Question 1

What is customer retention analytics?

Accepted Answer

Customer retention analytics is the practice of measuring how long customers stay and what separates the ones who stay from the ones who leave. It usually combines cohort analysis, which groups customers by when they joined, with behavioral analysis of what those groups did differently.

Question 2

What is cohort retention analysis?

Accepted Answer

Cohort retention analysis groups customers by something they share, most often their signup month, then tracks what percentage of each group is still subscribed at one month, two months and so on. It separates a genuine improvement from a temporary spike in signups.

Question 3

What should I group a cohort by?

Accepted Answer

Signup month is the default, because it answers whether the product got better or whether you simply got more signups. Plan, acquisition channel and account size answer a different question, which is whether you are selling to the people who stay. Retain builds a cohort from any customer trait you send it.

Question 4

What is a Best Retention Trigger?

Accepted Answer

It is the single behavior that the largest share of your successful customers have in common and that churned customers mostly lack. Retain looks across the actions you track, finds the one that separates the two groups most sharply, and then lists every current account missing it.

Question 5

How do you calculate customer retention rate?

Accepted Answer

Take the customers you finished the period with, subtract the ones you acquired during it, divide by the customers you started with, and multiply by 100. The subtraction is the step people skip, and skipping it lets new signups paper over the customers who left. The result is still one average for the whole business, which is the reason to read it by cohort rather than on its own.

Question 6

How much history do I need before cohorts are useful?

Accepted Answer

A cohort becomes readable once it has a few months behind it, so the first useful comparison usually arrives around month three. Before that the segment view is more informative, because it reads current behavior rather than elapsed time.

Find what your best customers have in common

Break retention down by cohort, find where each group starts to leak, and uncover the behaviors shared by your best-retaining customers.

A churn rate tells you
that you are leaking. Not where.

Every cohort, side by sideBuild cohorts around the traits that matter, then see how each one retains over time.

See which groups actually retainCompare retention across plans, segments, or other traits to see which groups retain better.

Find your Best Retention TriggerDiscover the behavior your best-retaining customers share, and give the whole team a clear north star for retention.

Find the behavior that drives retention. Then make it everyone's job.

Retention analytics, answered plainly.

Point this at your own cohorts today

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