Customer retention is a business’s ability to have the same customers or clients repurchase from them—which is vital for sustaining and growing revenue. Depending on your business and specific needs, various products like automation tools, loyalty management systems, and customer relationship management (CRM) software can help maintain your current customer base by keeping them satisfied…
Customer retention is a business’s ability to have the same customers or clients repurchase from them—which is vital for sustaining and growing revenue. Depending on your business and specific needs, various products like automation tools, loyalty management systems, and customer relationship management (CRM) software can help maintain your current customer base by keeping them satisfied through communication, activity tracking, and ticketing tools.
Based on our evaluation, the 12 best customer retention software tools include:
Best for business-to-business (B2B) sales retention: Freshsales
*Based on annual billing. Monthly billing is also available for slightly higher rates.
Best CRM Systems for Customer Retention
Customer relationship management (CRM) software allows businesses to oversee their sales process, manage leads and deals, engage customers, and track activity in one interface. Many CRMs include features for assisting customers, like contact storage, communication via phone or email, and account management. A CRM is highly valuable for its all-in-one functionality, where you can handle sales, marketing, and sometimes service functions in one platform.
1. Freshsales: Best for B2B Customer Retention
Our Expert Opinion
Freshsales is a great retention software specifically for account-based businesses. It’s an especially notable business-to-business (B2B) CRM through its account management module, built-in telephone, and invoice generation tools which let you track and engage B2B clients in an efficient manner. Freshsales is also a cost-effective solution with a free plan and low-cost paid plans that allow you to execute new business and retention strategies in one platform.
2. HubSpot CRM Suite: Best for Multi-functional Retention
Our Expert Opinion
HubSpot CRM Suite is a premium solution if you want to employ customer retention strategies in a CRM through all channels. The complete suite makes up the five HubSpot products: Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Content Management System (CMS), and Operations Hubs. While it does get expensive, you can use the platform to retain business by optimizing ticket pipelines, automating CRM campaigns, delivering relevant content, and supporting customers on numerous channels.
HubSpot CRM Suite free ticketing tools (Source: HubSpot)
Prominent customer service software specifically helps in tracking data records and managing service tickets. The have great retention tools for ensuring inquiries, issues, or other requests are resolved in a timely manner on the channel most appealing to the customer.
3. Freshdesk: Best Free Ticketing Software
Our Expert Opinion
Freshdesk offers a cost-friendly yet robust way to ensure customers get the best possible service. The main use case is its ticketing system for agents to receive, assign, track, and assist customer inquiries and requests. We like how it’s easy to use and available starting on the free-forever plan. Additionally, as self-service support is increasingly becoming a desired attribute for a customer, we also like that you can manage a knowledge base for your clients.
4. Zendesk: Best for Customer Retention Tools for Providing Omnichannel Support
Our Expert Opinion
Zendesk is an advanced customer retention management platform specifically for providing exceptional service and resources. The omni-communication capabilities enable agents to receive tickets and remain available to their customers on any desired channel, such as phone, email, live chat, social media, and chatbot. Client experience can also be enhanced by creating detailed self-service resources like a help center for do-it-yourself support.
Zendesk creating help center article (Source: Zendesk)
Customer retention systems with sales or marketing automation tools allow you to efficiently maintain relationships by putting customer journeys on auto-pilot. Rather than reaching out manually to someone you think will most likely desire a specific product offering or promotion, you can create automated workflows that track audience history, segment customers into lists, and deploy relevant content through email or text.
5. Mailchimp: Best for Email Automation
Our Expert Opinion
Mailchimp is one of the best email automation platforms, particularly helpful in connecting with ecommerce customers. Based on profiles, purchase history, and prior engagement, users can easily segment their customers into lists and deploy campaigns that provide relevant content to the recipient. Lots of the value of this customer retention platform is from the premade automated journeys and templates that save you time while managing campaigns.
Mailchimp creating emails from templates (Source: Mailchimp)
6. Customer.io: Best for Retaining Software Subscribers
Our Expert Opinion
If you are a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business or use an application for customers to manage their accounts and receive notifications, look no further than Customer.io. It’s a highly intuitive retention management system with customer data storage, advanced contact segmentation, journey automation, and campaign deployment through email, ads, and text. Teams can also send messages and notifications directly in their application.
Best Customer Experience & Insight Analytics Tools
One of the best retention strategies is focusing on customer experience (CX) management by ensuring all customers are satisfied and getting the maximum value from your product or service. Agents and CX managers can use these client retention software tools to obtain valuable feedback and produce the best possible experience for users and customers.
7. Qualaroo: Best for Obtaining Customer Feedback
Our Expert Opinion
Customer experience is a key indicator of retention. That said, just about every type of business, regardless of industry, can benefit from a customer insights tool like Qualaroo. The intuitive interface and features make it an easy solution for creating surveys, collecting feedback, analyzing sentiment, and ultimately putting those insights toward improving your offerings.
