When your business has loyal customers, you have consistent cash flow. Loyal customers become your brand advocates in the long run and start bringing in new customers, ultimately improving your revenue substantially.
Research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company reports that you can increase your profits by up to 95% if your customer retention rate improves by 5%.
Now, that’s a substantial return on investment.
To achieve this massive return, you must craft and execute strategies that increase customer retention. However, it’s essential to note that effective strategies alone won’t produce the desired outcome of keeping your customers coming back.
If you’re looking to build a client base of loyal and repeat customers, you must invest in customer retention tools that make your strategies a success.
This article will discuss seven web tools that can help you keep your customers coming back to you.
What is a CRM?
Customer relationship management (CRM) helps digital marketers and business owners nurture their relationships with their existing customers. This refers to all the techniques, strategies, technologies, and tools that businesses use to develop, retain, and gain customers.
This system makes sure that every step of interaction with customers goes efficiently and smoothly as possible, increasing the overall profits. A CRM system collects customer data from various channels. The system then stores detailed information on overall purchasing behavior patterns, personal information, and even purchase history.
The best thing about CRM software is that almost every departmental unit can benefit from it—from customer service and sales to marketing, recruiting, and business development. A good CRM system provides a better way to manage external relationships.
Let’s now dive into the seven web tools that can help your business retain its customers.
7 Top Web Tools for Customer Retention
1. Zight (formerly CloudApp): Improve Customer Experience
Zight (formerly CloudApp) is a customer retention tool that enables you to communicate with your target market easily and quickly. That’s because it combines GIF creation, screen recording, and image annotation features into one effective cloud-based solution.
If you want to answer a customer’s question, sending an email might not be the best option because your target audience has no interest in reading emails. Instead, you can show your customers how to solve their problems by shooting a quick video or annotating a screenshot, illustrating your solution.
With Zight (formerly CloudApp), you can easily distribute your content to your target audience by sharing your content via Slack, Google Docs, email, or customer support platforms, such as Jira and Zendesk.
How you handle customer complaints and questions has a significant influence on your business’s customer retention rate. In fact, a 2020 report by Qualtrics XM Institute shows that only 40% of customers would consider doing business with a brand with a poor customer experience. Zight (formerly CloudApp) can help you offer the best customer experience you can.
2. Ampry: Reducing Cart Abandonment
With Ampry, you can offer customized on-site experiences that can help you convert more web visitors into leads, generating more sales. This customer retention tool creates personalized web experiences using pop-ups, bars, social proof notifications that help you convert your visitors into leads and sales. Ampry is built to engage the right web visitors using advanced user targeting, at the right time via multiple trigger options, such as page scroll, site abandonment, and time on your site, with the right messaging through the split testing functionality and various placement options.
Daily use cases include displaying testimonials as social proof/conversion numbers, adding pop-up notifications with special offers targeted at exiting web visitors, and collecting user information through the integrated form capture and delivery function. All these functionalities are geared towards reducing cart abandonment by keeping your web visitors interested in what you’re offering and motivating them to complete their orders.
3. Smartlook: Analyze User Behavior
What if you could watch a video of users’ activities on your website? Smartlook is a customer retention software that enables you to watch replays of what users do when they visit your website.
Available in both paid and free versions, you can see which countries your web visitors came from, the time they spent on any web page, the web pages they visited, which web visitors signed up, and which pages they exited from. It also allows you to see how your web pages appear on various mobile devices, browsers, and operating systems. If you want a clear picture of the customer experience your website offers, and are looking to improve your customer retention rate, Smartlook is a valuable tool.
4. HubSpot: CRM Platform
Whether you’re a startup, a mid-sized business, or an established organization, you can leverage HubSpot’s all-in-one CRM platform to boost your customer retention rate.
To start, you can use HubSpot’s Marketing Hub to create highly relevant and personalized marketing content. This will promote brand awareness and convert audience segments via blog post, email sign-up, or call-to-action.
With HubSpot, you can also set automated reminders and sales follow-ups, record and track calls, access email tracking and templates, and use reporting features to build stronger relationships with prospective clients. These features build brand familiarity and trust, which is the crucial element for retaining customers.
5. Proved: Validate Market Demand
Customer loyalty or retention won’t happen for your company if there’s no actual market demand. Fortunately, there are a ton of web tools out there to provide you with insights into whether your product or service is in demand. Proved is the most effective customer retention tool to validate market demand.
This web tool gathers information about your product idea, sends a questionnaire to your target audience, and partners with Cint—to get feedback from millions of potential responders. After your results are ready, there’s a dashboard that you can reference to see whether your product resonates with your existing customers.
6. Optimizely: Run A/B Tests
A/B tests are a crucial customer retention marketing strategy. You can run tests between two versions of paid marketing campaigns to determine which one generates more sign-ups.
For instance, MedienReich, a computer training company, improved its engagement rate, which ultimately increased its customer retention rate by 40.87% after performing an A/B test on two versions of its homepage.
A web tool, such as Optimizely, makes it easier for business owners and digital marketers to run A/B tests. This tool helps you run A/B tests virtually on every single hypothesis, product or website, or function or item on your app in a short period of time. Optimizely enables you to see the option your target audience finds most valuable, helping you make educated decisions.
7. Reveal: Customer Value Optimization Platform
To get maximum benefits from your customer retention efforts, you need a web tool that segments your target audience and helps you interact with them differently. Reveal is a customer value optimization platform that leverages the Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) segmentation to gain crucial insights from your existing customers for better-targeted paid campaigns and emails and generate more repeat customers. This customer retention tool creates your Ideal Customer Profile while calculating:
- Behavior analysis for each RFM segment
- The margin share for each RFM segment
- How likely are your customers to place the next order?
- Cohort analysis
- Customer retention rate
- Catalog anomalies
- Predictive and historical customer lifetime value.
Gaining a new client typically costs 6-7 times more than retaining existing customers. Thus, you need an easy-to-use, intuitive, and effective tool to help you boost customer retention rate and build a loyal, dedicated, and long-term customer base for your business.
“The key to developing long-term customer relationships is building trust with your customers and delivering value.” – Chad Horenfeldt
Keeping customers coming back is a challenging task. But leveraging customer retention tools can deliver excellent experiences to your customers and build genuine, long-term relationships with them.
