Customer retention is priceless. When you have loyal customers, you have a consistent flow of revenue. They become your brand advocates over time and start bringing you more customers, eventually increasing your revenue significantly.
In fact, research conducted by Harvard Business Review proves that you can boost your profits by up to 95% if your customer retention increases by 5%.
Now, that’s quite a significant return.
To achieve this level of return, you need to develop and implement strategies that boost customer retention. But good strategies alone cannot produce the desired result of keeping customers coming back to you.
If you want to build a pool of returning customers, start investing in customer retention tools that make the implementation of those strategies a breeze.
In this article, we uncover the top customer retention tools that you can use to serve customers better and make them fall in love with your brand.
In this article
Why is Customer Retention Important?
Customer retention is critical to survive the fluctuating and evolving business landscape. Besides increasing your business revenue, it positions you as a trustworthy brand that customers love to be associated with.
Your customer retention rate speaks volumes about your brand values and how you treat your customers. Here are some of the major benefits that customer retention provides:
Word of mouth publicity absolutely free
Yes, you heard it right. Customers can be your brand advocates or critics. The choice is yours. If you treat them right, they stay loyal to your brand and don’t hesitate to share the positive experiences with their social networks. People trust the real-time experiences of those in their network more than the claims made in advertisements.
That explains how customer retention increases your brand’s popularity that too free of cost.
Cost-saving
Invest in nurturing your relationships with customers and providing them the best-in-class services, and you will not have to spend exorbitantly on marketing or advertising.
Besides, it also reduces the efforts that go into onboarding new customers. Your existing clients are already familiar with your offerings and how you function, so you don’t have to put that extra effort into serving them. That’s not the case with new customers, as they need proper guidance every step of the way while interacting with your brand.
Improves Your Revenue Graph
Loyal customers will buy more often from your brand. First, because they are familiar with your quality standards and service criteria. Second, because they trust that you will not wrong them. Therefore, buying from your brand gets much easier for them than switching to your competitor.
This leads to returning customers and more revenue for your business.
Besides, loyal customers will be ready to pay more for your products and services simply because they value your brand and trust that you work for their best interests.
Valuable Feedback
Loyal customers know your products and services in an out. Since they are associated with your company for a long time, they can give you valuable suggestions that new customers can’t.
They know details like –
- Bottlenecks faced while using your product
- How your customer service team operates
- What important features are missing in your product, and much more.
Customer retention gives you the opportunity to gain valuable feedback and suggestions. Implementing these can bring significant improvements in the way you serve your customers. This leads to happier customers and much better sales, as well.
Top 10 Customer Retention Tools You Can’t Ignore
1. Woorise
If customer engagement is on your mind, Woorise is the right choice.
Woorise is an excellent tool for running contests, giveaways, surveys, and quizzes. Whether your goal is to generate new leads, grow a subscriber list, or boost your social media following, this tool offers you interesting features that simplify the whole process.
Some of its key features include:
- Pre-made layouts and templates to create customized campaigns
- Drag and drop campaign and form builder
- Pre-built social actions such as viral share, follow buttons, social widgets, etc.
- Conditional actions and confirmations
- Custom CSS and various other design options
- Mobile-friendly
- GDPR-compliant
Price: starts at €0.
2. ProProfs Knowledge Base
When it comes to providing effective and instant customer service, there can be nothing better than a self-help knowledge base.
Customers are increasingly becoming impatient. When they experience a challenge, 40% of them prefer finding solutions on their own without approaching the support staff for help.
ProProfs Knowledge Base software helps you meet this expectation.
Simple yet powerful, the tool comprises smart features, settings, and integrations to help you build a self-help knowledge base, documentation, help site, manuals, and more.
Leverage the tool to create a centralized knowledge platform that customers can access conveniently to find answers to any questions they have regarding your products or services. Your support staff can also use this platform to find information while responding to customers on call or email.
The software assists you in various ways. Some of these are:
- Provide 24*7 instant self-help to customers across different devices and browsers
- Craft pleasant experiences for customers by integrating the software with third-party tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Wufoo, and more.
- Provide a seamless information-gathering experience to customers through a Google-like search system
- Gather customer feedback through surveys
- Identify knowledge gaps through metrics such as popular and poorly rated articles, the total number of searches failed searches, etc.
Key features:
- 25+ ready to use templates
- 90+ language support
- Rich text editor
- Powerful integrations with third-party tools
- Insightful reports
- Branding and customization options
- Roles and permissions
- Google-like search system
- Conditional content rules
- Context-sensitive help
- Revision history and version control
Price: starts at $0.
3. Yotpo
Yotpo is another powerful customer retention tool. It helps you collect customer reviews, showcase customer-related content strategically on your website, and drive more conversations. It also allows you to create referral programs and provide customized rewards for existing as well as new customers.
You can even use photos and videos of your existing customers to place on your website. This is a wonderful strategy, especially if your objective is to engage your prospects and drive them to purchase from you.
Here are some of its main features –
- Multiple campaign choices
- Custom designed experience
- Tier-based programs
- Track customer actions and behavior
- Multi-channel support
- Flexible reward structure
- Measurable ROI
- Multiple sharing options
Price: starts at $0.
