7 brilliant customer retention examples to learn from

Customer retention is a tremendous building block of a successful, sustainable business. In other words: your business can thrive if you know how to acquire customers and get them to make repeat purchases. 

But what does successful customer retention look like in real life? How are thriving companies ensuring their customers are happy with their product so they become loyal to the brand? This guide outlines six fantastic examples of customer retention and practical tips to emulate them in your business and industry.

1. Lume: product subscriptions, VIP pricing, and renewal emails

Lume is a brand of whole body deodorant, body care, and laundry products that offers recurring delivery and better prices when customers subscribe to certain products.

When Lume customers place an order, they receive a heads-up email about their upcoming subscription shipment. This email consists of shipment dates, a list of included products, and an option to delay or cancel their order.

Lume’s upcoming shipment reminder (source)

The same email also includes special offers and pricing for customers who add other one-time purchases to their order.

Special pricing in the shipment reminder email from Lume (source)

How Lume retains customers

Products like deodorants, body wipes, and laundry care need replenishing every once in a while. Even if you’re loyal to a brand, when a product runs out and you haven’t realized it in time to make an order, it’s often more convenient to run to the nearest store and grab an alternative.

Lume’s approach to product subscriptions is a twist on the conventional customer loyalty program. Instead of giving customers the option to collect loyalty points and exchange them for a discount, Lume discounts its products when you go for automatic deliveries every one, two, or three months.

The subscription operates on a ‘swap, skip, or cancel anytime’ policy. This means the company rewards you for committing to a recurring delivery, but won’t penalize you for changing, delaying, or dropping your subscription.

How Lume’s subscription works

Lume’s heads-up email for an upcoming delivery shows a great deal of care for its customer base. If you’ve ever been charged for a subscription you forgot you had (annual ones are particularly easy to forget about), you know how frustrating the ‘service renewal confirmation’ email can be. Lume doesn’t let it get to that point and instead gives customers at least five days to change their mind.

Replicate Lume’s approach to customer retention

Make repeat purchases easy

Build an option for easy reordering into your shopping experience. This can be a subscription, but even a ‘Repeat order’ call to action (CTA) button at the right place can make a big impact.

Send renewal reminders early

Your customers are counting on you to give them a heads-up about taking their money. Yes, this might increase churn rates—but those are the people who would be the most frustrated about the charge anyway. (And the ones most likely to complain and leave you bad reviews.)

Provide options

Retain and get more loyal customers by giving people flexible subscription terms. Ask them about their experience navigating their options through a customer effort score survey.

With Contentsquare Surveys, you can create a variety of surveys (including customer effort score surveys) to send to customers. 

2. Dubsado: building a community of customers

Dubsado is a client management software for freelancers and creatives, including photographers, coaches, virtual assistants, event planners, and makeup artists. The platform’s features include forms, contracts, invoicing, workflow automation, and client portals.

What makes being a Dubsado customer special is the company’s private Facebook group. It’s designed to ask the Dubsado community for support and advice around a specific problem—like location-specific payments or custom client workflows—and to celebrate business milestones and customer successes.

Examples of posts in Dubsado’s Facebook group for customers

This group isn’t the place to get answers to tech support questions, but to connect with fellow creatives and Dubsado’s employees—all working toward the goal of streamlined client communications and workflows.

How Dubsado retains customers

The Dubsado team built a setup checklist for new users who want to get up and running quickly, along with a detailed demo video. These resources are key for customer activation and to help new customers navigate the user interface (UI).

But Dubsado is a versatile tool with several different features—and it may take users a while to fully customize once they complete the setup checklist. With flexible products, there’s always a risk of overwhelming users with too many options.

That’s exactly where Dubsado’s social media community initiative comes in. The Facebook group lets people of similar backgrounds, niches, and goals help and inspire each other with ideas, templates, and workflows, so they can make the most out of Dubsado for months and years to come.

