Must-Have E-commerce Customer Retention Tools Your Online Store Needs

_{Struggling to decide which ecommerce customer retention tools will be perfect for your brand? Take a look at out recommendations below!}

Did you know that an increase in customer retention by just 5% boosts profits by 25% to 95%?

But what exactly is customer retention, and how do you improve it?

In simple words, customer retention is basically a strategy to get more out of the current customers by keeping them loyal to the brand and business over time.

Compared with customer acquisition, customer retention is a sustainable strategy because it boosts profitability and simultaneously encourages repeated business. In short, it is a long-term strategy.

Let’s see some more numbers to back the importance of customer retention for an eCommerce business:

• Acquiring a new customer is costlier than retaining an old one. In fact, customer acquisition will cost you 5 times more than retaining an existing one.
  
• The probability of selling to an existing customer is between 60% and 70%!

• Lastly, you wouldn’t believe that, sadly, there are only 18% of businesses that focus on customer retention!

In our previous posts, we have covered the importance of ecommerce customer retention in detail.

We have also shared how to create a strategy for your business to get the ball rolling, but in this post, we’re going to share a list of tools for customer retention that will help you set things up!

Ecommerce Customer Retention Tools To Boost Repeat Sales and Profits

Before we begin with our extensive list, let’s first know what customer retention software is and how it benefits your business.

A customer retention software gathers key insights about customers’ pain points so your team can act quickly to address them, implementing strategies that are tailored to add more value and context to the buyer at that stage.

Some of the prominent benefits of using customer retention tools are:

• You can easily identify your loyal customers and reward them by giving exclusive points that can be redeemed as discounts on future purchases.
• Improve the internal communications with your customers that help collect honest feedback from the shoppers.
• Customer retention software quickly identifies the problem areas and allows your team to take quick action to address the issues.

Now, let’s look at the tools we think you absolutely need to execute a well-defined, comprehensive ecommerce customer retention strategy.

1. LimeChat

LimeChat was founded to revolutionise conversational commerce by promoting chatting as an interactive and personalised medium for shopping. LimeChat is an all-in-one AI-powered live chat automation software with the following features:

One Dashboard For All Your Communication Channels

LimeChat offers a centralised dashboard for handling all your support tickets from all your channels – live chat, email, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. With this application, you can better manage your customers’ queries and post quick solutions using a single inbox.

Personalization On The Go

With LimeChat, you get a 360° view of your customers’ buying journey, which helps you tailor a personalised shopping experience. The platform lets you analyse your customer’s past interactions, which act as actionables for your marketing and support teams.

Scale With Automation

It lets you scale your customer support with human-level automation, which is implemented across the buyer journey. As a result, you can efficiently address your customers’ pre and post-purchase queries.

LimeChat uses conversational commerce to its full potential for executing customer retention strategies. You can learn more about conversational commerce here.

2. Pushowl

After conversational commerce, push notifications are the next best eCommerce strategy for retaining customers. It keeps them engaged, and if executed properly, it will keep your customers continually engaged with the brand, coming back to your site frequently.

According to a study, it has been found that users who receive one or more push notifications in their first 90-days have 190% higher average retention rates.

Pushowl is an eCommerce customer retention software that helps your customers stay updated with the latest news, deals, discounts and offers running on your store through web push notifications as a key channel – all without having to explicitly share their email addresses and phone numbers.

3. AdRoll

AdRoll is a marketing and advertising platform that lets you keep track of the shoppers who have shown interest in your products in the past.

It lets you give them a warm and subtle reminder about what they might be missing with the help of optimised retargeting and remarketing ad campaigns – which makes it also effective as a cart recovery strategy.  

Here are all the tools AdRoll provides for streamlining your ecommerce customer retention strategy:

• It comes with a cross-channel performance dashboard where you get a complete understanding of all your campaigns in a single place. On the dashboard, you’ll see the top conversion paths that help you optimise your ad budgets.
• AdRoll offers a detailed insight into your target audience for better targeting and retargeting. You get targeting options like: Contextual, Demographic, Interest, and Lookalike Targeting, Retargeting, and CRM Audiences.
• One of the best features of this platform is AdRoll List Builder. This feature allows you to customise your audience based on contact attributes and behaviour.
• Last and most important, you can manage all your advertising channels from a single platform.

