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Marketing vocabulary · Marketing Metrics

Customer retention

Meaning in marketing, with examples

nounCommon term

In marketing, customer retention means: Keeping existing customers buying from you over time, and the methods a company uses to stop them from leaving for competitors.

In Turkish: müşteri elde tutma, müşteriyi koruma

How it is used

Often measured as a retention rate, which is the other side of churn. Loyalty programmes, good service and personalised offers support retention. Marketers often say that keeping a customer costs less than finding a new one.

Example sentences

  1. This year we're moving budget from acquisition to customer retention.

  2. Customer retention improved after we started calling clients every quarter.

Common collocations

  • customer retention rate
  • improve customer retention
  • retention strategy
  • retention campaign
  • churn rateThe percentage of customers who stop using a product or cancel a subscription during a certain period, such as a month or a year.
  • brand loyaltyCustomers' habit or wish to keep buying the same brand again and again, even when competitors offer similar products or lower prices.
  • customer lifetime valueAn estimate of the total profit or revenue a company can expect from one customer for the whole time that person keeps buying from it.
  • customer satisfactionHow happy customers are with a product, a service or their overall experience, compared with what they expected.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Marketing Metrics

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