Replicate Dubsado’s approach to customer retention

Identify what customers struggle with beyond tech issues

Is there any knowledge or inspiration that your current customers lack when trying to make the most of your product? Review customer support conversations to find these pain points and a potential focus of your community.

Survey customers

Use Contentsquare to create a user persona survey to learn your customer’s background and the needs they’re looking to fulfill with your product. You can build upon those insights when creating a community and forge meaningful customer relationships.

An example of a Contentsquare Survey response to learn about customers

Create an online community

Explore options like Facebook groups, Slack channels, and software solutions for customer forums to bring your users together so they can help each other out and make the most of your product.

3. Ooni: product-specific guides and brand ambassadors

Ooni is a brand of pizza ovens made to be used at home.

Since most people don’t already know how to use a pizza oven, Ooni’s retention focus is on education and user onboarding. This includes dough preparation, shaping the pizza base, making the sauce, handling the oven, and more—and it’s all based on the exact model of the pizza oven you own.

Start of Ooni’s guides, prompting customers to choose the product they own (source)

And as it turns out, Ooni’s customers really love their pizza oven—they share their experience, tricks, tools, and recipes—and Ooni chooses to ride that wave and provide customers with a referral link and a discount code. They’ll likely keep sharing their Ooni photos and tips, so rewarding them (and new customers they send Ooni’s way) is a brilliant way to boost customer retention rates.

Ooni’s customer-turned-brand ambassador (source)

How Ooni retains customers

Folks at Ooni teach their customers how to make delicious oven-baked pizza at home—something that, before owning an Ooni, seemed like a stretch. Those people then quite organically become Ooni’s product advocates and brand ambassadors—just by virtue of loving the customer experience.

Ooni’s pizza ovens aren’t the cheapest kitchen gadget, so it might be easy to think that if someone makes a purchase, they’ll use the product regularly. Many things could prevent that—including that they don’t like it and end up returning it.

Thanks to Ooni’s educational content, recipes, and a team of people that keeps track of how customers talk about Ooni, the company builds long-lasting relationships with its customers—and turns them into ambassadors.

Replicate Ooni’s approach to customer retention

Shorten the learning curve

If there’s a chance your product will be tricky to use at first, use every interaction with your customer to point them to easy, digestible guides and walkthroughs. This includes emails that include order confirmation and shipping updates.

Level up the unboxing experience

Product unboxing is another key touchpoint that customers rely on to get started—make it delightful, educational, and seamless.

Collect customer feedback

Run post-purchase surveys to check in with your new customers and explore any moments with the product that made them feel stuck, or those that helped them more than anything else.

4. Miro: templates and user research sessions

Miro is a visual collaboration platform—that works like a digital whiteboard—teams use to brainstorm, plan, design, and teach.

Miro stands out with two customer retention strategies: the first is focused on product adoption with ready-to-use templates, which they emphasize in-app during signup and in onboarding emails:

Miro’s onboarding email guiding users toward templates (source)

The team’s other customer retention strategy focuses on getting to know Miro’s users, collecting direct feedback about the processes they use in their job, and understanding how Miro fits into their workflow through interviews. As part of its strategy to get more people to participate in these interviews, Miro offers its customers incentives in the form of a $50 gift card.

Miro’s email inviting users to a research session (source)

How Miro retains customers

Products like Miro become sticky—meaning they create repeat customers and usage—when an entire team gets on board. By default, starting a new board inside Miro opens a prompt with templates across different categories, which makes it easier to start working on an idea. If Miro’s users had to figure out everything from scratch each time they met, it would be a lot tougher for them to stick around.

Miro’s prompt for templates when starting a new board

And, by making the most of insights from user research sessions, Miro develops and tweaks these templates based on what customers need the tool to do for them (aka jobs to be done, or JTBD).

Replicate Miro’s approach to customer retention

Build a customer journey map

Identify all the touchpoints a user has when interacting with your product, both for the first time and as they keep using your product. Where do they get stuck? What makes it easy to progress?

