What is Customer Retention + 8 Customer Retention Strategies

Customer acquisition, ratings and reviews, and social proof are the most visible success indicators for your brand. However, customer retention plays a vital role in the overall health of your organization. Even when focusing on a mobile app within a larger company, customer retention remains a key health indicator. It provides valuable insights into the overall customer experience, helping to assess the app’s performance and user satisfaction.

Let’s dive into it.

Customer Loyalty Program

Customer retention definition

Customer retention refers to a brand’s ability to convert customers from one-time buyers to repeat purchasers. Higher retention rates mean less customers jumping ship to spend money with your competitors. Retention rates are an indicator of whether or not your product or service is high-quality and valuable.

Read: 2021 App Retention Benchmarks

The importance of customer retention

Retaining customers costs less than acquiring new ones and improves overall lifetime value with additional benefits. You can use app retention as a trust signal to show how well your brand knows its customers.

  • Product teams: Customer retention matters to product managers because it’s generally directly related to their mobile app experience. People uninstall apps because they’re buggy, don’t work as expected, have poor design, or are missing features. Without a feedback system in place, product managers won’t receive this feedback before it’s too late. Regularly collecting and analyzing mobile feedback lets teams solve issues and make positive changes before customers leave. When customers stay with a product for a while, product teams gain a unique opportunity. They can seek feedback and track the behavior of these customers over time. This can give deeper insight into the mobile customer journey and help identify what keeps loyal customers happy.
  • Marketing teams: Customer retention directly ties to ROI for marketers. When customers are happy and stay active on the app, marketers can leverage this engagement. They can activate loyal fans to essentially handle some marketing tasks. By retargeting these satisfied customers and directing them to the app store, marketers can improve ratings and reviews. This, in turn, positively impacts customer acquisition. When retention is high, marketing teams can constantly keep a pulse on brand sentiment and customer happiness. This gives insight into the overall brand image and customer experience, furthering the ability to manage brand reputation. When marketing teams proactively gather feedback from customers, they gain insight into what customers like and dislike about the brand. This understanding helps them tailor and inform their marketing strategy more effectively.

Strategies to improve customer retention

  1. Activate fans to amplify your brand: Boost Increase customer retention by increasing the volume of authentic five-star ratings and improving the quality of your reviews. Use your most loyal fans to drive customer acquisition and do your marketing for you.
  2. Precisely target the right people at the right time and place: In-app targeting, and segmentation allows you to get the right message to the right people at the right time. Prompt happy customers for reviews and resolve issues directly with unhappy customers.
  3. Get more out of CSAT and NPS: Augment customer NPS data with customer sentiment and track changes down to the individual level. Understanding the reasons behind your NPS score helps identify the changes needed to keep customers satisfied. This, in turn, helps retain them for a longer period.
  4. Measure and analyze your online reputation: Identify trends, changes, and themes in your online reviews and mobile surveys. This approach helps you better understand the customer experience in real-time. When changes happen, intervene quickly before customer’s churn.
  5. Create a loyalty program:  RetailMeNot reports that about 80 percent of customers are more loyal to brands with rewards programs. Additionally, 70 percent are more likely to join a loyalty program if they can access it via their mobile device. Develop a loyalty or rewards program to incentivize customers to stick around longer and therefore increase lifetime value.
  6. Actively communicate with customers before they get a chance to churn. When a customer submits a support ticket or expresses unhappiness with your product, make sure to close the communication loop. Inform them that their concerns have been heard and, ideally, that their issues have been resolved. Always proactively seek feedback so you can intervene before customers leave.
  7. Give customers a voice in deciding what goes on a brand’s product roadmap. This helps resource-stretched teams build features that both drive business goals and keep customers happy. It also helps customers feel heard and feel more invested in the future of your brand. When you give customers a voice and they care, they are more likely to stay loyal.
  8. Measure and act on emotion data. This allows brands to better understand customer sentiment and make changes accordingly. Consistently monitoring the customer experience allows you to quickly identify problems. You can then make the necessary changes to ensure customers keep coming back.

To learn more about marketplace retention rates as well as retention by app category, read Alchemer Mobile (formerly Apptentive)’s 2021 Mobile App Engagement Report.


Ultimately, converting customers into fans is one of your greatest opportunities for improving customer retention and loyalty, as well as reducing churn. To do this, you must understand why customers feel the way they do – especially when their emotions change over time. Accurately measuring shifts in customer sentiment helps you understand the reasons behind churn risk. This insight allows you to intervene at the right time and place before it’s too late. Prevent customer churn, increase customer retention, and improve the mobile customer journey by listening to feedback.

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