The Best Customer Retention Software in 2022
In case you didn’t know, customer retention is more important than customer acquisition as a means of growing your business. We have enough data available to us and have seen countless companies grow through using customer retention as the foundation.
Knowing how valuable customer retention is to growing a business is an important first step. Knowing what tool to use to begin or improve your customer retention strategy is the second step.
In today’s day and age, software plays a huge role in business. Luckily for us, we have access to some of the best customer retention software that has ever been created.
Let’s dive down into what customer retention software is, some different kinds, examples and comparisons and see what may be the best solution for your business.
What Is Customer Retention Software?
Customer retention software allows a person or business to stay in touch with their customer base from one central hub online.
When focusing on customer retention, it is important that your business always be on the top of your customer’s mind. This eliminates any need for them to look elsewhere when a solution that your business offers comes up.
In the old days, a business owner would have to reach out to customers individually by different channels. With the help of technology today, whole customer databases can be reached at once, eliminating a vast amount of effort.
Thanks to online software, you no longer need to download programs on one computer and pay an inflated licensing key. Online software is operated from web addresses and can be opened from any computer anywhere in the world.
Top 5 Customer Retention Software
Now that you have an understanding about customer retention software, let’s take a look at the Top 5 customer retention software tools currently available to help your business increase customer retention.
Text Message Marketing Software
What is text message marketing software?
Text message marketing software is a tool that allows a business to collect subscribers that opt in to their texting program. This software allows the business to send bulk text messages to those subscribers and receive individual replies in one central location. Texting software also allows a business to collect data on those subscribers in order to send more targeted messages.
I recommend reading our article on SMS marketing 101 to get a more complete understanding of how text marketing works.
In a brief summary, a customer would subscribe to your texting list in order to receive promotions, updates and other information from your business. Once they subscribe you can send out texts and pictures to the subscribers straight to their text message inbox. By understanding your customers, you can send out messages at the appropriate times to ensure the maximum amount of action is taken.
Example
Let’s say you’re a restaurant owner and you want customers to come back and eat more often. If you are in touch with your past customers, they will be more likely to come to your restaurant to eat when they have the “Where should we eat tonight?” question pop into their head.
Why texting is a useful customer retention software
With 98% open rates and 90% opened within 3-5 minutes, texting is the ideal channel for staying in touch with your customers. Click through rates around 19% are not unusual to see either.
Recommended text message marketing software
Text2VIP has helped thousands of businesses retain customers better since 2009. We offer a 14 day FREE trial and no contracts ever so you can cancel any time. You can learn more about how text messaging works here.
Email Marketing Software
What is email marketing software?
Email marketing software is similar to text marketing software in the fact that subscribers are all kept in one location. They can also be reached at once and messaging can be tailored to specific behaviors that different customers exhibit.
You can find a more thorough guide to email marketing here. A quick summary is similar to text marketing. A customer signs up to your email list to stay in the loop on upcoming promotions and events. You then send out bulk emails to those subscribers and work them back through the sales funnel to encourage them to purchase again and again.
Example
Let’s say you own an online dog toy business. You have a pop-up on your website that gives a 25% discount to shoppers who submit their email address. The buyers who were already going to purchase now give you their email so they can get their discount. You set up future emails to send out promotions on products similar to what they already purchased that similar others have purchased before. You get a percentage of sales from these kinds of emails. Rinse and repeat.
Why emailing is a useful customer retention software
With 20-30% open rates, it doesn’t quite see the results that texting does, but is still nothing to take lightly. Many businesses still see anywhere from 5-30% of their revenue coming from email marketing.
Recommended email marketing software
MailChimp has been the go-to email marketing software for millions of businesses since 2001. With a pop-up form that easily integrates into most websites, MailChimp has found a way to streamline subscriber acquisition. With an easy to use interface, it doesn’t take a lot of technical understanding to build emails quickly that look good.
CRM Software
A CRM (customer relationship management) software is an overall great database to store a lot of information on your customers. CRM software are especially useful in the sales process, but much of the information collected during the sale can be used in the retention side of your business.
