How to improve retention on retail sites with Contentsquare

As traffic dwindles and conversion rates waver, the focus for retailers is shifting away from simply attracting visitors to strengthening customer loyalty and retention.

Because in the digital retail space, retaining your customers and increasing their lifetime value (CLV) can help smooth out any dips in new customer numbers.

The good news is: it’s easier—and cheaper—to retain customers than it is to attract new ones.

Key data points on the current retention landscape for retail sites

The retail sector experienced a challenging year regarding retention. According to Contentsquare’s 2025 Digital Experience Benchmarks report:

• Returning traffic fell by 0.9% in 2024. Returning organic traffic dropped significantly last year by -6.7%.

• Paid returning traffic, however, grew +5.6% year-on-year, indicating a reliance on paid efforts for re-engagement

• Starting at 18.5% the week of purchase, retention on retail sites fell below 3% already on Week 5 after purchase

• 30-day retention rate changes for desktop users dropped from 6.6% to 5.7% from Q4 2023 to Q4 2024. On mobile, retention actually increased (very) slightly, from 5.6% to 5.7% for the same period.

• Measuring Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) on retail sites, 12.8% of customers were detractors, while 68% were promoters

• Sites with the highest retention rates have, on average, +18% more page views per visit. They also experience -17% fewer rage clicks per page, highlighting the link between engaging, frustration-free experiences and repeat visits.

Source: Contentsquare’s Benchmark report (filtered by ‘Retail’)

4 strategies to boost retention on your retail site 

With dwindling traffic and new customers harder to secure, retention is worth putting at the top of your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Digital shoppers are looking for engagement. By optimizing your digital experience, you can build customer loyalty and encourage repeat visits, delivering compound interest on your efforts. 

It’s about ensuring every digital experience counts, to give retail customers a reason to come back again and again.

1. Listen to your customers

Understanding what your customers want, not just today but over time, is key to retention. Contentsquare’s Voice of Customer (VoC) product helps you do just that.

Retention and churn are 2 sides of the same coin: to improve the first, you need to reduce the second. 

Start by using Contentsquare’s Surveys capability to measure your NPS® and take stock of how loyal your customer base is. Consider making your NPS® one of the key metrics you track to measure retention.

But that’s just the beginning. Surveys can be used in many other ways to proactively listen to customer feedback and understand what makes them happy or frustrated. This qualitative data can then help you prioritize initiatives to improve user experience and prevent churn. Use advanced targeting options to show exit-intent surveys to existing customers who’ve returned to your site but are about to leave without making a purchase this time.

Setting up an exit-intent survey in Contentsquare

Knowing what makes users leave is essential to removing any friction from their customer journey. But understanding what makes people come back to your retail site is equally important when looking to improve retention. 

Use Surveys to set up a dedicated customer retention survey to better understand what would make your site visitors come back and make a purchase. You could either trigger it after they’ve made a purchase, or make it an email survey, sent to customers who haven’t returned to your site within 30 days of making a purchase

🎯 Pro tip: water 2 plants in 1 pour with Surveys. Combine an NPS® survey with a ‘What would make you more likely to return to our site in the future?’ question to let customers tell you why they would come back.

Creating an NPS® survey in Contentsquare

Don’t have time to build a survey from scratch? Simply select one from Contentsquare’s survey templates or let Contentsquare’s AI, Sense, generate one for you based on the goal you’re trying to achieve. You can then edit the questions, display behavior, targeting, and more, before you publish the survey.

Sense also helps you dive deeper into survey responses by automatically sorting them by sentiment, topic, and keywords. 

You can then jump directly to the exact session replay that led to the feedback, allowing you to understand the ‘why’ behind the response. 

For example, after identifying negative feedback on your product detail page (PDP) that caused a user to churn without making a new purchase, use Contentsquare’s Session Replay capability to discover what caused the churn. Connecting survey responses to user behavior by creating segments based on feedback helps you prioritize fixes. 

2. Uncover successful journeys with advanced journey analytics

Mapping how shoppers interact with your site over time allows you to understand the paths that lead to repeat visits and conversions, helping you optimize key touchpoints and increase customer lifetime value (CLV).

Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis capability helps you compare successful and abandoned paths to identify which journeys lead to repeat purchases or higher engagement. This lets you further improve and promote the most effective flows, increasing the likelihood of customers returning and spending more over time.

Segment users by CLV to identify the journeys of users who keep coming back and converting. You can then analyze how high-value customers move through your site, what keeps them engaged, and where they encounter issues. 

