7 brilliant customer retention examples to learn from

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 seven 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.

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

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.

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.

Care for the customer and creating customer delight at its finest.

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.

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.

3. Hotjar: quick time-to-value and a learning center

Hotjar (that’s us! 👋) provides product experience (PX) insights that help businesses of all shapes and sizes—from startup teams to ecommerce stores—understand and empathize with their customers so they can make the best product decisions.

Our goal is not only to get our users up and running with Hotjar quickly (no credit card required and installation only takes a few clicks), but also to help them get value from Hotjar’s tools as quickly as possible.

One of the ways we do that is through a learning center, embedded in the exact places where customers might feel unsure about what to do next.

On top of that, customers also receive onboarding emails with relevant tips, plus a weekly email update with the most important insights Hotjar collects on your website or product.

How Hotjar retains customers

Depending on the traffic your website or product gets, Hotjar can collect hundreds or even thousands of customer data points and insights in as little as one week.

This is fantastic—and can also be overwhelming. Let’s take the example of our Recordings tool, which gives you playbacks of each user moving through your website, including scrolling, clicking, mouse movement, and navigation.

A few days after you install Hotjar on your website and collect a couple of hundred recordings, what do you do? Watch each of them—which might take you hours? Randomly pick a few? Only watch the longest recordings?

Another option, of course, is to do none of that and call it quits. You never see value from Hotjar, your free trial runs out, and you move on. That’s why Hotjar has a prompt to teach you about filters, so you can find hidden gems in your recordings. These prompts take you directly to a short course focused on extracting value from Recordings.

In just 20 minutes, you can jump back into your Hotjar account and start finding useful insights—and get your teammates and other teams on board—which is how Hotjar fosters and boosts customer loyalty.

4. 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.

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.

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 of kitchen gadgets, 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 just 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.

5. 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:

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.

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.

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).

6. 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.

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.

The style, tone, and focus of Uber’s emails morphed as the world changed with the coronavirus pandemic, emphasizing health, safety, and the commitment to protecting drivers and passengers alike. They often link to pages focused on safety, nurturing the trust and relationship that was there before the pandemic.

7. 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:

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.

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.