The Retention Agent helps you get ahead of churn. It analyzes where subscribers drop off in your program, surfaces the patterns worth acting on, and builds ready-to-launch retention workflows for your approval. This article explains what the Retention Agent does, how it works, and how to get it turned on for your store. We're starting by focusing on subscriber drop-off across orders, with plans to expand the agent to help you intervene across more of the customer journey over time.
Feature Access: The Retention Agent is currently in Early Access. Fill out the Agents Form if interested. Note: The Retention Agent works through Ordergroove Workflows, which is also in Early Access. We'll set you up with both.
Note: Retention Agent it isn't available for stores using Ordergroove transactional emails during Early Access; support is coming in the immediate future.
What is the Retention Agent?
The Retention Agent is an AI specialist focused on keeping your subscribers around longer. Subscribers rarely cancel out of nowhere, drop-off tends to cluster at specific points in the lifecycle, like a particular order number or for certain product-and-frequency combinations. Spotting those moments normally means digging through cohort reports by hand. The Retention Agent does that analysis for you, then proposes targeted ways to step in before subscribers leave.
What can the Retention Agent do?
- Find where subscribers drop off. It analyzes your cohort data across product and frequency combinations to pinpoint the moments subscribers are most likely to cancel—for example, heading into a particular order.
- Explain the opportunity in plain language. Each finding spells out the cohort, how much more likely they are to churn than your average subscriber, and the revenue at stake.
- Recommend a targeted play. It suggests a specific intervention for that cohort—like a one-time discount, a gift with purchase, or a benefits reminder—and explains why it fits.
- Build the workflow for you. When you approve a recommendation, it creates a new workflow, pre-targeted to that cohort and set up as an A/B test so you can measure the impact against a control group.
- Wait for your go-ahead. You add the incentive you want to offer, review the workflow, and launch it. Nothing happens until you do.
How the Retention Agent works
The Retention Agent automates the work a growth marketer would otherwise do by hand—digging through cohort data, spotting where subscribers slip away, and designing a play to win them back. It runs through a review-and-approve loop:
- It analyzes your retention data behind the scenes, looking across product and frequency cohorts to find the biggest drop-off patterns.
- It surfaces recommendations on the Workflows page—each tied to a specific at-risk cohort, with the reasoning and a suggested retention play.
- You review each recommendation and either approve it or dismiss it.
- When you approve, it builds the workflow for you, pre-targeted to that cohort and structured as an A/B test—a treatment group that receives the intervention, and a control group that doesn't.
- You add your incentive, review, and launch. You choose the actual gift or discount, give the workflow a final look, and launch it when you're ready.
Because every recommendation is built as an A/B test, you can see how much each intervention actually moves retention compared to doing nothing—and keep what works.
Getting started
1. Request access. The Retention Agent is in Early Access and runs through Ordergroove Workflows. Reach out to your Customer Success Manager or Ordergroove Support, and we'll enable both for your store. There's no implementation work on your end—the agent analyzes retention data Ordergroove already has and builds the retention workflow for you.
2. Find the agent. Once enabled, go to the Workflows page. The Retention Agent appears in a card at the top, with a feed of its most recent findings about where subscribers are dropping off.
3. Review its recommendations. Click Review Activity to open the activity panel, where each recommendation is laid out as its own card. For every one, you'll see:
- the at-risk cohort it found and the pattern behind it
- the estimated revenue opportunity
- the retention play it recommends, such as a discount, gift with purchase, or benefits reminder
- whether it includes an A/B test (recommendations are set up to test against a control group)
Approve the ones you want to act on, and dismiss the ones you don't.
4. Finish and launch the workflow. When you approve a recommendation, the Retention Agent builds a new workflow for you, pre-targeted to that cohort. Add the incentive you want to offer (for example, the specific gift or discount), review the workflow, and launch it when you're ready.
- Note: Ordergroove transactional emails aren't supported in Workflows yet (this is on the roadmap). If a retention play relies on email, reach out and we'll help you find the best approach for your store.
Additional reading
- Ordergroove Agents — an overview of agents, how they differ from "just AI," and the full agent lineup.
- Payment Agent — how the Payment Agent recovers revenue from failed payments.
- Analytics Agent — how to get insights and answers from your program data.