Retention Marketing: Winning Strategies & Real-Life Examples
As an e-commerce business that wants to thrive in the market, you invest a lot of time, money, and effort to ensure you gain your customers’ trust.
After you’ve done so much, it is only fair that you don’t want to let them go so easily, and that’s exactly where customer retention comes into the picture.
Source: Cain & Company
We understand how important it is to have sound customer retention strategies – check this out: Simply increasing customer retention effort by 5% can boost your profits by 25 to 95%.
Peter Fader, Marketing Professor at The Wharton School & Co-Director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, has rightly said, “Your best customers are your existing customers. Look after them.”
In today’s world, retention has become more important than acquisition, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing you focus on. Retention should be done in balance with customer acquisition.
To help you with this, we have a list of tried-and-tested strategies to help you retain your customers along with some real-world examples for better understanding.
Let’s begin!
Strategies for Customer Retention
#1 Personalise User Experience
As customers, do you know what the most frustrating part of online shopping is? It’s them having to be vocal about their desires and wants CONSTANTLY.
With the rise of AI and diverse retention marketing strategies, personalisation has become easy – you can predict demands, analyse user behaviour, and tailor their shopping experience to how they like.
What benefit does this have?
You can retain your customers for longer!
Source: Wisernotify
In fact, 44% of online shoppers will repeat a purchase from a brand that offers them personalised experiences, while 39% may also recommend the brand to their friends and family.
If you provide tailored experiences, 32% of users may also leave a positive review about you, and 22% of them may post about you on their social media. That’s FREE marketing!
Personalisation can set the stage for how your customers will see you in the future, making it very important to prioritise personalisation from the get go.
To understand personalisation on a deeper level, let’s take an example –
We all know, love, and use Netflix – but did you know that they have solid personalisation strategies in place that recommend relevant content suggestions for you?
Their recommendations are very diverse, including analysing all devices and across all languages. Deeply understanding all this data helps them keep their users engaged ALL. THE. TIME.
Source: Netflix Research
#2 Provide Excellent Customer Service
Customer service plays a SUPER IMPORTANT role in your retention strategy. If you keep your customers happy and satisfied, they stay loyal to you – it’s as simple as that!
This can do wonders for your business: increase your brand’s customer lifetime value (CLV) and profits.
Customers are also more likely to stick with brands where they feel like they’re heard and understood, creating a lasting relationship.
You can implement a 24*7 support on your website that can help online shoppers with their queries and concerns promptly.
You can also implement AI chatbots to help you reduce your manual effort in servicing your customers – these are well-equipped in 2025 to handle all queries your users might have.
Source: EDesk
Around 64% of customers can change brands over one single bad experience, making continued excellence in customer service very important.
You can retain customers solely based on providing them a good customer experience through various channels of customer support such as live chats, phone support, AI chatbots, and more.
For example, Amazon provides really good customer service, along with many extra options for Prime members such as priority support, exclusive deals, same-day delivery, and more.
This helps customers gain an effortless shopping experience, leading to a 93% retention rate among prime users.
Source: Beamer
#3 Implement Loyalty Programs
If you want your customers to keep coming back to you, you need to offer them customer retention programs. – that’s where loyalty programs come in.
These compel the customers to repeat their purchases and spend more on every subsequent purchase through reward systems, benefits, and discounts.
You can go for point-based reward systems, where customers can earn points through each purchase. They can later redeem these points as discounts or free products.
You can also give loyalty program members early access to new products and exclusive members-only benefits.
Source: QRcode Tiger
Here’s a quick breakdown of what you need to know –
- 60% of users are loyal to a brand for their exclusive and additional discounts and deals.
- 75% of users go for a brand that has a loyalty program.
- Consumers who are members of a loyalty program spend around 67% more than non-members
Let’s understand loyalty programs a little better:
Do you know about the Starbucks loyalty program? With every purchase, customers get stars which they can later redeem for free products.
If you download their app, you can also get many personalised deals, adding to their client retention strategies.
Source: Medium
#4 Go for Omnichannel Strategies
It’s simple – the more you see something, the more you remember it. This makes it a really big deal for brands to provide the EXACT SAME shopping experience across all channels.
Whether a customer wants to shop online or offline, through mobiles or desktops, on your website or other shopping platforms, you need to take care of the consistency in your brand image.
This adds up to their satisfaction, pushing them more towards repeat purchases. And that’s what you want as a brand to grow your sales!
Still have questions? Check this out!
Source: Uniform Market
Let’s compare the numbers side by side – a company that has omnichannel retention marketing tactics can retain up to 89% of customers, while the companies without it can only retain up to 33%.
To better understand the importance of omnichannel strategies, let’s take an example:
Nike has one of the best omnichannel marketing strategies – you can simply browse their app and choose the sneakers you like. Pretty regular, right?
Here’s the kicker – you don’t necessarily HAVE TO wait for delivery. You can simply reserve them online and go pick them up from your nearest physical store.
Now, because you have them set aside by reserving them online, you can try them on for size and purchase instantly and effortlessly in their store.
This bridge between online and physical shopping and its consistency makes the experience much more delightful, convenient, and faster for the user.
Source: LinkedIn
#5 Opt for Data-driven Decision Making
As an e-commerce brand willing to retain your customers, you need to analyse what your customers like, their behaviours, their preferences, and more.
This can help you create data-based strategies to target them and also increase their customer lifetime value (CLV).
Check this out to understand this retention strategy better:
We all use Spotify on a daily basis – but very rarely do we notice just how accurate the recommendations in their “Discover Weekly” section are.
How do they get it so right?
It’s all backed by data and analysis – Spotify keeps a track of your listening behaviour, deeply analyses it, and comes up with personalised suggestions based on it.
It’s not only limited to what you like, it understands your patterns – it also avoids the music that you don’t like and skip frequently to create more hyper-tailored recommendations for you.
And as a customer, if you get what you like, would you leave a brand? Think about it!
Source: LinkedIn
#6 Improve Mobile Shopping Experience
Now, EVERYONE owns a smartphone. Everyone browses the internet through their smartphone. Everyone shops online through their smartphone.
What do we understand from this? Smartphones have become key in our day-to-day lives and brands need to utilise them to their fullest!
Source: Gauss
In 2024, 56% of ALL online sales were made through smartphones. This statistic alone makes it important to have a mobile shopping strategy for all e-commerce brands.
Let’s take an example:
Sephora, a well-known makeup brand, provides an amazing mobile shopping experience.
It allows virtually trying on make-up on your skin tone, offers personalised recommendations, and more options on your phone to make your shopping more engaging and enjoyable for you.
This attracts more and more customers again and again to their brand, ensuring their retention efforts do well.
Source: Contact Pigeon
Final thoughts
Let’s sum it all up –
If you are looking for fool-proof strategies for retention marketing for your e-commerce business, there are many ways to go about it.
Opt for personalisation, improved customer service, introduce loyalty programs, go for marketing through omnichannel strategies, make data-based decisions, and optimise mobile-shopping.
There are many well-known brands that have tried and tested these strategies SUCCESSFULLY – Netflix, Amazon Prime, Starbucks, Nike, Spotify, and Sephora, to name a few.
You can also implement these techniques to retain more customers than ever and boost your profits by 5x!
Need help with it? Get in touch with us for expert retention marketing services!