🤖Having trouble understanding which journeys drive the most engagement and lead to retained customers? Chat with Sense and get detailed analysis in seconds.

Chat with Sense directly in Journey Analysis 

By identifying journeys that lead to churn or low engagement, you can trigger targeted win-back campaigns, personalized offers, or nurture flows to re-engage at-risk users.

Journeys aren’t always linear though. Once they’ve made a first purchase, your customers may come back again a fortnight later to browse on mobile, only to make another purchase a week later on desktop.  

Contentsquare’s Product Analytics powered by Heap, allows for cross-session and cross-device analysis, providing a holistic view of the customer journey—crucial for long-term retention. You can analyze funnels across sessions to visualize drop-offs and understand friction or perform a cohort analysis to measure conversion rate over time.

Understanding the full customer journey helps you spot moments where users are most receptive to cross-sell or upsell offers, increasing their lifetime value.

⚡Success story: how Thinx increased retention with Product Analytics

Period and bladder leak underwear company Thinx faced the significant hurdle of educating potential customers about period-proof underwear, a relatively new concept for many. This lack of understanding directly impacted initial conversions and the long-term retention of new customers.

The Thinx team developed an interactive quiz designed to help users understand their periods better and receive personalized product recommendations, tailored to their needs. 

To refine this user experience, Elise leveraged Product Analytics to identify and address areas where users struggled or dropped off within the quiz.

Using these insights, the team made strategic refinements to the quiz that led to a remarkable 5x increase in conversion rate. Crucially, by effectively educating users on product functionality, Thinx also achieved an impressive 90% retention rate for customers who engaged with the quiz experience.

Read the full case study here.

3. Identify what drives lifetime revenue and retention

By analyzing how often and in what ways users engage with your site, you can identify features or content that drives engagement and retention. This allows you to focus on enhancing these elements to keep users coming back. 

Contentsquare’s Heatmaps and Page Comparison capabilities allow you to understand which pages and elements drive the highest lifetime revenue, helping you prioritize content for loyal, returning customers.

Zoning analysis in Heatmaps allows you to measure page elements in terms of average lifetime revenue and multi-session purchase rate.

For instance, you may notice patterns emerging around certain elements: users who interact with user reviews generate more revenue over time than those who don’t. In that case, you might consider placing user reviews more prominently on product detail pages (PDPs).

⚡Success story: how John Lewis increased engagement and retention with banners

Department store chain John Lewis launched one of its biggest members’ week campaigns. The team Used Heatmaps to understand user engagement and Contentsquare’s Impact Quantification capability to measure the revenue contribution of those who interacted with campaign banners placed across the website.

After comparing customers who interacted with the banners with those who didn’t, they discovered campaign banners drove up to 4x higher engagement than their target of 7%.

Better yet, customers who engaged with the banners had significantly higher average order value (AOV).

Read the full case study here.

1. Personalize experiences for lasting loyalty

Personalization is a powerful differentiator, and AI is now enabling marketers to personalize and optimize experiences at scale.

With detailed insights into user preferences and behaviors, you can personalize the shopping experience, making it more relevant and engaging for each user, and increasing the likelihood of them coming back.

Contentsquare lets you dynamically group and segment users based on real-time behavior, which can then be pushed to your external data warehouse via Contentsquare’s Data Connect capability.

Understanding user preferences and adapting your content to their needs can be a game-changer for your online store. By combining Contentsquare’s insights with AI to analyze user behavior as it's happening, you can dynamically adjust the content and offers displayed to each visitor, significantly boosting conversion rate optimization (CRO) and average order value (AOV). 

Online fashion retailer ASOS uses personalization to drive loyalty by building strong relationships early, providing ultra-relevant content, and rewarding customers based on their behavior.

ASOS sends users emails spotlighting brands they’re probably going to like, based on user journey data they’ve gathered in Contentsquare.

An example of a personalized email from ASOS

Moving away from the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to loyalty, ASOS has taken a different tack: treat every single customer as an individual, whose tastes you know and wants you can predict. With this approach, the team has boosted the number of loyal, returning customers, bypassing the traditional loyalty program.

Unifying your data sets will allow for deeper insights, enabling personalization and improving CLV. Data Connect seamlessly integrates Contentsquare's rich behavioral data with other data sources in your warehouse, enabling your teams to power external machine learning models for churn prediction, conversion forecasting, and anomaly detection.

Try Contentsquare to improve digital experiences on your retail site

By leveraging Contentsquare’s capabilities and the strategies above, you can create engaging, friction-free digital experiences that encourage repeat visits and build lasting customer loyalty.