Building a retention machine: 6 data-driven insights

Looking for ways to increase your brand’s customer retention rates? While not all of the factors that drive customers to stick around are within your control, you may have more influence over preventing churn than you realize.

From the channels you use for your customer engagement campaigns to the efforts you take to convert unknown users to known customers, you have the potential to strengthen both shorter-term 30-day retention rates and longer-term 365-day retention rates—by as much as 13X.

That’s according to our Braze 2025 Global Customer Engagement Review (CER).

Want to know what else you can do to move the needle? We’ve pulled together a list of data-driven tactics from this 2025 study as well as earlier Braze research that you can put into action to watch retention take off for your brand.

Why boosting retention matters

There’s a lot of upside to investing in customer retention: Not only are new customers more likely to stick around, there’s the chance to boost profits, increase customer lifetime value, and reduce the costs associated with higher customer turnover.

One of the most compelling cases for prioritizing retention marketing comes from research conducted by the founder of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Frederick Reichheld, for Bain & Company: His team found that improving customer retention by just 5% could help brands increase profits by more than 25%. Other studies have found that existing customers spend more and are more likely to convert than new customers and that losing customers (and their potential future spending) costs businesses trillions annually worldwide.

What moves the retention needle

In-Product vs. out-of-product messages

Different messaging channels have different strengths—and different purposes. Think of in-product messages as those that get deployed within a given experience you control, such as your app or website, while customers are actively browsing these owned digital properties. Out-of-product messages are those you may send to bring users back to your digital experiences, such as email campaigns, push (mobile and web), and text campaigns.

In general, using these two types of messaging channels in concert can have a positive impact on your customer in

1. Using hybrid messaging channels for customer engagement drives 30-day retention

Brands that take a hybrid approach to customer engagement—using both in-product and out-of-product messaging channels in concert—are able to achieve an 82% 30-day retention rate (vs. a 15% retention rate that’s observed when customers receive no marketing outreach at all). In other words, when brands use a hybrid, push-and-pull approach, they deliver a retention rate that’s more than 4X higher than when no messages are sent at all.

2. Leveraging both in-product and out-of-product messages has an even greater impact on 365-day retention

For 365-day retention, the effects are even stronger: Hybrid customer engagement outperforms no messaging by nearly 14X, it out performs pull-only (in-product) messaging by nearly 2X, and push-only (out-of-product) messaging by nearly 100%.

Finding the right retention-driving channel combinations

3. Bringing the right customer engagement channels together can boost 30-day retention

Pairing in-product messaging channels like Content Cards and in-app messages (IAMs) with out-of-product channels like email, mobile push, web push, and SMS can help drive nearly perfect—about 95% to 97%—30-day retention rates.

4. Using different marketing channels together can support longer-term, 365-day retention

While some of the combinations of channels that are most effective at moving the needle for long-term, 365-day retention overlap with those that are most influential when it comes to 30-day retention, there are some differences. Here are the channels to prioritize if you’re looking to keep your customers engaged over many months and even years.

The value of being known: Converting anonymous users can drive stronger retention

5. Converting unknown users into known customers can help accelerate 30-day retention

Previous Braze research has found that most website visitors (92%) and app users (86% of retail and eCommerce app users) are unknown customers who engage with brands’ online channels without logging into an account. New findings from our 2025 Global Customer Engagement Review reveal why this segment of users offers a huge untapped potential for marketers: Known customers have a 2.3X higher 30-day retention rate than anonymous users.

6. Converting anonymous users into known customers has an even greater impact on 365-day retention

The difference is even more sizable when you look at 365-day retention: Brands are 7.87X more likely to successfully hang onto known users than unknown users at the one-year mark.

Discover more ways to fuel your customer retention

Inside our guide: Retention in Action: Creating lasting and lucrative connections with customers, you’ll find powerful retention campaigns you can leverage for your brand and insights into the tactics marketing teams at KFC India, Tapas, and Jumbo are using to increase retention.