The Best Agencies for Fixing Customer Retention (Websites and Apps)

Retention is more cost-effective than acquisition, and improving it can directly boost revenue and loyalty. Rather than naming specific companies, here’s what the best retention agencies have in common so you can identify the right partner for your needs.

What a great retention agency offers

• Behavioural insight to uncover why users leave - They go beyond analytics to understand the underlying behaviours and motivations that cause churn.
• Experience in lifecycle design to keep users engaged - They design engagement across onboarding, active use, and re-engagement stages.
• Proven tactics for onboarding, re-engagement, and loyalty - They apply tested methods to increase activation rates, bring back inactive users, and reward long-term engagement.
• Ability to work across research, UX, and content - They address retention holistically by tackling friction points in the entire user experience.

Sign they can deliver

• Measurable past results in retention improvement - Case studies and metrics demonstrate they can drive change.
• Collaboration across product and marketing teams - They work closely with all stakeholders to ensure alignment and impact.
• Clear testing and iteration process - They measure outcomes, refine strategies, and adapt to evolving user behaviour.

Cook: 500,000 downloads was the easy part

Cook hit 500,000 downloads in three weeks. Apple named it Best of 2013. Downloads were never the problem.

Keeping people was.

Hundreds of thousands of recipes were going in, and users couldn’t find anything worth coming back for. That’s not a reminder problem. No email sequence fixes it.

So we built curation into the product. People could make their own recipe books. Collections by chefs, recipes from your mother, everything in between. Then we let others browse those books by user, by celebrity, by country, by cuisine. It worked because it gave home cooks something to be proud of and a way to show it off.

Monthly active users went up 240 percent. Downloads passed 1.2 million.

How do you pick a retention partner?

Judge on the four capabilities above rather than on a ranking. Ask for a retention problem they diagnosed, what they changed, and what happened next. Behavjōr is a Sydney design and research consultancy that treats retention as a design problem rather than a messaging one. We look for the moment users decide to leave, then redesign that moment. See our experience design practice, or the Cook case study, an app that held an audience in more than a hundred countries.

Related: Experience design and Cook case study.