A CRM is a more useful tool for larger companies with multiple roles on different teams. Everyone is able to access customer data in one location which improves communication and understanding of each customer.
Example
A car dealership CRM has the information of one customer who has bought 5 Toyota Priuses in the last 7 years. The salesperson can assume that customer likes the Prius and is open to trading often. She would not try to sell that customer on a used truck as that doesn’t represent past behaviors of that customer. A deal on a new Prius would be worth pitching, though. This sort of historical data can help salespeople make better sales decisions.
Why CRM’s are useful customer retention software?
According to Salesforce, CRM’s can help increase customer retention by up to 27%! They also go on to say that 3 out of 4 customers spend more with a company because of a positive customer experience.
Recommended CRM software
Since 1999 Salesforce has been one of the top CRM software on the market. With countless integrations (including a Text2VIP integration), it can sync many of your favorite tools together. With over 150,000 customers, their numbers speak for themselves.
Live Chat Software
Live chat software enable users on your website to quickly and easily message your company. They can ask questions easily while still remaining on your site. Customers want answers immediately and with live chat software, they’re able to ask and receive information seamlessly.
Most live chat software will embed into your website and can send you notifications to your browser or mobile device when a new customer appears or asks a question. If you notice in the bottom right corner of our site, there is a little chat box. That is a live chat bot. Feel free to ask any questions and we will try to answer as quickly as possible!
Example
A potential customer for our texting software has a question about how the messages per month work. They ask through our live chat software. A member of the team can quickly answer the question and move the customer down the sales funnel. That customer feels the value of how quickly the team responds to questions/concerns and decides to go with our company as their texting software.
Why are live chats useful customer retention software?
Live chats provide an easy way for customers to ask any support questions without needing to call and wait on the phone. This allows them to receive that information at almost any time and can expect fast responses. Addressing questions concerns quickly is a great way to improve customer experience which improves retention.
Recommended Live Chat Software
Funnily enough, the live chat software we recommend (and use) is LiveChat. With an affordable pricing model, easy to embed code and notification ability, LiveChat is a no-brainer for a chatting software.
Customer Feedback Software
Customer feedback is crucial for improving all aspects of your business from sales to services. Find out what customers love and promote that like crazy. Find out what customers are not pleased with and address those concerns quickly.
“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” -Michael LeBouef
You can create custom questionnaires tailored for customers of your specific business model and easily send these forms to your customers to fill out.
Example
You want to start collecting more testimonials from clients and also want to know areas to address should they be slacking. You create a survey to take customers through questions. Different answers will lead to different questions. This way at the end of a good survey you can collect a testimonial and at the end of a bad survey, you will know what to do to improve the poor performing areas.
Why customer feedback software is a useful customer retention software
Consider this statistic, one happy customer can lead to nine referrals while one unhappy customer can lead to 26 other unhappy customers.
This is why it is very important to understand your customers and see how your business is performing for them.
Recommended Customer Feedback Software
We recommend Typeform as a customer feedback software. With over 130,000 customers, Typeform is one of the fastest growing and customizable feedback software on the market. Enabling customers to feel like they are carrying on a real conversation, Typeform is able to collect better data points from customers.
Customer Retention Software Comparison
Customer Retention Software Pricing
With starting package ranges from $11/month to $29/month, all of these software are very affordable. That is less than $1/day to potentially double your business profits! For less than $110/month, you can add all of these into your marketing stack to supercharge your customer retention efforts.
Overall Best Customer Retention Software
The result of a great customer retention strategy is that customers will spend more money with your business. The best tool to drive those sales is a text message marketing software. Other tools are “nice-to-haves” but text marketing software is a “must-have”.
A text marketing software can combine many of the tools into one. Your customers are all held in one database, similar to a CRM. You can message one-on-one with customers, so they can ask any questions through text. You can also collect feedback from texting them. With 3x the open rates, it is a much more effective communication and marketing tool than email.
Text marketing is in the first inning and many businesses are adding this to their technology stacks. It’s only a matter of time before your competitors start using it, so it would be wise to beat them to the punch and add this to your customers before they can.
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