Customer Retention Rates by Industry: Retention with Loyalty

Customer acquisition might win headlines, but it’s customer retention that drives real, long-term growth. Retaining existing customers is crucial for both short-term profitability and long-term business success.

Yet while retention has a massive impact on revenue (just a 5% lift can boost profits by up to 95%), making it a highly cost-effective strategy), most brands still focus their energy and budgets on acquisition.

The result? They leave a mountain of revenue on the table.

If you’re wondering how your industry stacks up, or how to finally close the gap between your retention goals and reality, you’re in the right place.

We’re unpacking the latest industry benchmarks and revealing how smart loyalty tech is helping brands across every sector turn one-time customers into loyal advocates.

What’s a “Good” Retention Rate in 2025

Knowing your numbers is half the battle. A good customer retention rate depends on your industry, as the average retention rate can vary significantly between sectors.

Here’s how average customer retention rates compare across major industries in 2025:

A retention rate represents the percentage of customers you keep over a given period. Tracking this percentage helps you understand loyalty trends and compare your performance to industry benchmarks.

Sources: ExplodingTopics, Shopify, Userpilot.

Why Retention Is Still So Hard, No Matter the Industry

Let’s be real: customer loyalty isn’t broken because of a lack of effort. Most brands want to keep their customers. They invest in CRM tools, loyalty schemes, email journeys, and app notifications because customer retention drives repeat business, increases profitability, and reflects the overall quality of products and services.

But many still fall short. Why?

Because the biggest barriers to retention are systemic. They’re baked into the way many businesses are structured, especially as technology stacks and customer expectations evolve. Overcoming these barriers requires targeted retention efforts and a clear retention strategy that addresses both customer and employee needs.

Here’s a closer look at what’s holding retention back across the board and why continuous improvement in retention practices is essential to achieve customer satisfaction.

1. Low data visibility & difficulty getting customer feedback

You can’t improve loyalty and increase customer retention if you don’t know what’s working.

Most brands still lack real-time insight into how their customers behave. They track transactions, but miss everything in between: the visits, the drop-offs, the scrolls, the shares, the signals of churn or loyalty brewing.

Collecting and analyzing customer data is essential for personalizing experiences and tailoring loyalty programs to individual needs.

This blind spot is especially painful in:

• Fintech, where users might download an app, explore once, and never return.
• Retail, where multichannel behavior (online and in-store) isn’t connected.
• B2B, where key decision-makers may engage irregularly and go unnoticed.

Without clear behavioral data, personalization is impossible, and retention suffers. The lack of actionable insights from customer experience management software makes it difficult to identify what drives loyalty and where to focus improvement efforts.

To close this data gap, brands must proactively gather customer feedback through surveys and direct interactions, ensuring they capture the full picture of customer needs and expectations.

It's also important to know how to measure customer retention and why you want to invest in customer retention just as much as customer acquisition.

2. Low engagement from new customers and old customers

Customers won’t stay if they don’t feel connected. Keeping customers engaged is crucial for building loyalty and encouraging ongoing interactions with your brand.

We’re well past the era of “spend more, get more” as the only loyalty driver. People now expect rewards for attention, recognition, and value beyond the product. Think early access, community perks, content, or even charitable impact.

When engagement is low:

• Media and entertainment apps lose trial users after one episode or login.
• E-commerce platforms see one-time buyers disappear forever, risking the loss of current customers.
• Financial apps lose users after onboarding if they don’t build habit loops.

Modern loyalty is about creating reasons to stay, not just tracking transactions. High engagement with your brand leads to more repeat business and long-term customer relationships.

3. Disconnected systems

Your tech stack is only as powerful as its integration.

A loyalty strategy that spans channels, actions, and touchpoints simply can’t succeed if your systems aren’t speaking to each other.

For example:

• A customer leaves a review on your app, but the system doesn’t reward them.
• Someone redeems a code in-store, but it’s not reflected in their online profile.
• A purchase happens via your partner site, but goes unrecognized in your CRM.

These gaps are common in retail (fragmented POS + ecommerce + apps), hospitality (booking engines vs loyalty databases), and telecom (legacy CRM systems + app-based tools). Disconnected systems create disjointed experiences, which can severely impact customer support by making it harder to resolve issues quickly and consistently.

