The 4 Best Customer Retention Software Tools

Why is customer retention important?

Customer retention is essential for businesses to grow and succeed.

Businesses with good customer retention spend less to keep existing customers than to acquire new ones. In addition, satisfied and loyal customers are more likely to purchase from a business again and refer others.

A study of nearly 1,000 businesses by BIA/Kelsey revealed that:

61 percent of small business owners surveyed report over half of their annual revenue comes from repeat customers rather than new customers and that a repeat customer spends 67 percent more than a new customer.

It’s easier to cross-sell your product to repeat customers

A repeat customer has a 60-70% chance of converting, according to Paul Farris in his book, Marketing Metrics. In a similar study, Adobe backed this up: conversion rates for repeat customers were 9x higher than first-time customers.

Lower customer acquisition costs (CAC)

Higher conversion rates from existing customers for revenue expansion means you’re spending less to acquire new business. There’s also the referral factor: customers who are happy to spend more on your products will also be more willing to spread the news about your product through word of mouth.

Loyal customers reduce your churn rate and increase profitability

Lower churn helps you maintain a healthy subscription business. It means you have more resources to improve your product and drive growth without having to refresh your customer base too frequently.

Churn happens for a variety of reasons:

• Cancellations because your product isn’t priced correctly, didn’t meet customer expectations, or provided poor support
• Failed payments from troublesome credit cards or other payment methods

Metrics for a healthy business: calculate your retention rate

If you’re looking for ways to track customer retention and measure retention KPIs, we dive deep into that here. There are a variety of ways to calculate retention rate:

• Retention Metrics to Reduce Churn and Win Back Customers
• Retention is the Most Important Revenue Growth Metric
• Gross Retention vs. Net Retention vs. Logo Retention: What They Are & How to Optimize Them

Five ways to improve customer retention

Find better target customers

The best way to reduce churn is to avoid signing up customers who are likely to churn in the first place. This starts with having a solid understanding of your ideal customer profile (ICP). Once you know who your ICP is, you can use account-based marketing (ABM) to specifically target these individuals and companies.

Align pricing with customer expectations

Once you know who your target customers are, you need to make sure your pricing is aligned with their expectations. If you’re charging too much, you’ll lose customers to cheaper alternatives. If you’re charging too little, you’ll attract price-sensitive customers who are more likely to churn when a better deal comes along.

PS: here are some frameworks for how to use pricing to improve retention.

Deliver an amazing onboarding experience

A poor onboarding experience is one of the main reasons why customers churn. If customers can’t figure out how to use your product, they’ll quickly become frustrated and give up. On the other hand, a great onboarding experience will help customers get the most out of your product and stick around for the long term.

Improve product or provide better customer support

If customers are churning because they’re unhappy with your product, the solution is obvious: find out where your product isn’t meeting expectations and improve it. However, even if your product is great, customers may still need help from time to time to experience your product’s magic.

That’s where customer support comes in. By providing great customer support, you can keep customers happy even when they run into problems.

Revisit your entire customer experience

Map your customer’s entire customer journey from awareness to onboarding and beyond. Understand every touchpoint your product has with your customers. Find ways to add value at every touchpoint while delivering unquestionable value.

Use customer retention software to help improve retention

Customer retention software helps businesses keep track of their customers and improve customer retention rates. The software can help businesses track customer behavior, preferences, and purchase history. It can also help businesses identify at-risk customers and deploy retention strategies.

There are many different customer retention software tools available, and the right tool for your business will depend on your specific needs.

The 4 best customer retention software products

Churnkey

Churnkey is the only platform that fixes every type of churn for you, automatically, so you can focus on product and growth. By focusing on all aspects of churn—not just failed payments or only cancellations—you can supercharge all aspects of modern retention. Juggling product releases and growth is hard enough. But when it comes to retention, it requires so many different disciplines to improve, it’s left as a nebulous priority with no clear owner.

Using Churnkey, you’ll be able to personalize cancel flow experiences at scale, recover failed payments, and inform customer-driven product development with AI-analyzed sentiment analysis.

And with fixed pricing, you won’t have to worry about invoices fluctuating wildly without warning, or wonder if we’re taking credit for performance we didn’t actually drive.

If you want to run a healthier subscription business, let’s begin. You’ll boost your company’s profitability immediately on day one, keep customers around longer, and demystify the reasons why people leave your product.

Personalized cancel flows make your business healthier

Get the best cancel flow in the business and reduce cancellations up to 42%. Because your cancel button is a blunt instrument just waiting to become a growth lever. Make customers happier, drive more revenue, spend more time doing what you do best.

Payment recovery so good, it needs to be free

Losing customers to failed payments is antiquated. Come to think of it, so are all of the major dunning players. That’s why subscription businesses under $25K MRR get our failed payment recovery product for free. It’s optimized by AI models and ready to go in minutes.

Analyze feedback at scale with AI

You know the only way to improve your business is to listen to customers, but it’s nearly impossible to do it at scale without a dedicated team. Then there are customer interviews, which everyone dreads. But with our AI engine, we analyze customer feedback for you and automatically categorize it so you can act on it.

ChartMogul

Chartmogul is a subscription analytics platform that teams use to measure and understand their SaaS revenue. By tracking high-level metrics like MRR, churn, LTV, and cashflow, you get a better grasp of your business’ performance and can make more informed decisions for new product development.

Supporting a wide range of SaaS businesses—indie hackers and large companies alike—since 2014, Chartmogul now supports a host of integrations from Stripe to Recurly to the major mobile app stores.

With their metric “Combined MRR,” Chartmogul makes it easy to track new business, churn, downgrades, expansions, and cancellations all in one.

Exakt

With Exakt, it’s easy to measure customer satisfaction and discover what they think about your product. It’s a simple customer satisfaction survey platform that’s figured out how to improve response rates, getting your team more honest feedback while keeping your brand image in a better light.

Exakt embeds cleanly within your product and can be triggered by a variety of event or usage-based settings. In no time, you can ask specific questions at certain stages like onboarding, ask for insights at key points of your product journey, or measure improvements to new product releases.

Exakt is priced affordably and is a great option if you’re only focused on collecting feedback at key points.

Heap

If you want more insight into how your customers move throughout your product, Heap is an analytics can give you a better understanding of your customers’ digital journey. With this data, you can improve conversions and retention.

Heap relies heavily on dashboards that roll up user behavior into funnels. In this way, you can break down typical customer navigation paths and pinpoint where conversions fall off and where they are most successful.

Unlike Exakt, Heap is purely an analytics platform. It relies heavily on user behavior to determine the success of failure of a product feature versus direct feedback. It’s left up to you and your team to identify unhappy customers, track them down, and find ways to keep them around.

It’s time to try Churnkey

If you’re worried about customer retention or trying to find ways to lower churn, it’s time to try Churnkey. After all, every subscription business is always losing customers. So take the more profitable and sustainable route by improving retention. Build a bigger business by keeping more customers.

Incredibly-fast, 30-minute setup

Nobody has time for complex integrations. Start taking on every type of churn with minimal engineering lift. The rest we’ll do for you or train your team to handle with our beautifully-designed, no-code setup tools.

Blends seamlessly into your product

We’ve designed everything to fold seamlessly into your product: your brand, all the time. Customize it all: look and feel, copywriting, language, and more.

Immediate ROI on day one

Start recovering failed payments and reducing cancellations the second you go live. Watch in real-time as we tackle your churn problem and analyze valuable customer feedback.

Try Churnkey for free now

Go live with Churnkey and you’ll get your first month free. Products driving less than $300K ARR get payment recoveries for free.