4. Flits

Flits enhances the customer’s account page for better engagement for your Shopify website. It lets you create an account page that keeps your shoppers engaged with features like saved addresses, wish lists, order history, recently viewed items, and others – similar to that of the Amazon customer account page. As a business owner, this tool lets you closely analyse customer interactions, and preferences and derive insights to run your upsell/ cross-sell strategies for higher context.

With Flits, you can create interactive account pages that let you:

• Shows customer metrics such as reorders, order history, and recently viewed products that help you know your customers better.
• Flits has a next-gen customer reward program that helps strengthen relationships with your customers. The Shopify store credits increase repeat purchases and turn customers into brand advocates.
• Along with inducing customer retention, Flits lets you reduce abandoned cart rates by letting your customer create wishlists to purchase from later.
• Flits makes it easy for your customers to register and create an account on your website using social logins.

5. LoyaltyLion

Customer retention is all about building strong relationships with your customers. One of the best ways of strengthening customer relationships is to have a loyalty program on your eCommerce website.

LoyaltyLion lets you implement a points and rewards system on your eCommerce website to encourage visitors and existing customers to interact more frequently with your brand – even if it means taking smaller actions like creating an account, saving items in a wishlist, making a purchase, leaving a product review and so on.  

Here’s what you can do with Loyaltylion:

• Allow customers to send referrals and earn exclusive rewards in exchange.
• It comes with CSS editors, which lets you create customised loyalty program pages from scratch.
• With LoyaltyLion, you can integrate with different software such as subscription partners and review platforms.
• Give customers gift cards, cart rewards, and even personalised rewards like free shipping.

6. KissMetrics

Marketing is all about keeping yourself updated with all the necessary KPIs to find what’s working for you and what needs optimization. The same holds true for your ecommerce customer retention strategy.

It’s often seen that businesses witness low retention rates because marketers aren’t targeting the right audience. This is where behaviour tracking tools like KissMetrics come into the picture.

KissMetrics gathers insights from your customers’ journey, which is later interpreted by businesses to develop a better website experience, marketing and sales strategies, and product pricing.

It also allows you to perform actions such as comparing pages with longer average time with those having higher bounce rates and understand what’s making people leave to further optimise the conversion rate.

7. ProfitWell

One of the biggest setbacks for your customers is payment failures. According to Visa and Mastercard, an average of 15% of recurring payments are declined.

ProfitWell comes as a saviour and saves businesses from losing customers due to credit card payment failures. It is a churn software that automatically recovers declined payments and lets you focus on scaling your business.

ProfitWell is a cloud-based app that provides users with all their financial metrics in one place. So this means it captures metadata from your existing customers and allows them to retry payments tactically – without seeming overly push for the sale. This helps deliver a good customer experience, leading to better retention rates in the long run.

8. Zendesk

A good list of customer retention tools is incomplete without a CRM.

A customer relationship management system, popularly known as CRM, helps you manage your customer relationships efficiently. It basically streamlines your customer services efforts and, as a result, builds a delightful customer experience that helps in making your business grow better and more scalable.

Zendesk is a sales CRM that helps you execute your customer retention strategies effortlessly and close more deals. With Zendesk, you can:

• Store data of customers as contacts based on information collected from multiple sources like social media, landing pages, etc. This helps personalise your marketing campaigns and identify what will resonate with your customer’s interests.
• CRMs automatically organise the customer data that, help in analysing it and getting deep insights into your customers’ preferences. Also, you can recreate the customer journey and see what lead-capturing elements give you the maximum results.
• With CRM, you can monitor the customers’ behaviour and create exclusive campaigns for your loyal customers.

Which of these ecommerce customer retention tools do you need?

Customer retention tools alone cannot do the trick.

When used in siloes or without a direction, they may end up only adding to your bills instead of helping you understand your customers better and retain their interest in your brand.

That’s why we recommend identifying your customer retention goals and objectives and documenting a strategy before signing up for any of the tools above.

At the same time, we also recommend evaluating the various purposes a single tool can serve. The more streamlined your data is, the better will be the insights and actionables for your customers.

Ecommerce customer retention tools like LimeChat are designed keeping in mind how important understanding your buyers are. It comes with multi-channel features, a shared inbox, advanced automation and in-depth analytics to bring all your strategies onto one dashboard.

Brands leveraging LimeChat have seen a 23% increase in customer retention rates with omnichannel strategies and smart automations.

Book a demo today to explore LimeChat for ecommerce customer retention.