The Customer Retention Era is Here

Brands are beginning to place as much emphasis on retention as acquistion.

As an industry, we’ve faced supply chain delays, the crumbling cookie, an eCommerce boom, inflation, price hikes, and global cost of living crises — just to name a few things. Consumer spending has slowed down as a result while acquisition costs have continued to rise, which means that brands are spending more only to gain less when it comes to winning new shoppers.

You know retention is essential for your bottom line:

It’s 6 to 7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer.
A 5% increase in customer retention can increase company revenue by 25-95%
Retained customers buy more often and spend more than newer customers. They’ve learned the value of a product or service and keep coming back, again and again.

And, brands need some guidance. Since we’ve invested so much time into the acquisition side of things, we’re at a loss when it comes to keeping customers coming back. In our State of Retention Survey, we found that this past year alone over 50% of brands are more focused on retention efforts than ever before, and yet, 40% haven’t changed their strategy to achieve their goals.

And we can understand why so many brands say their strategy hasn’t changed. Retention is so much more multidimensional than acquisition, making the margin of error that much smaller. It takes cross-departmental buy-in, a massive shift in brand thinking, deep understanding of your customers — we could go on. In other words, acquisition is checkers; retention is chess.

With this in mind, we created The Retention Marketing Manual for eCommerce Brands, an all-in-one retention playbook intended to help brands navigate customer retention with confidence (and verve).