---
name: retention-marketing
description: Keep and re-engage existing customers, which is usually cheaper and more valuable than acquiring new ones. Use when churn is high or growth is entirely dependent on new acquisition.
---

# Retention marketing

Acquiring a customer costs several times what keeping one does, and a
business retaining poorly needs ever-increasing acquisition to stand
still. Retention marketing addresses the value customers are not getting
rather than reminding them you exist.

## Method

1. **Understand why people leave first.** Cancellation reasons and
   behaviour before churn, since retention campaigns aimed at the wrong
   cause do nothing (see churn-analysis).
2. **Focus on early activation.** Most churn is decided in the first
   sessions, and the highest-leverage retention work happens before
   anyone has churned (see user-activation).
3. **Trigger on behaviour, not on schedule.** Declining usage or an
   abandoned feature is the moment to reach out, and calendar campaigns
   arrive irrelevant.
4. **Lead with value, not with pleading.** Showing what they are missing
   or how to get more out of it beats we miss you.
5. **Separate voluntary from involuntary churn.** Failed payments are a
   billing problem with a different fix entirely (see
   failed-payment-recovery).
6. **Win back selectively.** Recently churned customers with a fixed
   reason are worth contacting; a broad win-back to everyone who ever
   left is not.
7. **Measure retention by cohort.** Aggregate retention hides whether
   recent cohorts behave better, which is the number that tells you
   whether anything is improving (see cohort-analysis).

## Boundaries

Retention marketing cannot compensate for a product that does not
deliver value, and campaigns against a real gap annoy people on the way
out. Aggressive win-back can generate complaints. Some churn is healthy
where the customer was never a fit.