. This way, they succeed in retaining their customer base and boosting profits.

What is a good customer retention rate?

Customer retention rates fluctuate and vary by industry. Yet, usually, a customer retention rate between 35% and 84% is considered a good one. Different aspects influence customer retention rates, including customer satisfaction, difficulty in leaving, customer success, and many other factors. However, it depends on your industry and is always unique. That’s why let’s discover customer retention rates for every industry you might be involved in.

Average customer retention rate by industry

When talking about the average customer retention rate, we can’t mention one specific universal number. As we’ve already mentioned, it depends on the industry and many other factors. The metrics rely heavily on the nature of your product or service, customer relationships, and the size of your business. Now, let’s see the average numbers for e-commerce, SaaS companies, banking, and many other businesses.

According to Statista, we have the following numbers various industries get as their average customer retention rate.

• Multimedia businesses get an average of 84% because of long-term contracts and bundle promotions.
• IT companies usually have an 81% customer retention rate. Clients stay with the brand as long as it meets their expectations and requirements and solves their problems.
• Insurance companies have a quite high retention rate of 83% because clients stay with the same business for years due to multi-year contracts and attractive financial incentives.
• If you are involved in finance or banking, your average CRR should be around 75%—78%. The retention rate is quite high because customers have bank contracts that might last for years.
• Healthcare companies get 77% CRR, while construction and engineering businesses have an average of 80%.

Now let’s jump into calculations associated with customer retention rate. They are necessary to estimate your CRR and identify whether it is good for your industry.

How to calculate a customer retention rate?

Customer retention rate (CRR) is given as a percentage. To calculate it, the following information is needed:

• The number of customers at the end of a specific business period (E)
• The number of customers acquired by the business over that duration (N)
• The number of customers at the beginning of that period (S)

When calculating the customer retention rate, the number of new customers acquired is not counted, only the number of existing customers at the end of a specific period. To determine your remaining customers, subtract N from the value of E. To get a percentage, divide the result by the number of customers at the beginning, then multiply by 100. Below is the formula:

CRR = ((E-N)/S) *100

Let’s imagine that you have a SaaS company with the following indicators to estimate your customer retention rate:

1. The number of customers at the end of a specific business period (E): 155
2. The number of customers acquired by the business over that duration (N): 6
3. The number of customers at the beginning of that period (S): 130

CRR = ((136-6)/155*100 = 86%

Your customer retention rate will be 86%, which is a good indicator for this industry.

Now let’s find out the difference between customer loyalty and retention because these two concepts are usually misinterpreted.

Customer Loyalty and Retention

Customer loyalty and customer retention are related but don’t determine the same marketing concept. When you understand the major differences between these two terms, you can craft better marketing strategies and improve customers’ experience with your brand. So let’s dive in.

Customer loyalty is the customer’s willingness to stay with the company and continue purchasing from it despite many choices and pricing. Clients remain loyal to a brand and engage with it. Customer loyalty can be measured using the following metrics: net promoter score, customer lifetime value, repeat purchases, and others. To encourage loyalty, companies often strive to establish a strong brand identity, provide a positive customer experience, create loyalty and referral programs, build communities, interact with customers, etc. Usually, customers stay with a brand because of the emotional bond they have with it.

Customer retention is the ability of a brand to prevent customers from leaving over a specific timeframe. Companies use various marketing strategies and techniques to maintain their customer bases and prevent clients from switching to competitors. You can evaluate customer retention by using the customer retention rate formula provided above. When businesses focus on customer retention, they pay attention to customer satisfaction, seamless customer service, providing incentives, rewards, loyalty programs, and many other things to encourage interaction and repeat purchases.

In short, customer loyalty focuses on building trusting and long-lasting relationships with customers, while customer retention is about retaining the same number of customers over a specific period. Both terms are essential for your business yet have different approaches and goals.

Now that you clearly understand that your company needs to retain existing customers, we invite you to explore some excellent strategies that will help you achieve your business objectives.

Top 10 Customer Retention Strategies

Companies use many tactics to retain their customers, yet not all of them are effective. Below, we’ve listed the most successful strategies for you to consider.

1. Share case studies during the sales process

Companies should provide information from previous case studies to reveal their style of collaborating and communicating with customers. They can then disclose the results achieved. With this information, new customers will set their expectations and be more welcoming of the experience they get while interacting with the company.

