The second purchase is where brands are really built.

Retention marketing is everything a brand does to keep customers buying after their first purchase. It covers lifecycle email and SMS, loyalty schemes, referral programmes, subscriptions, post-purchase experience and win-back journeys for lapsed customers. The aim is to increase how often people buy, how much they spend and how long they stay. Because existing customers already know and trust you, retention usually costs far less than acquisition and has a large effect on profitability over time.

A retention and loyalty agency analyses your customer data, designs the programmes that encourage repeat buying and runs them day to day. At Vertical that covers retention strategy, loyalty scheme design, referral programmes, subscription journeys, win-back, lifetime value analysis and reporting. Because we also run email, SMS and paid media, we connect retention with acquisition, so you know how much a customer is worth and how much you can afford to spend to win one.

Not always. A loyalty scheme works best for brands with products people buy repeatedly and a customer base large enough to make the mechanics worthwhile. For some brands, better post-purchase journeys, replenishment reminders or a subscription offer will do more than points ever could. We look at your purchase frequency, margins and customer behaviour first, then recommend the approach most likely to pay back, which may or may not be a formal scheme.

A referral programme rewards existing customers for introducing friends, usually with an incentive for both the person referring and the person referred. The best programmes ask at the right moment, such as after a great delivery or a positive review, and make sharing effortless. We design the incentive, the messaging and the placement across your site and emails, then track which referred customers go on to buy again, so the programme is judged on long-term value.

Subscription churn usually comes from a few predictable moments: a first delivery that disappoints, too much product building up or a subscriber forgetting why they signed up. We design onboarding that sets expectations, flexible options such as skipping or changing frequency and timely messages that remind subscribers of the value they are getting. We also study cancellation reasons and test changes to the offer and cancellation flow to keep more subscribers for longer.

Customer lifetime value is the total revenue or profit a customer generates over their relationship with your brand. It matters because it tells you how much you can afford to spend to acquire a customer and which channels, products and offers bring in the most valuable ones. We calculate lifetime value by cohort, so you can see how it changes over time and whether retention work is genuinely making customers more valuable.

Most of our retention work runs through Klaviyo for email and SMS, connected to Shopify for order and customer data. We work with established loyalty, referral and subscription apps rather than building custom systems, and we choose them based on your needs rather than preference. Where SMS or WhatsApp fits your audience, we add it to the same lifecycle programme, so every channel works from one view of the customer.

Some improvements, such as better post-purchase and win-back journeys, can start affecting results within weeks. Changes to repeat rate and lifetime value take longer to show, because they depend on customers coming back over months. We agree early indicators to track, such as second purchase rate and engagement, alongside longer-term measures, so you can see progress well before a full year of cohort data is available.

We use AI agents to predict which customers are likely to lapse, identify the next product each customer is most likely to buy, segment audiences and draft journeys and messages. That lets us personalise retention at a scale that would be impractical by hand. Every journey, offer and message is reviewed by our team before it reaches customers, so AI speeds up the work while experienced people protect your margins and your brand.