Overcome retention challenges with in-product messages

To understand where you need to go next, you first have to understand where you are. For marketers, gaining a deeper understanding of their current and prospective customers makes it possible to optimize and enrich their customer engagement efforts.

To help marketers out here, experience intelligence platform (and Braze Alloys technology partner) Contentsquare has released its 2025 Benchmarks: Insights Report, which helps marketers get a fuller picture of key digital experience insights across the whole of the visitor journey.

Let’s explore some significant insights from the report and how brands can respond effectively.

Retention (and engagement) are in a downturn

When it comes to web traffic, things are tough all over. According to the report, there’s been a noticeable decline in organic traffic, with direct, email, organic, social, and SEO traffic dropping by 5.7% year over year. That’s a significant drop, one that’s only partially alleviated by a 0.4% rise in paid traffic over the same time period. Complicating that picture, the amount that brands spent on digital ads rose 13.2% in 2024, and brands spent 9% more money per web visit. Overall, brands are finding it harder to drive users to check out their website, and are having to spend more money to make it happen, compared to a year ago.

• Organic traffic: Down 5.7% YoY
• Paid traffic: Up 0.4% YoY
• Digital ad spending: Up 13.2% YoY
• Cost per web visit: Up 9% YoY

The picture is similar once visitors are on your site. Contentsquare uses a metric called “consumption” to measure various web engagement factors (including number of pages visited, time on site, and scroll depth). They reported the consumption rate declined 6.5% year over year, signaling an across-the-board challenge for marketers looking to pull in new users and keep them engaged. The numbers were even tougher when it came to paid users: Contentsquare found that the conversion rate was approximately 31% lower for users who came in via paid traffic versus organic. That means that brands who attempted to respond to the decline in organic traffic by upping their paid campaigns likely saw a higher percentage of those costly users slip away.

Given these drops in acquisition and engagement numbers, it’s perhaps not surprising that the report found that retention rates also took a hit, with 30-day retention declining 7% year over year.

However, the situation wasn’t uniformly bleak: Contentsquare identified a subset of brands that had managed to operate so-called “high-retention sites” that performed significantly better than the average website. On average, these sites saw 18% more page views per visit, demonstrating stronger stickiness and reminding marketers that even a challenging landscape can be overcome with the right approach.

How brands can respond: Lean into in-product channels to boost performance

There’s no single way to improve your marketing performance. Depending on your region, your industry, your business model, and your own unique customer base, different tools and tactics can have different efficacies. Smart brands know that embracing a culture of thoughtful experimentation can go a long way to finding approaches that fit their specific needs. At the same time, there are things you can do that are associated with stronger results across a range of different metrics and KPIs.

According to the Braze 2025 Global Customer Engagement Review (CER), one of those things is surprisingly simple and something you likely already have access to—but may not be using to its full potential. That strategy? In-product channels like Content Cards and in-app and in-browser messages.

The CER found that top-performing brands were 31% more likely to use in-app messages and 23% more likely to leverage Content Cards, compared to other companies. And taking advantage of these channels, which allow marketers to curate and shape the user experience and journey within an app or website, had a broad-based positive impact on customer engagement:

• Brands that sent in-app messages to users as part of their messaging mix saw 140% more sessions, 51% lower average user lifetimes, and drove 60% more purchases per user
• Brands that used Content Cards as part of their messaging mix saw 144% more sessions, 85% longer average user lifetimes, and drove 138% more purchases per user

In a world where engaging and retaining users is only getting harder and more expensive, in-product channels like Content Cards provide an opportunity to turn the tide and do it without requiring significant new costs or extensive engineering support.

Final thoughts

In-product channels aren’t the only tool in your tool belt. But they’re powerful, effective, and simple to use (and optimize). If you aren’t building these key tools into your customer engagement programs, now may be the time to start.

Interested in learning more about today’s visitor journey and key trends in customer engagement? Check out Contentsquare’s 2025 Benchmarks: Insights Report and the 2025 CER today.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the performance of and expected benefits from Braze and its products. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in the Braze Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2025, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on March 31, 2025, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.