Open Loyalty shares case studies on its website and narrates how businesses already use its product successfully.

2. Set expectations early

Companies should communicate progress toward goals, deadlines, project inclusions, processes, and so forth to keep their customers informed. This will ensure that the customers are happy and, thus, ready for continued interaction with the business.

3. Develop a roadmap for the future

Marketers should create and revise company-customer relationship roadmaps regularly to enable buyers to plan effectively. Doing this will keep the customers informed of the current and future stages of the relationship.

4. Create memories around shared successes

Companies can boost customer retention by creating memorable events around their successes. Implementing this approach will also keep customers from dwelling on negative experiences, for example, missed deadlines, wrong deliveries, etc.

5. Create customer loyalty programs

Loyalty programs motivate clients to choose your brand. Offer them to collect the bonuses after each purchase, and when they reach a particular amount of money, customers can use them to get a discount.

For example, Innisfree provides customers with rewards for purchases.

6. Ask for feedback and act on it accordingly

Ask your clients to estimate both the service and the products after every purchase. Let them not only provide you with points but allow them to leave a comment. This way, you can use it to improve the service.

For instance, Sensatia Botanicals sends email campaigns asking customers for feedback after a specific time after purchase. One of them is shown below.

7. Provide attractive offers, discounts, and gifts

Consider sending email campaigns, SMS, or chatbot messages informing customers about attractive offers of your company. If you want to encourage more purchases faster, you can establish a fear of missing out by adding countdown timers. With the help of discounts and promos, you’ll be able to prevent clients from leaving and make them repurchase with your brand.

8. Use proactive web push notifications, live chat, or chatbot

When customers don’t interact with your brand, it’s essential to keep them. You can do it by incorporating proactive chatbots that will be triggered at a specific time. They will help you engage with your inactive customers and prevent them from leaving by providing something they are interested in. Chatbots can recommend products related to the latest purchases, provide items based on search history, or give discounts on products these clients were exploring. You can build a quality chatbot for Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, or Telegram with SendPulse and effectively bring your customers back.

9. Incorporate AI to ensure excellent customer service

Sometimes, customer support influences consumers a lot, especially when they can’t get the proper answers to questions that concern them. Providing seamless customer service is a must if you want your customers to stay loyal to your company and repurchase your products. For this purpose, consider using all the necessary tools, including AI, chatbots, and live chat, for instant and accurate responses. Although AI can help your business a lot, you still need some human agents to solve serious issues. It’s essential for high customer satisfaction and customer retention.

Below, you can see a live chat from Etihad Airways, which supports customers 24/7. Clients can communicate using automated messages or connect with a human agent.

10. Bring social impact

Consider collaborating with NGOs to bring change to our society or environment. You can start incentives where a part of the costs from your sales goes to fighting cancer, hunger, or environmental problems. This will help you establish a good reputation and make customers happy to be associated with you. It might encourage word-of-mouth promotion and more sales.

Below, you can see how McDonald’s contributes to the community by helping families.

If you are selling your product to businesses, there are some other strategies to consider. You can find them below.

Top 8 B2B Customer Retention Strategies

There are numerous customer retention strategies for businesses, yet they are different when we talk about B2B companies. Let’s discover the approaches that will help you make your business customers loyal.

1. Provide value after a purchase. It's essential to follow up with your business clients after they complete purchases. Make sure to provide all the necessary materials related to your product.
2. Incorporate proactive problem-solving. Predict potential issues and concerns that might arise and solve them before they become a bigger problem for your clients and your company's performance. To eliminate these issues, you need to look at feedback and customer data.
3. Use automation. Consider using a CRM system to monitor customer preferences, interactions, and behavior. Then, set your communication with clients on autopilot using marketing automation. You can send follow-up emails, SMS, web push notifications, and chatbot messages to Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. The process is simple and fast when you use SendPulse.
4. Assign dedicated managers. Consider assigning account managers to your high-value clients. This will help you understand the problems clearly and establish strong, trusting relationships with clients.
5. Consider creating loyalty programs. With loyalty programs, you can show your business customers they are much appreciated and cared for. You can provide your repeat clients with discounts, credits, or exclusive offers to reward their loyalty.
6. Ask for feedback. Surveys, interviews, and feedback forms are effective ways of gathering customer opinions about your product or service. By collecting this data, you can determine what businesses like and don’t like about your company. Here comes space for optimization and improvements, affecting customer retention and loyalty.
7. Interact with clients regularly. Consider creating or participating in forums, user groups, or social media. They can become touchpoints with your clients. By building a sense of community, you can encourage decision-makers to repurchase your products or services shortly.
8. Personalize your offers. After customers complete purchases, you have data that outlines customer behavior, purchasing history, and preferences. This information allows you to create highly targeted offers that perfectly suit clients' needs and requirements. Personalized offers enable you to showcase relevant products and encourage future purchases.