4. Qualaroo
To retain customers, you must understand them. Customers go through a period of dissatisfaction before they quit doing business with a company. Understanding the issues that they are unhappy with could be just what you need to make them stay.
Qualaroo can help you do this easily. The tool is adept at launching surveys on your website to collect and analyze customer feedback. It enables you to target specific users, track visitors in real-time, and nudge visitors at the right time, without interrupting their browsing experience.
The tool’s AI-powered sentiment analysis system is competent in tracking mood metrics and keywords, helping you analyze customer feedback in a better way.
Key features:
- Beautifully designed survey templates to get started
- Sentiment analysis powered by IBM Watson
- Exit surveys to identify reasons behind lack of conversions
- Branching and skip logic
- Customizable nudges
- User experience insights
Price – starts at $199/month.
5. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing tool to keep customers coming back to your business. The tool is perfect for connecting with prospects through customizable emails, creating landing pages that help in conversion, and developing digital ads to get new customers.
Whichever industry you belong to – ecommerce, retail, hospitality, or startup, Mailchimp can help you in your growth journey. The tool also offers powerful integrations with Zapier, Slack, Canva, and WordPress to make your experiences extremely pleasant.
Key features:
- Email analytics
- Pre-designed email templates
- Identify what’s working and what’s not in the campaigns
- Pre-built segments based on campaign activity, purchase history, and more
- Pop-up signup forms to gather contact details of prospects
- Mailing address finder
- Launch surveys and send targeted messages based on survey responses
- Detailed revenue reports
- Share emails on social media
Price: starts at $0.
6. Chargify
Customer retention is about giving customers pleasant experiences throughout the purchase and post-purchase phase. Billing and payment are important touchpoints in a customer’s purchase journey. They are integral to the purchase process and play a significant role in keeping customers closer to your brand.
To retain customers, you need to provide them with a frictionless billing system that builds trust and improves your relationship with them.
If you are looking for a tool that can help you achieve this, look no further than Chargify.
This client retention tool is ideal for managing online payments and dealing with revenue management challenges. It provides pricing combinations, automates your quote-to-cash process, manages subscriptions, offers over 20 payment gateway options, and much more.
Key features:
- Events-based billing
- Elastic billing
- Analytics and predictive insights to give you a deeper understanding of revenue flow
- Automated billing logic
- Customizable sign-up pages
- Subscription modifications
- Two-factor authentication
- User access controls
Price: starts at $149/month for startups
7. Heap Analytics
Heap Analytics is an amazing tool for understanding customers, making smart business decisions, and providing excellent experiences to your customers. It gives you an end-to-end understanding of how customers use your product and helps you identify the features users love and the ones they don’t.
This client retention tool tracks every click, tap, or swipe your customers make while interacting with your product on your website or mobile app. Not just this, Heap Analytics also help you improve customers’ journey by providing them personalized experiences at every stage.
Key features:
- User segmentation based on past behavior and attributes
- Role-based project access
- Event previews and event history
- World-class security system
- Product analytics
- Run experiments, test new features, and identify bottlenecks
Price: starts at $0.
8. Litmus
If emails form a significant part of your strategy for retaining customers, you need to ensure that your customers are opening and acting on those emails.
Litmus is the right tool to achieve this. It allows you to create emails that convert and improve returns from your email marketing campaigns. You can use Litmus to increase your email marketing effectiveness and keep customers coming back for more.
Key features:
- Email previews to know how your emails look like on different apps and devices
- Verify links and evaluate subject lines
- Track clicks and discover trends
- Identify broken links and test spam filters
- Reusable templates and task lists
- Meaningful email insights
- Custom task list and status updates
- Multi-channel collaboration
Price: starts at $99/month.
9. Buffer Reply
With many customers now opting to use social media platforms to express their dissatisfaction with companies and share experiences with their networks, this can spell doom for your brand. The best way to avert this disaster is to track customer complaints on social media.
A social media monitoring tool, Buffer Reply, enables you to do this on Twitter. The tool tracks customer complaints on Twitter and pushes them to your company so you can respond faster. It brings tweets about your company in a centralized tweet box, where you can respond, archive, and monitor conversations easily.
Key features:
- Double-reply prevention
- Team signatures
- Tag conversations for followups
- Custom search queries
- Assign conversations
Price: starts at $15/month.
10. Gainsight
It’s a fact that the more your customers succeed in using your product or service, the more they are likely to come back for more.
Gainsight’s customer success tool is the ideal choice to keep tabs on how customers experience your products. It enables you to increase customer retention and improve customer success at every stage of their interaction with your brand.
Managing customers gets seamless with data-driven alerts and productivity tools offered by this software. It’s a powerful tool to supercharge your customer service team, gather useful customer insights, and bring success to your customers.
Key features:
- 360-degree customer profiles
- Customer health scorecards
- Engagement analytics
- Scenario workflow automation
- Call-to-action notifications
- Visual reports and dashboards
Price – Available on request
Conclusion
Retaining customers can be challenging. However, with customer retention tools discussed above, you can create excellent experiences for your customers and build genuine relationships with them that last a lifetime.
The cost of using these tools varies – some are costly, and others are cheap or even free. Whatever the investment, your business will certainly benefit more from returning customers than if you decided to maintain the status quo.
