13 Top Picks for Customer Retention Software for 2024

Customer retention software is not just a tool; it's the Robin to your Batman when it comes to satisfying and retaining your existing customers.

It's a crucial part of your business strategy that can help you implement your ideas to drive customer loyalty at scale and maintain consistency and excellence. 

That’s where customer retention software—your trusted sidekick—comes in.

Read on to find the top candidates to fill this sidekick role across different areas.

What is Customer Retention Software?

When considering customer count, businesses can be likened to a leaky bucket. As customers troop in, others trickle out through the holes. 

Customer retention software is any tool designed to help you plug those leaks and keep as many customers as possible in the bucket.

This way, you save money on customer acquisition and boost revenue from repeat business.

These tools are supposed to help you keep existing customers happy and returning for more. They do this by performing one, some, or all of these functions: 

• Storing and managing customer details
• Providing insights into customer needs and behaviors
• Offering personalized experiences
• Delivering and automating customer engagement campaigns

Everything from marketing automation tools like HubSpot to customer behavior analytics providers like Hotjar can be classified as customer retention software.

Benefits of Customer Retention Software

Customer retention software is not just a tool; it's a game-changer for your business. Here are some key benefits you can expect when using it. 

1. Boosts retention rates and customer loyalty

Your customer retention rate is the percentage of customers you retain over a specified period and a valid indicator of how many loyal patrons you have. 

Customer retention tools can keep your retention rate up by delivering personalized offers that prompt repeat purchases and engage existing customers.

This way, they feel valued and have a reason to stay loyal to your product or service.

2. Increases customer engagement

Engaged customers are more likely to become repeat customers and willing brand advocates, leading to increased revenue and reduced customer churn. 

Customer retention software can drive customer engagement by creating personalized interactions that give existing customers precisely what they need when they need it.

3. Improves customer relationship management

Strong customer relationships are the bedrock of recurring revenue and a loyal customer base.

Customer retention management software can help build this sturdy foundation by providing extensive details about each customer, including their past interactions with your business and other critical data.

This way, you can better nurture your relationship with your existing customers and solve their problems.

4. Enhances marketing and sales campaigns

Insights from customer retention software can help you run more precise marketing and sales campaigns. 

Consider how, with some tools, you can easily segment your audience based on factors such as purchase history and reach them with messaging that resonates.

These insights enable you to get more bang for your marketing buck.  

5. Strengthens customer service and support

Like many other things, technology, in this case customer retention software, has paved the way for more efficient customer service and support. 

You can access customers’ past interactions with your business, including previous purchases and support tickets, to better address their problems or even automate critical support tasks for quicker responses.

6. Streamlines customer onboarding

Customer retention software can also help you delight new customers from the jump, increasing the chance they become loyal customers. 

It does this by ensuring a smooth and coordinated onboarding process that gets customers up and running quickly using everything from automation to personalized onboarding journeys.

7. Increases company revenue

With retention software, you can keep existing customers happy and loyal by consistently delivering an excellent experience.

The upside? It's not just about customer satisfaction; it's about boosting your revenue. 

For instance, satisfied customers are 82% likely to repurchase even when they have an opportunity to switch to a competitor and 86% likely to increase their spending.

Imagine the potential for your business!

8. Data analysis and reporting

For businesses, data is both a diagnostic tool and a compass. The best customer retention software can unearth a treasure trove of customer data and help you understand it. 

This way, you can determine what’s working, what’s not, and where to direct your resources for maximum impact.

You can also compile key reports on customer behavior and sales and marketing efforts.

Types of Customer Retention Software

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM software is a hub for storing customer details and managing customer interactions—emails, purchases, and support tickets.

This way, you get a detailed view of each customer’s bio, historical behavior, and preferences so you can anticipate their needs, personalize interactions, and build stronger relationships.

2. Customer Support Software

Serving your customers should be a delight for both you and them.

Customer support or customer service software makes this process smooth for both parties by offering ticketing systems, live chat options, and a built-in knowledge base.

This allows you to resolve issues faster, boosting customer satisfaction.

3. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is like having a smart, tireless assistant who can handle the grunt work elegantly.

Marketing automation tools automate repetitive tasks like email blasts and social media scheduling, allowing you to focus on creative marketing strategies.

Plus, they power personalized campaigns that resonate with your audience.