However, incorporating all these techniques is very difficult without a special service. That's why, in the next section, we'll review the best options for you to consider.

5 Best Customer Retention Software

Since customer retention is a complex process, requiring you to combine various techniques and approaches, it’s better to use a special service allowing you to automate it. These tools bring you various benefits, including improved customer insights, automated communication, personalized offers, seamless customer experience, instant customer support, and many others. By setting up routine tasks on autopilot, you can improve the efficiency and performance of your business, reduce the workload on your team, prevent human error, and incorporate proactive retention strategies.

When choosing the perfect tools for your business, consider the features, usability, and pricing. Ensure that the platform integrates with all the apps you need, provides onboarding and training for inexperienced users, ensures customization features, offers in-built comprehensive analytics and reporting, has a friendly pricing structure, and excellent customer support. Now that you know where to focus, it’s time to provide you with the services with good pricing, all the necessary features, and usability.

SendPulse

SendPulse is a multipurpose solution allowing you to keep track of all your customers through its CRM, send personalized follow-up emails, tailored offers through chatbots, share important events and information through web push and SMS notifications, and many more. The platform is easy to use for beginners and it provides all the necessary onboarding and training for you to start fast. The pricing depends on the products you decide to choose. Its CRM will cost you $12 monthly. For this price, you can create 2 sales pipelines and 2 boards and use Automation 360.

Below you can see how to work with SendPulse’s CRM.

ClickUp

ClickUp is a service combining CRM and project management. With its help, you’ll be able to ensure seamless workflows and interaction with customers and check analytics for long-lasting relationships with clients. The platform enables you to keep an eye on customer lifetime value, average order value, and churn rate, showcase your customer orders, sales pipeline, and other essential data on the Kanban board. The service has free and paid plans. The cheapest will cost you $10 monthly per user for unlimited dashboards, custom fields, time tracking, guests with permission, and many more.

Below you can see how to manage tasks with ClickUp.

Open Loyalty

Open Loyalty is a service for developing loyalty programs contributing to a company's loyalty and retention. The programs are easy to personalize and customize, enabling you to tailor them to your customer’s preferences and purchasing history.

With the service, you can create customizable loyalty programs and add discounts, giveaways, and gift cards. The platform’s analytics will help you track performance and ensure that your clients are satisfied with your offers. Contact Open Loyalty’s customer support directly for more information on its pricing.

Below you can see how to create a loyalty program within the service.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a popular platform that marketers use to understand site visitors’ behavior. Its features help businesses gain comprehensive insights into how clients engage with the company’s website. With this data, brands can optimize user experience and encourage clients to complete their repeat purchases. It results in higher brand loyalty and customer retention rates. When using the service, your marketing team can send net promoter score surveys to customers to receive their feedback on the product.

Marketers can identify selling opportunities using Hotjar’s data analysis. However, the platform requires special skills. The service offers a free plan covering unlimited heatmaps, recordings of user sessions, basic filters, and more. The paid plans start at $39 for tracking 100 daily sessions, using page views filters, accessing session information and technology filters, and monitoring custom user actions.

Below you can see Hotjar’s dashboard.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a platform that keeps all your communication with customers in one place. With its help, you don’t need to worry about the security of your information, customer data, and the progress of your sales. Zendesk allows you to share all the necessary information with clients through knowledge bases. Your company will be able to provide instant help through chatbots and solve urgent problems immediately. The tool combines messaging and live chat, AI, and automation.

The platform provides a free 14-day trial. After it expires, you’ll need to buy a paid plan which costs $69 monthly for one agent for the ticketing system, email, chat, voice, social messaging, AI agents, and more.

Below you can see what the dashboard looks like in Zendesk.

