Building a Retention Promo Feature to Improve LTV

The Challenge

Post-2019, the market turned decisively away from “growth at all costs.” Akseleran shifted its lifecycle marketing strategy to match — prioritizing retention, not just acquisition.

We had promo codes for acquiring new users, but no dedicated engine for retaining existing ones.

How might we design a retention-focused promo engine to deepen engagement and lifetime value?

Solution & Process

I built the business case around targeting “soft-churn” and “hard-churn” users specifically, got sign-off from the CEO and CTO, then negotiated engineering bandwidth against competing department priorities.

Combined with RFM-based segmentation from our BI tools, the first version shipped after a few months of iteration. A second version added mission-based promos — a minimum transaction threshold to qualify for the voucher — to protect return-on-promotion-spend. That took nearly a year of follow-up to ship, due to engineering bandwidth constraints.

• Engaged new users to complete 4+ early transactions (correlated with materially lower churn)
• Re-engaged soft-churn users before they became hard-churn
• Reactivated hard-churn users with targeted incentives
• Lifted average transaction size via minimum-investment missions