4. Customer Loyalty Software

Rewarding your customers is a smart move, and loyalty programs are a great way to do it.

Customer loyalty software helps you design and manage these programs, giving your top customers exclusive perks and points that make them feel appreciated and keep them coming back for more.

5. Help Desk Software

With help desk software, customer service teams can feel energized and prepared.

They include ticketing systems, a knowledge base packed with solutions, and performance tracking tools so teams can handle customer inquiries confidently and efficiently and deliver exceptional service.

6. Social Media Management

Social media can be a lot to handle, especially when you’re juggling multiple social media platforms. 

The good news is that many social media management tools allow you to schedule posts, track engagement, and analyze follower demographics across multiple platforms.

This will enable you to manage your online presence and connect with your audience effectively.

7. Behavior Analytics Tools

Behavior analytics tools track user actions on your website or app.

Imagine heatmaps showing where users click and recordings of their browsing journeys.

This data helps you understand customer behavior and optimize your website or app for a better user experience and more desirable results, such as conversions.

8. Customer Feedback Software

Getting customer feedback can help you identify areas for improvement, deliver a better customer experience, and ensure your customers feel heard and valued.

Customer feedback software simplifies getting such qualitative and quantitative data by providing surveys, polls, and in-app feedback options.

Top Picks for Customer Retention Software

1. Hotjar

Hotjar combines product experience insights, user behavior analysis, and customer feedback to help you understand how and why people are using your product or website the way they do.

It complements data from tools like Google Analytics, which only shows you the pages users visit, with insights into how they interact with those pages.

Best For

• Website and user behavior analytics

Features

• Heat maps
• Recordings (for user behavior)
• Feedback
• Surveys
• User interviews
• User research automation
• Integrations: Slack, Google Analytics, HubSpot, etc

Pricing

• Basic: free forever
• Plus: $39/month
• Business: $99/month
• Scale: $213/month

Save 20% on all plans when billed yearly.

2. ClickUp

ClickUp tags itself “The Everything App for Work,” and for good reason.

While it’s a core project management and collaboration tool, it includes customer relationship management features so you can access customer insights while leading your team to deliver results and projects on time and within budget.

Best For

• CRM and Project management

Features

• Pipeline visualization
• Lead qualification and scoring
• Customer data visualization for customer lifetime value, average deal sizes, and more
• Email marketing hub
• Customer workflow automation
• Collaboration tools: tasks and checklists, comments, chat, etc
• Customer account manager
• Templates

Pricing

• Free
• Unlimited: $10/month
• Business: $19/month
• Enterprise: custom quote

Save 30% on paid plans when billed annually.

3. Paddle

If you’re interested in a business intelligence suite trusted by Canva and Notion, you should check out Paddle.

The platform provides everything from pricing optimization to predictive analytics regarding customer churn to help B2B and B2C subscription companies improve customer retention and monetization.

Best For

• Customer data analytics

Features

• Revenue reporting: MRR, churn, customer lifetime value, subscription upgrades and downgrades, etc.
• Data-backed recommendations for growing customer spend
• Customer and growth insights based on segmentation
• Tailored and data-backed pricing strategies
• Customer payment process optimization: payment recovery, automated card retries, etc.

Pricing

• Billing: 5% + 50¢/checkout transaction
• Metrics: free
• Retain: quote-based
• Price Intelligently: quote-based

4. Keap

With 20 years under its belt as a part of the Infusionsoft brand, Keap is a comprehensive CRM and sales and marketing automation solution designed to help small businesses grow.

Keap’s features allow you to easily streamline lead capturing, organizing, tracking, nurturing, and other sales funnel management tasks.

Best For

• CRM and marketing funnel management

Features

• CRM system
• Email marketing (+automation)
• Sales pipeline management
• Invoices
• Appointments
• Quotes
• Text marketing
• Landing pages
• A/B Testing
• Lead scoring
• Lead source attribution
• Sales and marketing reporting
• Integrations

Pricing

• 14-day free trial
• Pro: $199/month
• Max: $299/month
• Ultimate: $299%

When billed annually, the Pro Plan offers a 20% savings, and the last two plans offer a 23% savings.

5. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a product analytics tool for web and mobile apps that rivals Heap Analytics.

It provides real-time data on how users interact with your product so you can optimize it to convert, engage, and retain more customers while also offering insights into retention and conversion trends.