When using the software’s analytics and reporting, you should know what metrics to watch. They will help you identify whether your customer retention rate is good. In the next section, we’ll uncover the most essential customer retention metrics to consider for your business.

Customer retention metrics are crucial for determining how effective your marketing strategy is and how many people switch to your competitors. After identifying the essential indicators, you can unveil areas for improvement and retain more clients with your company. So let’s start with the churn rate.

Churn Rate

The churn rate is the percentage of people who stopped purchasing and using your product or service at a specific time. When having a high churn rate, it’s crucial to determine the problems that lead to customers churning out. These can be issues with onboarding, customer service, high pricing, customer experience, customer retention strategies, etc.

Churn Rate = (Customers Who Left / Customers at the Beginning of the Month)*100

Let’s imagine you have a subscription-based business. The total number of customers at the beginning of the month is 150 and the number of customers at the end of the same month is 4. Let’s calculate this indicator for this example.

Churn Rate = (4 / 150)*100 = 2.6%

It means that your customers are reduced in number by 2.6% every month.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total cost the customer spends during the relationship with your brand. Calculating CLV enables companies to identify high-value clients and allocate their budget correctly to attract these customers and make them repurchase products.

Customer Lifetime Value = Value of a Purchase * Purchase Frequency * Customer Lifespan

Let’s imagine you have a sports apparel company for professional runners. You established your business three years ago and have found that your customers typically purchase four pairs of sneakers each year. Let’s estimate the customer lifetime value of a client who has stayed loyal to your brand since the day of its opening.

Average value of a purchase = $640;

Purchase frequency rate = 4 times a year;

Customer lifespan = 3 years.

$640 ✖ 4 ✖ 3 = $7,680

$7,680 is the CLV of your most loyal customer.

Repeat Purchase Rate

Repeat Purchase Rate is the percentage of clients who buy several times from your company. It allows businesses to identify how loyal their customers are and the effectiveness of loyalty programs.

Repeat Purchase Rate = (Number of Repeat Customers / Total Number of Customers)*100

Let’s imagine you have a home appliances company. Your repeat customers are 40, and your customer base consists of 102 clients. Let’s calculate the measure.

Repeat Purchase Rate = (40 / 102)*100 = 39.22%.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net promoter score is a metric that measures the likelihood of customers recommending a company’s product or services to their friends and family. It helps you evaluate customer loyalty and satisfaction on a scale from 0 to 10, where 10 is the highest score.

NPS = (Promoters/Total Number of Respondents) - (Detractors/Total Number of Respondents)*100

For instance, if you send a survey to 100 respondents and receive 65 promoters, 12 passives, and 25 detractors, your

NPS = (65 / 100)*100 - (25 / 100)*100 = 40%.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction score is a metric that assesses customer satisfaction with a brand or customer experience. With its help, marketers can identify issues and optimize their businesses' performance.

CSAT = (Number of Satisfied Customers / Total Number of Survey Responses)*100.

Suppose you’ve sent your survey about a specific experience with your company and received 130 responses. Let’s say 74 of them are happy clients. Time to calculate the measure.

CSAT = (74 / 130)*100 = 56.92%.

If your rates are low, consider some effective ways to boost customer retention. We’ll provide them in the next section.

How to increase customer retention?

By improving customer retention, you contribute to your business's success and customer relationships. We’ve listed the most effective techniques for improving customer connections and encouraging them to stay.

• Send re-engagement email campaigns. Businesses and their customers often grow apart after a while. Work, family, or changes in interests are just a few reasons for this trend. To keep customers involved, businesses should send re-engagement emails. Updates and offerings, as well as benefits, are some of the things a company can include in these emails.
• Segment and personalize. Generic marketing emails will not cut the mustard as far as customer retention goes. Customers prefer customized messages. With the help of an email marketing service. Email marketing services offer tools for mailing list segmentation based on gender, location, products purchased, etc.
• Give discounts. They encourage customers to keep coming back to a brand. By offering a discount for the next purchase, you make a small investment in fostering customer loyalty and boosting customer retention.
• Ensure seamless customer support. Consider using various tools to provide instant answers and solutions to customer problems. These can be a chatbot, live chat, or dedicated customer support agent. Customers’ concerns and issues should be resolved quickly, as this influences customer satisfaction and loyalty. You can use a virtual assistant to help customers choose the products they are looking for.
• Interact with your existing customers. After clients complete purchases, you still need to follow up with them, asking for feedback and gathering their concerns. They give space for improvement and optimization, allowing you to improve satisfaction with your product and company in general.
• Incorporate loyalty programs. By showing your appreciation to existing customers, you can gain their trust and loyalty and encourage repurchases. Various incentives, rewards, and discounts will entice clients to buy more products. Consider providing early bird access to special products, services, or events to stay loyal.
• Establish strong relationships with existing clients. Use various marketing tools to communicate with customers and share what they like. Email campaigns, chatbots, SMS, web push notifications, and many others to communicate your message and show transparency. SendPulse offers all these products, so you can use them after registration.