This, in turn, leads to a poor overall customer experience, as customers expect seamless interactions and efficient service across all touchpoints. Customers don’t stick around for those.

4. One-size-fits-all rewards

If everyone gets the same offer, it’s not loyalty: it’s a coupon.

Generic rewards fail to make people feel seen or valued. And in a world flooded with offers and discounts, your program becomes noise unless it’s personal.

• A power user who refers five friends should get more than a generic 10% off, rewarding your most loyal customers with exclusive perks can turn them into true brand advocates.
• A new customer should be welcomed with an experience, not just a discount.
• A churn-risk user should be re-engaged based on what they value, not a mass email blast.

Personalization drives stickiness. Nurturing loyal customers through tailored communication and rewards increases retention and lifetime value. And without it, loyalty becomes forgettable.

A well-designed referral program can help turn satisfied customers into brand advocates, leveraging their trust and enthusiasm to grow your business.

How White Label Loyalty Powers Retention

The retention problem isn’t a lack of ideas, it’s a lack of infrastructure and insight.

Across every industry, the most common story is this: “We tried a loyalty program. It didn’t move the needle. We don’t really know why.”

White Label Loyalty is built to fix that, and our technology is the reason why brands such as ARDEX/BAL were able to achieve an impressive 73% engagement rate within six months of launching their loyalty program.

Our platform helps brands improve customer retention by providing actionable insights and tools to address the root causes of churn.

Whether you’re building from scratch or evolving your existing tech stack, White Label Loyalty gives you the tools to create modern, data-powered loyalty experiences that keep customers coming back.

With features designed to boost customer retention, our solution empowers you to deliver personalized experiences, run effective loyalty programs, and gather valuable customer feedback.

With a comprehensive suite of features, White Label Loyalty supports your customer retention strategy, helping you drive long-term loyalty and reduce churn.

Here’s how we help you flip the retention script:

Dynamo: Loyalty Engine for Developers

With Dynamo, you can build loyalty into your product, your way.

With our API-first, headless loyalty engine, you can plug retention-driving features directly into your apps and platforms, without reinventing the wheel.

• Event-based reward logic: incentivize any action, not just purchases, to help turn customers into repeat buyers and loyal advocates
• Custom schemas: capture meaningful interactions in real time
• SDKs & plug-and-play UI: ship loyalty features faster than ever
• Start building instantly, no sales calls, no delays

🧠 Perfect for: product & engineering teams who want speed, control, and flexibility.

Activate: Full-Service Loyalty, Launched Fast

Need to go live quickly? Activate delivers a ready-to-use loyalty program with pre-built mobile apps, microsites, and expert onboarding, including a structured onboarding process to engage new customers and improve retention.

• Gamified campaigns to boost engagement
• Custom branding and advanced rules engine
• Real-time analytics to track what drives loyalty
• Full project support, from launch to optimization

🧠 Perfect for: brands that want a fast, guided path to measurable retention.

Enterprise: Loyalty at Global Scale

Custom needs? Complex stack? Multiple markets? Here's Enterprise.

Our modular loyalty platform is built for scale, security, and seamless integration with your CRM, POS, or ecommerce systems. It enables enterprises to engage and retain existing customers across multiple markets, supporting customer retention and reactivation efforts.

• Multi-language, multi-currency, and cross-border ready
• Flexible rewards: cashback, gift cards, points, perks
• Enterprise-grade compliance (SOC2, GDPR)
• Full API access and real-time performance monitoring

🧠 Perfect for: large enterprises managing loyalty across multiple systems and markets.

Gravitate: Turn Social Engagement into Loyalty

Where your customers scroll, we help them stay.

Gravitate connects loyalty to your Instagram and social channels, rewarding DMs, story mentions, shares, and comments. Leverage social media to enhance customer engagement and retention by providing immediate, personalized support and gathering valuable feedback.

• Build email & SMS lists from social
• Incentivize UGC and referrals
• Launch in 24 hours, no code needed
• Capture first-party data, convert followers to customers

🧠 Perfect for: digital teams looking to unlock retention through social-first engagement.