According to ProfitWell Benchmarks, customer acquisition costs have risen by 60% since 2020. Over that same time, retention costs have only risen by 12%. Bain & Company report that a 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits anywhere from 25% to 95%. Even if we take that last figure with a grain of salt, the retention math favors your business and is critical to offsetting the costs of acquisition.
It’s also a problem that tends to be invisible until it’s too late.
In our recent webinar in partnership with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), “Revenue Robbers: How to Save At-Risk Customers Before They Leave,” Resonate CMO Meredith Albertson shared concrete strategies for strengthening customer retention, regardless of your organization’s size, tech stack, or industry.
Here are the three biggest takeaways from the session.
Takeaway 1: Churn Signals Show Up Months Before the Missed Purchase
Most churn models watch for a missed purchase, a dropped subscription, or a decline in email engagement. The problem, as Albertson explains, is timing. “By the time any of those signals appear, the customer has usually already made the decision to leave.” The team catches the outcome, not the cause, so it’s too late to implement a strategic plan to save the relationship.
That gap gets wider when you rely on exit feedback because self-reporting isn’t qualitative enough to plan around. For example, a customer who cites price as a reason for leaving may really be reacting less to your price tags and more to generalized economic anxiety or a life-stage change. That means your last-ditch discount offer still doesn’t land.
Brands may also assume that they simply aren’t satisfying the initial need of a customer, but as Albertson points out, “The reason a customer joined isn’t the same as the reason they left.”
Her fix is to move your churn model upstream by three to six months, shifting from transactional data to insights into a customer’s motivations, behaviors, and values. Three signals belong in that early warning system:
- A change in attitude. A customer who bought on quality six months ago now waits for sale days before clicking “add to cart,” or spends most of their time in your clearance section.
- Category disengagement. Customers often stop engaging with content and media about a purchase category weeks before they churn. The beach vacation researcher goes silent, or the subscriber who opened every other email stops opening any.
- Competitive openness. The customer tells themselves they’re “just going to look around to see if anything better is out there,” or starts researching alternatives to your brand.
Once you spot these signals, those customers need their own campaign track. The boilerplate loyalty message tells them, “We’re still the same great brand, nothing has changed,” but it’s the customer that has changed.
Albertson suggests matching the message to the shift: a value message for the newly price-sensitive customer, quality reinforcement for someone questioning the category, and a relationship moment for someone who has simply drifted away.
She also points out something that might seem counter-intuitive but bears repeating: standard retention messaging still works, but it’s most effective on your solid, consistent customers. They are the group that needs the reinforcement that drives continued brand loyalty.
Takeaway 2: Engagement and Cross-Sell Both Depend on Knowing Where a Customer’s Mindset Is Today
Engaged customers keep coming back. According to McKinsey, loyal, engaged customers are 64% more likely to purchase frequently than customers who aren’t. Many loyalty programs still struggle here because marketers can’t predict which message, offer, or channel will get a specific customer to respond.
Albertson recommends treating engagement as a segmentation challenge, because not all unengaged customers are unengaged for the same reason. That includes lapsed customers, which are on the cusp of becoming at-risk. These customers aren’t leaving, but their activity has dropped to zero. Three steps help:
- Build an engagement model that separates customers who are unengaged but still aligned with your brand from customers who have drifted from the values that brought them in. Those are different problems and need different messages.
- Pair channel intelligence with motivational intelligence to understand that preferred channels of your lapsed customers; this may differ from the channels you spend against or the ones that sourced these customers in the first place.
- Personalize the offer to the customer’s current life stage and values, not the ones that informed the original purchase.
Cross-sell and upsell follow the same logic. “My customer bought X, so they might want Y” can be circumstantial or incidental, and it doesn’t give you a repeatable formula. A high-level motivational analysis does. Ask what your highest-LTV customers value beyond the category, what life stage they’re in, and which adjacent categories they’re already showing behavioral signals around. Then:
- Map your product or service catalog to motivational drivers based on your value props.
- Add those drivers to your customer profile.
- Set a trigger based on an attitudinal signal rather than a transactional event, so the cross-sell goes out “when the customer is psychologically ready, not just when a certain number of days have passed since their last purchase.”
Takeaway 3: Predictive Consumer Intelligence Makes Retention Proactive
The first two strategies are things you can do on your own. If you want an easier route rooted in quantifiable data, Albertson pointed to predictive consumer intelligence (PCI). PCI tells you about a consumer’s motivations, values, and behaviors, and it also tells you what they’re likely to do next. That makes retention proactive instead of reactive. It surfaces mindset shifts, category disengagement, and competitive openness before the customer has made up their mind. As Albertson notes, “You don’t have to lose business to identify churn.”
To show how this works, Albertson shared an audience built from real Resonate data on one of the big national banks. Of its more than 29 million customers, PCI shows that 70% are happy and plan to stay. The other 30%, nearly 9 million people, are on the fence or have already decided to switch. Intent attributes, such as “plan to switch banks in the next 12 months,” make those people findable.
Motivations also tell you what might keep them. Among the potential switchers, 27% say lower rates or fees would prompt a switch, 15% say no minimum balance would, and 12% say better online and mobile banking services would. Each of those groups needs a different message.
Take the 27% who want a better deal. Their top personal values include showing abilities and being admired. An email offering no-fee banking for the bank’s best customers gives them the value they’re looking for and a feeling of being admired. You can make that offer to this segment alone, so you aren’t spending blanket offers on people who never planned to leave.
PCI also sorts those 9 million people by urgency:
- 17% aren’t sure when they’ll switch. They’re still persuadable and don’t need attention right now.
- 8% plan to switch in the next four to 12 months. They have a timeline, so reach out soon.
- 4% are switching within three months. They come first in your win-back plan.
Where to Start
If you’re looking for a first move, start with your churn model. Shifting it upstream by three to six months, and building your early warning system around attitude, category engagement, and openness to competitors, gives the other two strategies something to work from. Engagement and cross-sell both get easier once you know where a customer’s mindset is today.
If you’re looking at your retention numbers and wondering how much of that 30% you could keep, schedule some time to discuss where predictive consumer intelligence can boost your retention efforts.
