Retention Slide [Design that emphasizes loyalty]
- Ink Narrates | The Presentation Design Agency
- May 11
- 6 min read
Our client, Lori, asked us an interesting question while we were working on her investor pitch deck.
“Is there a way to visually prove that our customers actually stick with us?”
Our Creative Director answered,
“Yes, it’s called a retention slide, and it’s one of the most underrated slides in a deck.”
As a presentation design agency, we’ve observed a common challenge: Most companies are great at talking about acquisition but go completely blank when it comes to retention. They treat loyalty like an afterthought. Like it’s something too soft or too vague to highlight. And they couldn’t be more wrong.
So, in this blog, we’ll talk about what we’ve learned over the years designing retention slides that do more than just fill a spot. They reinforce trust, credibility, and staying power in your business.
The Real Problem With Most Retention Slides
Most retention slides are either non-existent, painfully vague, or just plain boring. You know the ones: a bar graph with no context, a couple of numbers thrown in with no explanation, or worse, a bullet list that says something like “We retain 80% of our users” and expects the reader to just take it at face value.
Here’s what we’ve noticed: when teams build decks, they obsess over customer acquisition metrics. CAC, MRR, YoY growth, all of that gets the spotlight. But when it’s time to show that people stick, suddenly there’s radio silence.
The irony? Retention is what investors, clients, and partners actually care about long-term. Growth is exciting. But loyalty is what builds value.
We’ve worked with dozens of SaaS founders, ecommerce leaders, and B2B veterans who were proud of their retention, they just didn’t know how to show it. Not clearly. Not confidently. And definitely not in a way that earns them an extra five minutes in the boardroom.
And we get why. Retention is tricky. It’s not just a number. It’s behavior, consistency, and emotional loyalty wrapped into a metric. And if you’re not careful, the way you show it can do more harm than good. We’ve seen people misuse cohort charts, misunderstand churn, or slap on a vanity metric without a clue about what their audience actually wants to see.
A weak retention slide doesn’t just miss the mark. It quietly tells your audience that you haven’t thought it through. And that can be a deal breaker.
How to Design a Retention Slide That Actually Proves Loyalty
1. Start With What Loyalty Looks Like in Your Business
Retention is not one-size-fits-all. If you're in SaaS, it might look like renewals, subscription longevity, or daily active usage. In ecommerce, it’s about repeat purchases and customer lifetime value. In services? It could be client contracts renewed year after year.
Before you throw numbers on a slide, ask yourself: what does real loyalty look like for us?
When we worked with a B2B SaaS client last quarter, they were proud of their low churn rate but even prouder of the fact that 68% of their enterprise clients had expanded their contracts within 12 months. That’s retention plus growth. That’s a story. And that’s what ended up being the hero of the slide, not just the churn figure.
You need to figure out what your version of that story is. Because when you know what loyalty actually looks like in your business model, you can design a slide that proves it rather than just claiming it.
2. Choose the Right Visual. One That Shows Change Over Time
Let’s get tactical.
Good retention slides often fall into one of three visual models, depending on the type of business:
Cohort charts: Great for SaaS, especially if you’re tracking retention or engagement month over month for a specific group of users.
Bar graphs or line charts over time: Useful when showing retention rates across multiple time periods (monthly, quarterly, annually).
Retention funnel or cycle diagrams: Good for ecommerce or product businesses to show how customers come back, when, and in what way.
But visuals are just scaffolding. What makes them work is how you use them to show contrast. That’s the trick.
For example, one of our clients had a slide that said: “74% of users still active after 6 months.” Flat. Vague. Easy to ignore.
We redesigned that slide to show cohorts over six months, with a baseline comparison from the previous year. Suddenly, the visual told a clear story: “Our retention improved by 18% over the last year, thanks to product updates and onboarding changes.”
That’s the magic — not just saying “we’re good at retention” but showing the journey.
3. Add Context or You’ll Be Forgotten
A retention slide with numbers and graphs but no context is like a punchline without a joke. You need to say something about why those numbers matter.
Think about the questions your audience is quietly asking:
“Is this retention rate good or bad?”
“How does it compare to others in the market?”
“What are they doing that makes people stay?”
Answer that directly in a line or two of copy. This is not the time for generic fluff like “our customers love us.” Be specific. Use cause and effect.
Here’s an example from a deck we designed for a fintech client:
“Retention improved by 21% after introducing a customer success team — now 3 out of 4 users remain active beyond 90 days.”
Notice how that sentence doesn’t just show a number, it gives a reason, a result, and a time frame. It tells a mini-story. That’s what makes the slide memorable. You don’t want people just to see your data. You want them to remember what it says about your business.
4. Don't Oversell — Trust Is the Whole Point
This one might sound obvious, but it’s where a lot of people trip up: don’t manipulate the data to make it look prettier. Don’t cut off axes. Don’t round numbers in your favor. Don’t cherry-pick best-case weeks and ignore your baseline.
Your retention slide is where people are quietly testing your credibility. It’s a trust signal, not just a bragging moment.
We once reviewed a deck where a startup had posted a 95% retention rate on their slide. Sounds amazing, right? Until we asked: over what time period? Which segment of users? Turns out, it was a 1-week retention rate for their most active beta testers, not representative at all.
That’s not just weak, it’s risky. A savvy investor will dig, and if they sense spin, they’ll question everything else in your deck.
So be honest. If your retention isn’t where you want it to be yet, show the direction, not just the number. A well-framed “we improved from X to Y” is always better than a misleading “we’re already at Z.”
5. Make the Slide Visually Respected
Let’s talk about aesthetics. The fastest way to weaken your retention slide is to make it look like an afterthought. Design matters. Fonts, spacing, hierarchy, they’re all quietly working to convince the viewer that what they’re seeing is trustworthy.
If you just paste an exported Excel chart and call it a day, it shows. And worse, it suggests that you didn’t care enough to make your most loyal customers part of your story.
Here’s what we do when we design retention slides:
Keep only the most relevant data — no clutter.
Use consistent color to highlight customer journey or data change.
Use clean labels and avoid jargon.
Let white space breathe around the key stat or visual.
Your audience should get the point in 3 seconds or less. If they’re squinting, scrolling, or wondering what they’re supposed to take away, it’s not working.
Remember: your retention slide is the visual representation of the most important relationship in your business, the one with your customers. Treat it with the respect it deserves.
6. One Slide, One Message
And finally — keep it tight. One idea per slide. We’ve seen people try to cram churn rates, cohort tables, NPS scores, renewal rates, and feature adoption into one chaotic slide like it’s a dumping ground for leftover stats.
Don’t do that.
Decide what single message you want to communicate. Is it that customers stay longer than expected? That your product keeps them engaged month after month? That retention is improving every quarter?
Pick one. Say it well. Support it visually. That’s it.
One of the best retention slides we ever designed simply said:
82% of clients have stayed with us for over 3 years — and 61% have expanded their contract.
Next to that was a simple bar chart showing client tenure distribution. Clean. Honest. Impressive. No filler.
Why Hire Us to Build your Presentation?
If you're reading this, you're probably working on a presentation right now. You could do it all yourself. But the reality is - that’s not going to give you the high-impact presentation you need. It’s a lot of guesswork, a lot of trial and error. And at the end of the day, you’ll be left with a presentation that’s “good enough,” not one that gets results. On the other hand, we’ve spent years crafting thousands of presentations, mastering both storytelling and design. Let us handle this for you, so you can focus on what you do best.