Now let’s explore some tips for an even more effective customer retention strategy.

Customer Retention Tips

Since it’s often more cost-effective to retain existing customers and encourage them to purchase than acquire new ones, it’s a must to implement some helpful best practices. We’ve listed some of the most effective ways to retain your customers, so let’s explore.

• Encourage loyalty through shared values. If you have some company values, consider sharing them with your clients. Whether you donate to charities, help NGOs, or remain sustainable, let customers know about it. All these aspects influence customer decisions and make them stay with your brand, bringing change to society or the environment.
• Treat clients right. Although AI now replaces half of the human agents’ responsibilities, you shouldn’t forget that customers need support and sympathy when they face some issues. Consider using chatbots for basic frequently asked questions and add a button to connect with a human agent. This will help you provide more specific insights and personalized solutions to problems that appear.
• Make everything easy to understand. To outshine competitors, provide customers with excellent customer experience and seamless customer support. Everything clients use to access your product should be easy to understand and effortless.
• Ensure fast delivery options. Some customers prefer to receive products in days or weeks, but others need them immediately. To improve satisfaction, it’s essential to provide both options. Fast delivery will encourage your customers to return and get your products faster than from other brands.
• Incorporate gamification. Gamification elements can keep your customers engaged and interested in purchasing. By providing clients with rewards and points for buying products, you encourage them to make bigger purchases or return soon. Many consumers will be eager to shop now and receive a good discount during their next shopping trip.
• Allow the “Buy now, pay later” option. Not all customers can instantly buy a product, especially if it’s costly. In such cases, it’s crucial to have a “Buy now, pay later” option available. More clients can shop with you and get the products they need right now.
• Ensure easy refunds. Different situations can happen: customers can get the wrong product, it may not work well, or it may not comply with the customer's requirements. You should always ensure easy returns and refunds. It’s a must when you want customers to come back.

Now that you know how to boost customer retention, it’s time to see how it works in real life. Below you’ll find some excellent examples for some inspiration.

5 Customer Retention Examples From Famous Brands

In this section, we’ll review 5 excellent examples for your inspiration. They incorporate various strategies to retain customers and make them loyal to their companies.

Starbucks — Loyalty Program

Starbucks retains its customers with a loyalty program. The company encourages clients to install a special app and sign up for it. After every purchase, these customers will get stars. Later, they can exchange stars for rewards like free food and drinks. The redemption starts at 25 stars.

Amazon — Prime Membership

Amazon offers customers the opportunity to join its membership to enjoy the benefits of the service. Amazon Prime members can take advantage of one-day delivery, a 10% discount on various products, and the ability to shop throughout the week and receive all the items in one day.

Spotify — Personalization

The popular music service uses personalization and predictive analytics to retain its subscribers. The platform cares about its customers and strives to retain them by providing music they like. Subscribers can explore tailored playlists to their preferences, such as “Weekly Discover,” “Spotify Wrapped,” or “On Repeat.”

Nike — Multichannel Customer Service

Nike cares about its customers through excellent customer support. When having product problems or looking for consultations and recommendations, clients can always contact customer service and get quality help. If customers have any questions and want to receive instant answers, they can install the company’s app. It enables them to navigate the nearest stores, get gear recommendations, or join the community.

Ikea — Educational Content

Ikea’s YouTube channel is full of educational content that allows customers to design their own homes comfortably. Various videos on different topics help Ikea’s customers find solutions to their problems.

Congrats! Now you know what customer retention is and why it’s essential. We hope that our strategies, tips, and examples will help you develop an excellent customer retention strategy.

Last Updated: 10.06.2024