Retention.com Pros and Cons

Our ecommerce business has been using Retention.com for nearly 6 months. The setup/implementation was pretty seamless. We've been most impressed with the "reclaim" campaigns (ie. they duplicate our abandon cart, abandon checkout, browse abandonment flows in Klaviyo and send them to subscribers who may have been missed by our normal Klaviyo flows). Since getting everything setup, we've seen a 5.1x ROI, which we're very pleased with. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We use both the "reclaim" and "grow" tools through retention (reclaim helps us recover existing customers, grow helps capture new contacts and adds them to our email list). The "grow" tool has added approximately 20k new contacts to our email list since launching it 6 months ago. However, we have noticed that these grow contacts aren't as qualified/engaged as our normal subscribers. The addition of these new contacts hasn't had a noticeable impact on our email revenue. I'm sure with some more work on our end we can figure out how to improve that though. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Onboarding is great; they set things up from the start, which is very helpful as I am part of a small team. They get the flows created and optimized and create the proper lists within Klaviyo. communication is great through out the entire process. I wouldn't call it a set it and forget solution, but it's not far from it. Installing the tool was pretty simple, and we saw a positive ROI in the first week. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Had some pricing issues in terms of onboarding at one price and then needing to upgrade less than 60 days later, but it was actually a positive in the end. Even after changing our plan, we maintained a very healthy ROI. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Great at catching people who get missed from our eCommerce/Mailing Integration Tools, so we know more people who visit our site, and can email more contacts. Abandoned Cart Flows are the most clicked flows, so emailing more people is great. On the daily, once set up the tool runs by itself. No need to make very many changes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Implementation was a bit challenging, because we wanted to make sure we were not double sending our Abandoned Cart Flows or any other emails. Our implementation specialist did not fully understand our mailing integration logic, and so our team had to double check everything and correct some mistakes that our implementation specialist had made. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Retention has been a great resource since we have began with them. We've generated a 6.8x lift in the short time we've been working together. The support is fantastic as well. The ease of use combined with the support makes this a no brainer. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not much to not like. All works so smoothly that you can nearly set it and forget it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Definitely the ability to capture emails from anonymous website visitors, huge game changer Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The email quality might not be the best. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We have seen a significant impact for our lead acquisition efforts by using Retention.com. It is very simple to setup and has shown immediate results. The user interface is very intuitive and is easy to navigate. Customer support is very helpful and I always get a quick reply. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only thing of concern with Retention.com is the impact to deliverability. They have improved by running additional filters, but it is something we continuously monitor. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's cool that you can capture user info from everyone that comes to the site Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The dishonesty with their UX on the dashboard is troubling. They have this big green box that displays an outrageously high ROI (ours said it was 20x ROI), and when we dove into the actual numbers, they were super inflated. Retention attributes any customer who goes to your site and purchases but just so happens to be in their data base as retention revenue, even when retention never sent them an email or made any contact through their software. these customers all came from ads or other touch points in our funnel but retention still attributes the revenue to their involvement.

That's just a flat-out lie. I get it, you need your customers to see a return, but come on, don't mislead people. Our own CSM told us to ignore all those numbers because they are misleading and just focus on a few. Or, if I want true accurate attribution, I had to go through all my Klaviyo contacts and do all the math myself, leaving me blind unless I spent hours trying to figure out if we were actually making anything with the software.

The second issue we encountered is the spam complaint, which they are upfront and honest about, but it's just too high, at least for our company. Maybe it works for others, and I'm sure it does, but long term, this would never be a good solution. The whole idea of collecting consumer information from people who didn't first party consent to you having their info is sketchy and not worth it in my eyes. It's only a matter of time before more laws are put in place to shut down this type of business model, unfortunately.

Does retention work? I don't know, probably for the right company. As an email marketer I wouldn't recommend it though, regardless of the industry . You're just going to cause more issues in the long run trying to repair your deliverabilty issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's an easy software to set up and integrate that immediately starts generating incremental revenue from your email + SMS channels. Their support is great and super helpful, and it's been a pleasure working with their team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Getting granular revenue reporting for some of the products they offer (Grow) isn't as granular as I'd like it to be, but I know they're working on better revenue performance tracking. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Retention.com is a great way to build your email list and cut costs, especially if you use Klaviyo as your ESP. They fill a gap allowing you to drive revenue and collect emails from the majority of your traffic that doesn't submit to an email popup. They also provide a self-serve competitive offering to tools like Wunderkind if you're not looking for full white glove service and the high price tag that comes with it. The people on their team I've interacted with have been very friendly and willing to help out. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Works best if you're on Shopify. We're currently migrating to Shopify Plus but previously integrated while on Salesforce Commerce Cloud and things took a while. They also don't yet have a "checkout abandonment" option that would send the entire contents of a users cart. This would likely drive much better performance than the "add to cart" event they have which triggers off just the first event the user adds. It would also be great to get some visiblity into the match rate on your site to compare to other solutions like Wunderkind. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.