In recent years, customer retention has become an increasingly big focus for marketers. Why? As brands navigate a challenging, fast-moving landscape, there has been a turn toward long-term business practices and profitability—and it’s hard to build a sustainable business when your customers don’t stick around.

But this focus on retention doesn’t always translate smoothly into a successful retention marketing strategy. If it were easy to retain customers, brands could just flip that switch on whenever they needed. However, in practice, retention is a matter of relationship-building: You need to understand your customers’ wants and needs, and then take effective action to provide value as you work to satisfy those needs in an ongoing way.

To help marketers support more effective retention programs, we’ve highlighted three strategies from brands that have successfully reduced customer churn by embracing a thoughtful, retention-focused approach to customer engagement.

Immobiliare.it Boosts Retention by 28% With Personalized Updates

Immobiliare.it, a leading player in the EU real estate scene, identified a roadblock in their customer experience that needed to be addressed: They needed to find a way to keep customers in the loop about new listings without overwhelming them with too many notifications.

Their solution? To offer each customer personalized updates relevant to each individual’s unique journey of searching for the ideal home. With Braze, Immobiliare.it was able to create tailored cross-channel flows that alert customers about new listings via their preferred channels based on their individual behavior. Thanks to this strategic approach, the brand has seen a 28% increase in retention within their first 15 days of engaging and a 16% lift in interactions between users and real estate agents.

Interested in digging deeper? Read the full case study here.

Peacock Celebrated Individual Milestones to Reduce Churn Rate by 20%

Too often engagement campaigns focus on trying to get customers to come back, without giving them reasons to do so. When 2022 drew to a close, streaming service provider Peacock took a different tack. The company encouraged customer retention by sending a personalized year-end recap campaign that showcased users’ individual engagement, the types of genres they watched, and the amount of content they consumed.

This campaign was a huge hit with subscribers, which led to a major business impact, too. Compared to a control group of users who did not receive a year-in-review email, subscribers who received a recap were 20% less likely to churn within 30 days of receiving the campaign and had a 6% increase in converting from free to paid subscriptions.

Interested in digging deeper? Read the full case study here.

Picklebet Embraced Cross-Channel Journeys to Increase Retention

The Australian sports betting app Picklebet saw an opportunity to increase customer lifetime value and engagement without relying on the expensive promotions that legacy sports betting companies typically turn to to capture share of wallet. How? By creating more relevant, cross-channel experiences at key moments across the customer journey with Braze.

The team introduced customer engagement strategies designed to successfully onboard customers within their first few days of using the app and to subsequently retain them over the next two months using in-app messages, push, SMS, email, and paid ads. These campaigns kept customers coming back for more without overextending the company’s budget, resulting in a 13% increase in two-month retention and a 116% increase in sessions per user.

Interested in digging deeper? Read the full case study here.

Final thoughts

Data-powered campaigns. Cross-channel messaging flows. Personalized communications. There are many tools and tactics that brands can leverage to strengthen relationships with customers and keep their audiences around longer. To dig deeper into customer retention and how to master it, check out our exclusive retention guide.