Best For

• Product analytics

Features

• Product analytics and user behavior tracking
• Event tracking
• User segmentation-based analysis
• Revenue analytics
• Retention monitoring and analysis
• Marketing analytics
• Interactive reports
• Data management
• Integrations

Pricing

• Starter: free forever
• Growth: starts at $24/month
• Enterprise: custom pricing

6. Open Loyalty

One way to drive customer loyalty is to create loyalty programs. Open Loyalty is an API-first solution that enables you to launch tailored loyalty programs quickly.

It also offers gamification features that engage and delight customers. The available loyalty and gamification elements include points, tiers, rewards, referrals, coupons, challenges, etc.

Best For

• Loyalty programs

Features

• Multiple loyalty features: Points, tiers, rewards, badges, coupons, referrals, wallets, achievements
• Loyalty campaign builder
• Loyalty analytics 
• Loyalty API

Pricing

• Custom quote

7. Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics is another product analytics tool worth mentioning.

The person-based analytics solution delivers user insights by tagging actions on your web or mobile apps to specific users and providing a clear history of how a particular user has interacted with your product, even pre-signup.

This way, you can identify customer sticky points, optimize your product, and reduce customer churn.

Best For

• Customer journey mapping and product analytics

Features

• User behavior tracker
• Multi-channel attribution
• A/B testing
• Email marketing automation
• Sales funnel visualization
• Extensive reporting: customer lifetime value, churn rates, etc
• Advanced Business Intelligence reporting
• Integrations: Shopify, Instagram, Facebook, etc. 

Pricing

• Self-custom plans – minimum 10k events: $25.99/month or 233.91/year (25% off)
• Pay-as-you-go model: $0.0025/event
• Silver: $199/month
• Gold: $499/month
• Platinum: custom quote

8. Hubspot

We’d be remiss not to mention the all-in-one CRM juggernaut HubSpot.

HubSpot has everything you need to capture, nurture, convert leads, and engage and retain existing customers.

From email marketing and social media marketing tools to customer support and marketing analytics solutions, HubSpot is your one-stop shop for delivering an excellent experience and uncovering the insights you need to keep your customers happy.

Best For

• CRM and sales and marketing automation

Features

• Marketing Hub: marketing analytics, social media management software, behavioral targeting, marketing automation software, etc.
• Sales Hub: sales pipeline management, business insights, sales automation, etc.
• Service Hub: automated customer service, ticketing system, etc.
• CMS Hub: website builder, website monitor, etc.
• Operations: programmable automation, data sync, etc

Pricing

• Free tools under each category
• Paid plans start at $20/month/seat

9. Whatfix

A big part of retaining customers is offering a product that’s easy to use.

In Whatfix, you have a data-driven digital adoption solution that helps you create contextual in-app guidance for users.

With Whatfix, you can insert an interactive overlay of instructions, tutorials, self-help support, and feedback into your product, making it easy for customers to navigate and get the most value. 

Best For

• Customer success management

Features

• Real-time user guidance and training system
• On-demand support delivery
• In-app messaging 
• Product analytics
• Guidance analytics
• User guidance content creation, aggregation, and content management system

Pricing

• Free trial
• Custom pricing for paid plans

10. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a customer experience automation platform that combines sales and marketing automation and CRM features to help you streamline your marketing efforts and nurture customer relationships.

From targeted email marketing and omnichannel marketing features to tailored landing pages and audience management tools, ActiveCampaign has you covered.

Best For

• CRM and sales and marketing automation

Features

• Email marketing automation tools: create personalized triggered, transactional, broadcast, targeted emails, etc.
• Marketing automation: engagement scoring, automatic reminders, etc
• Website tracking
• Tailored landing page builder
• Sales automation CRM: automate contact management, score leads, monitor sales, and more
• eCommerce marketing
• eCommerce marketing automation
• API solution for transactional emails

Pricing

• 14-day free trial
• Marketing: starts at $29/month (billed annually) or $39/month (billed monthly)
• Sales: starts at $19/month (billed annually) or $23/month (billed monthly)
• Bundles: starts at $93/month (billed annually) or $116/month (billed monthly)
• Transactional emails: starts at $15/month

11. Zendesk

The award-winning Zendesk customer service platform streamlines customer interactions across multiple channels.

Think of it as your customer experience hub for communication and support, where you can implement a ticketing system and engage customers via email, phone, text, live chat, and social media — similar to those offered by Zendesk alternatives.