Use Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis tool to see the path users take to become paying customers (including where they drop off) and build out a useful customer journey map.

Consistently collect user feedback

Pain points can range from a frustrating user experience (UX) issue to a confusing feature. Let users share these pain points with a handy on-page feedback widget with our Voice of Customer tool. Users can leave in-the-moment feedback without any major disruptions to their visit. 

Brainstorm helpful assets

Consider any guides, templates, walkthroughs, demos, tooltips, or checklists you can build into your product experience to make the journey smooth.

5. Uber: re-engagement emails and reminders

Uber doesn’t need an introduction, because even though it’s grown its platform in many ways, ridesharing remains its core product.

Uber’s customer retention strategy focuses on engaging existing users, and email plays a big role in it. Customers who haven’t taken a trip with Uber in a while get an email with a gentle reminder, along with a list of recent updates on the app, safety measures, and the booking process.

And for those who recently took a ride with Uber, there's a receipt email that suggests leaving the driver a tip or a rating, plus a ‘Thanks for tipping’ follow-up email.

Uber’s follow-up email after rating and tipping a driver

How Uber retains customers

Uber’s emails aren’t their only customer engagement and retention tactic—similar messages come through the mobile app’s push notifications. However, those notifications rarely arrive exactly when someone needs a ride, so users dismiss and forget about them soon after.

Emails are different. They’re more sticky and linger in our inboxes and minds for much longer than weirdly timed notifications on our phones. They’re also more thorough and complete, and they make it easy to focus on the overarching message.

Replicate Uber’s approach to customer retention

Brainstorm reminder messages

“We’ve missed you” isn’t a bad message, but it can be very bland and is unlikely to stand out. What can you say to your existing customers to remind them of you and their past experiences?

Find a ‘sticky’ channel

Not all channels work equally well for all industries and product types. Explore text messages, push notifications, email, or a combination of them to find out what customers rely on the most.

Analyze what happens post-click

Once you nudge your customers to remind them of you, watch session replays to track what they do on your website or in-app. What draws their attention? What are they ignoring or getting stuck on?

Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool lets you watch anonymous sessions from real users on your site

6. Allbirds: exceptional customer support

Allbirds is a brand of sustainable clothing and footwear. Their go-to retention strategy is providing exceptional customer service, which this case perfectly embodies:

One customer’s experience with Allbirds customer support (source)

It’s the ultimate dedication to retention: the customer received a product and practically destroyed it within a day, meaning they no longer had the product and may never order it again. Allbirds made sure that wasn’t the case and exceeded customer expectations.

How Allbirds retains customers

Customer support as a retention strategy means that something has to be wrong so that you can make it right and retain your customer. That seems…counterintuitive?

But things will and do go wrong. All customers won’t always be 100% happy—and that’s okay. It’s what you do when you face customer complaints that counts and makes a difference.

This TrustPilot review (slightly shortened for clarity) of Allbirds shows how the company’s support team operates:

Would this customer have been happier if they received the correct pair of shoes the first time around? Possibly. But the way Allbirds handled the issue showed this person that Allbirds always has its customer’s back, making it an easier choice to buy from the company again—and recommend it to others.

Replicate Allbirds’ approach to customer retention

Track your CSAT and NPS®

Your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score® (NPS) measure your short-term and long-term customer satisfaction and loyalty. Any dips reveal issues in the customer journey that need your instant attention.

Don’t wait for things to go wrong

If things sometimes do go wrong, there’s a chance that potential customers are thinking about it (“What if I receive a wrong product?”). Build the answers to those questions into your buying experience—for example, into your knowledge base or FAQs.

Layer customer support with qualitative insights

When customers tell you about a pain point, make it easy to recreate their issue on your end so you can see exactly what they see. For example, look at the session replay of when they experienced an issue so it’s easier to identify and solve.

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