10 Customer Retention Tools that will Help You Succeed in eCommerce

KissMetrics is a really good behavioral analytical program that can help you out with eCommerce. It is a fantastic tool because it allows you to see exactly where your customers are coming from.
Whether you are providing a good or a service, you need to know how your marketing dollars are doing. KissMetrics allows you to see from which avenue your customers are coming from.
It will tell you whether your customers are brought in and kept through email, AdWords, referrals, social, or through any other method.

In other words, KissMetrics lets you maximize your money and allows you to be efficient with your marketing dollars. It also shows you the percentage of customers who keep coming back week after week and which type of marketing brought them back.

Crazy Egg is another good tool that you can use to help you be successful in the world of eCommerce.

This is actually a unique tool because it does not show you numbers, graphs, or any of that other stuff. Instead, it displays a heat map of your website showing which areas have the most activity.

Crazy Egg will show you where people scroll over and click on the most on your website. This is really useful for an eCommerce website because it allows you to see which products and which product categories people are the most and least interested in, thus allowing you to remodel your website to focus on what your customers want.

Knowing how customers feel about the features on your eCommerce site are affecting customer retention is a pretty big deal, and that’s what Indicative is for.

Indicative is a customer retention tool that analyzes exactly how customers are reacting to and interacting with new features on your website. It then rates or categorizes these interactions based on how they affect customer retention.

Maybe you added another drop down menu to your page, maybe you added another product category, a different shipment method, or a different payment method. Indicative will tell you how these new features directly affect customer retention. It could be something as simple as a new questionnaire or newsletter.

Qualaroo allows you to send customized and highly targeted surveys to your customers. This is a really easy way to gauge what the customer experience is like in relation to your business.

You can design these surveys to be focused around the value and usefulness of your product or the buying experience on your website.

Knowing exactly how your customers feel about your business is essential to getting new customers and retaining old ones.

Survey Monkey is another really good survey based customer retention tool to use if you want to be successful in the world of eCommerce. Survey Monkey is very different from the previous survey tool we talked about. While the previous too, Qualaroo, was all about specific targeted surveys for a few people, this one is all about general survey questions. Survey Monkey is a great way to send out surveys to all of your customers at once, using very generalized questions to get generalized responses. It might not be quite as targeted as some other options, but in terms of the sheer volume of responses you can get from Survey Monkey, it is well worth using. This lets you turn very open ended feedback into something that you can easily use to improve your website, products, and overall customer experience.

This is another really cool survey based customer retention tool. Now, this one is once again different from the previous two survey tools we looked at. In terms of generality, this one is about in the middle. You can choose whether to send really personalized and targeted surveys to select few customers, or you can send generalized surveys to all of your customers. Where Client Heartbeat really stands out is by the way it gauges these results. Client Heartbeat allows you gauge and benchmark the results compared to your competitors and the results which they receive. In other words, this tool will let you know if customers are on average happier or less happy with your products and/or services when compared to other sellers.

Smile.io is a really cool customer retention tool to use because it focuses on customer rewards. In other words, it rewards the most loyal customers with special bonuses just for shopping with you. Smile.io provides people with points which they can spend on certain products, services, or rewards. Every time they shop with you, Smile.io will give them a certain number of spendable points, thus encouraging people to come back for more, almost like free giveaways. Smile.io also has a feature which allows you to turn existing customers into powerful marketing tools, thus decreasing the amount of money you need to spend on marketing. Moreover, the most loyal customers will get VIP reward points. The point here is that customers always like coming back for more when there is “free” stuff involved.

Optimove is a really neat tool to use for customer retention. This is actually one of the very best marketing automation tools out there at this time, which is thanks to its various features. The Optimove tool allows you to engage in predictive customer modeling so you know who your customers are and what they want. It also allows for various types of automated marketing such as with emails, surveys, and more. There is a lot more that Optimove can do for you, but the main takeaway here is that if you need good automated marking, it is one of the best choices out there right now. It is actually fairly similar to another customer retention tool of this type known as StackTome.

One of the most important things when it comes to customer retention has to do with customer service. People need to able to talk to somebody when they have a problem with your service, product, or website. If the customers have no one to talk to and no one to help them solve their problems, they will definitely never come back for more. Help Scout is a great tool for this purpose. Help Scout is linked with external email addresses, which makes customers feel like they are having a normal email conversation with a real person instead of a big monolithic company. Whenever somebody needs customer support for whatever reason, Help Scout is a great way to go about the process, allowing you to view these emails in an organized ticket fashion. Having great customer support is essential to customer retention.

This final customer retention tool that we want to talk about is Woobox, an innovative discount and rewards based program that is shown to get people coming back for more. People like getting discounts on the things they are already buying and on things that may have been too expensive for them to buy in the first place. Woobox offers you the ability to send flyers, coupons, sweepstakes, video contests, photo quizzes, and other such things to your customers. You can offer big or small rewards for the contests and big or small discounts with the coupons. The big point here is that Woobox offers a big incentive for customers to visit your site, to participate in contests, and to use coupons to buy stuff. This is an especially good option for small businesses.

These 10 customer retention tools that will help you succeed in eCommerce are undoubtedly some of the best around. If you are having issues with customer retention, or just want to improve it, we would definitely recommend to try reach more with retention marketing.