Creating a new survey in Qualaroo (Source: Qualaroo)
Hotjar is a specialty customer retention technology designed to keep interested buyers on your website. It tracks and analyzes web traffic activity so you can find ways to improve page elements, increase conversions, and understand why certain web pages aren’t getting solid results. The platform is affordable overall as there’s a free-forever plan and scalable plans that steadily increase in cost as the number of web sessions recorded increases.
Hotjar viewing a website traffic heat map (Source: Hotjar)
Loyalty management tools are a type of customer retention software that lets you boost recurring business by administering loyalty programs. These products help convert one-time purchasers into buyers with high customer lifetime value (CLV) by rewarding purchases with points or free offerings, using referral incentives, and deploying personalized marketing campaigns.
9. YotPo: Best for Administering Loyalty Programs
Our Expert Opinion
YotPo’s Loyalty & Referrals product gives ecommerce businesses a central solution to creating, promoting, administering, and tracking customer loyalty programs. The great thing is that users can design their program for any type of reward, including points, discounts, free products, and coupons. It’s also flexible in terms of program triggers. Customers can get rewarded for profile attributes, brand engagement, purchases, and making referrals.
YotPo creating loyalty program marketing campaign (Source: YotPo)
10. Woorise: Best for Managing Contests & Giveaways
Our Expert Opinion
One of the best ways to keep customers constantly engaged is by setting up contests and product giveaways. Woorise is the ultimate system for managing giveaway campaigns—letting you handle everything, including setting the contest rules, creating promotional ads and landing pages, collecting entries, and selecting a winner. It even extends its capabilities so you can maximize entries with a refer-a-friend feature and surveys to see how participants like your contest.
Woorise creating a landing page for a giveaway (Source: Woorise)
Messaging and social media software are used to keep engaged with customers through social media content and messaging channels. As many people spend lots of time on their favorite social accounts like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, you can use these tools to always put your brand in front of them and keep them coming back for more purchases.
11. Buffer: Best for Cost-friendly Social Media Features
Our Expert Opinion
Buffer offers the best cost-friendly customer retention management software if your strategy is to leverage social media for engagement. The platform offers tremendous value as you can connect to all the available social accounts for free to schedule and publish content. It’s also flexible in terms of content generation—allowing you to do mentions, tags, hashtags, images, video thumbnails, and embedded links within your posts.
Buffer scheduling a Facebook post (Source: Buffer)
12. Sprout Social: Best for Customer Insights Through Social Media
Our Expert Opinion
Sprout Social stands as a powerful social media management and customer feedback tool. We mostly like its advanced analytics features that allow you to track popular social keywords and trends, and surveying that lets you obtain valuable insights directly on a customer’s favorite social media system. We also can’t overlook the integration capabilities for teams to keep their customer data synchronized across all sales, marketing, and service platforms.
Sprout Social keyword trend listening on Twitter (Source: Sprout Social)
How We Evaluated the Best Customer Retention Tools
To evaluate the best customer retention tools, we broke down the specific types of software that can be used to execute a retention strategy: CRM systems, help desk software, automation tools, customer experience management systems, loyal management tools, and messaging and social media platforms.
We then evaluated relevant attributes for each product category. For example, CRMs should have a broad range of communication and customer tracking tools to best support their needs. Alternatively, loyalty management tools should have capabilities for delivering and tracking rewards programs for customer purchases. In addition to the features, we also looked at product affordability, customer support by the provider, and the intuitiveness of each software.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
A customer retention tool is any software that lets you maintain current buyers. Because many factors impact brand loyalty, retention tools can consist of a wide range of products. For instance, customer service systems let you efficiently handle support tickets to maximize service quality. Alternatively, loyalty program tools allow you to administer rewards for repeat purchases, while marketing automation platforms let you stay constantly engaged with customers.
Customer relationship management (CRM) lets you oversee the sales process, leads, deals, and customers while allowing you to store data and communicate with contacts. On the other hand, customer retention is the process of bringing back buyers and retaining client relationships. Because of the many features and integrations within the software, a CRM is a great customer retention tool that lets you monitor, engage, and support customers.
Bottom Line
Customer retention is vital to sustainable business growth. Various customer retention software products can be used to deliver, automate, and track performance for your retention campaigns. But which tool you need depends on your business type and sales and marketing strategies. A CRM like Freshsales, for example, has activity tracking and communication tools to support customers, while a customer analytics tool lets you get feedback to improve your offerings.
Jack Pittas is a Content writer to Fit Small Business and Co-Founder of PK Cyber Solutions Inc, a service specializing in business and sales software, cybersecurity, and IT products and expertise. He began his career as a commercial insurance producer, developing deep subject matter knowledge in B2B sales within the insurance space. There, he found an interest in SaaS products and cybersecurity, which prompted him to start a tech consulting firm that later evolved into the business it is today.
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