Retention
The share of customers still with you after a given period — the same fact as churn, read from the side that grows.
Retention is the proportion of customers who are still here after a defined period: month one, month six, year one. It is churn's mirror image, and the reason both words exist is that they lead to different questions. Churn asks who left. Retention asks what the survivors have in common.
It is the least glamorous number in a business and the one that decides the others. Every other growth lever is bounded by it: acquisition fills a bucket, and if the bucket leaks, spending more only fills it faster than it drains for a while. A ten-point improvement in retention raises lifetime value, lengthens payback, and increases how much you can afford to spend to win the next customer — three effects from one change.
Measure it by cohort, never as a single blended figure. Blended retention mixes people who joined last week with people who joined two years ago and reports a number that describes nobody.
Worked: 200 customers at the start of the quarter, 24 leave, 30 join. Retention is 176 of 200, or 88%. That reads well until you split it: of the 30 who joined last quarter, 12 have already gone — 60% retention in the newest cohort, which is what the next four quarters will actually look like.
Also known as
- repeat rate
- stickiness
Relevant for
- Founders
- Fix retention before you raise acquisition spend — every point of leak is multiplied by everything you spend afterwards.
- Creators
- Watch what the people who stay two years have in common, not what the people who unsubscribed said; the survivors describe the product you actually have.
- Business owners
- A returning client costs nothing to win and buys with less negotiation — retention is the quietest pricing power a practice can build.