Best For

• Customer service

Features

• Ticketing
• Messaging and live chat
• Help center
• Knowledge base
• Voice support solution
• Customer community creator
• AI marketing automation: bots, response suggestions, etc

Pricing

• Free trial
• Basic plans start at $25/agent/month (billed monthly) and $19/agent/month (billed annually)
• Suite plans start at $69/agent/month (billed monthly) and $55/agent/month (billed annually)

12. Optimove

Optimove employs a mix of historical, real-time, predictive customer data and attribution insights to help you understand your customers and deliver the right message to each customer on the right platform and at the right time.

The goal is to empower you to create customer-led journeys that drive conversions, increase user engagement, and boost customer lifetime value and loyalty.

Best For

• Multichannel marketing and customer journey orchestration

Features

• Real-time customer data platform (CDP)
• Predictive analytics
• Multi-channel customer journey orchestration and campaign automation
• Marketing attribution
• AI-powered marketing platform
• Personalized email marketing software
• Supports: In-app messaging, mobile push notifications, text messaging, web messaging and pop-ups
• Digital ad manager
• Integrations: AWS, Salesforce, Shopify, etc.

Pricing

• Custom quote

13. Freshworks

In Freshworks, you get a handy bundle of marketing tools for managing customer relationships, delivering customer service, and streamlining business and IT operations.

The AI-powered platform offers everything from omnichannel customer service software to sales and marketing automation solutions.

Best For

• Customer relationship management 

Features

• Customer insights and analytics
• Omnichannel ticketing support
• Live chat, bots, and self-service support
• Voice service
• Landing page creator
• Site visitor intent monitor
• Tailored and automated email campaigns
• Multi-channel digital engagement: emails, SMS, WhatsApp, and Chat
• Sales pipeline management
• AI-powered insights and recommendations

Pricing

• Customer service suite: starts at $35/agent/month (billed monthly) and $29/agent/month (billed annually)
• IT Service: starts at $29/agent/month (billed monthly) and $19/agent/month (billed annually)
• CRM: $11/user/month (billed monthly) and $9/user/month (billed annually)

Key Features of Customer Retention Software

1. Omnichannel Capabilities

Today’s savvy buyers want businesses to meet them where they are. Customer retention tools should let you engage customers on their preferred channels: email, social media, or text.

This keeps things convenient and makes a good impression on customers.

2. Customer Segmentation

While your customers may share some similarities, they are still individuals with varying interests, tastes, etc.

The best customer retention software options allow you to group customers based on their purchase history or interests.

This lets you send targeted messages and promotions that resonate more, making them feel valued.

🧐 To learn more about marketing segmentation, check out our epic guides! 🙌

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✔️ What Is Psychographic Segmentation (5 Variables + Examples)

✔️ What Is Demographic Segmentation (+ Examples)

3. Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Understanding customer sentiment is crucial for finetuning your customer service and retention strategy. 

So, opt for retention software that allows customer surveys that provide feedback about your customer's experience, satisfaction level, pain points, and likelihood of recommending your business (Net Promoter Score).

Use this knowledge to fine-tune your customer retention strategies.

4. AI and Automation

With AI and automation, managing customer retention tasks becomes more accessible, faster, and more impactful. 

As such, it’s best to choose customer retention tools that integrate AI and automation to ensure you can place repetitive tasks on autopilot, analyze customer data, and access insights such as customer needs and churn risk.

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5. Real-time Analytics and Reporting

Your customer retention software should provide real-time insights into customer behavior and reporting features. 

You should be able to track engagement and churn rates, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to improve your customer service and retention strategies and enhance customer satisfaction.

6. Integrations

Any customer retention tool worth its salt should support integrations. Integrations allow your retention software to connect with other business tools you may already be using. 

This creates a unified view of your customer data, so everything runs smoother and nothing falls through the cracks.

7. Customization and Scalability 

Customer retention management software shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, you should be able to tailor the solution to your specific needs.

It should also be able to grow with your business, so you're never stuck with a system that can't keep up.

Your Business and Customers Deserve the Best

Correctly applying customer retention software creates a win-win situation.

Customers derive more value from your business and are satisfied while you win their loyalty and grow your bottom line. What’s not to love? 

Check out some of the best customer retention software we’ve outlined, look out for their key features, including clear privacy statements, and build a business that keeps customers coming back for more.