Customer advocacy

Top 7 Retention Tools for eCommerce: How to simplify and improve your martech stack

By Rhys Williams — March 4, 2024 -

Read time: 4 minutes

Customer retention is a top priority for brands. To get retention right, you need to provide an outstanding customer experience with rich data and detailed customer profiles from your CRM, CDP and other parts of your martech stack.

So it’s not just about which individual tools you use, but how you get them working together to create a well-oiled, highly targeted marketing machine.

Retention shouldn’t be about throwing resources into special promotions and expensive marketing campaigns that aim to hold on to customers at all costs.

Rather, it’s about recognising and nurturing your most valuable customers. The best retention tools help you identify your best customers and turn them into loyal brand ambassadors. Mention Me does just that.

Our Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform binds your tech stack together, enabling more personalised and relevant marketing campaigns. It leverages first-party customer advocacy data to deliver a more sophisticated, data-driven approach to customer retention and advocacy.

1. CRM

As your CRM sits at the heart of your interactions with customers, it offers comprehensive customer insights. From your CRM, you can:

Create customer segments: Segmenting your customers into groups with common characteristics lets you tailor CRM campaigns to the needs of specific groups, meaning you can deploy more sophisticated offers and messaging to stop your customers from churning.
Layer in extra data: Other software can provide different types of first-party data. If you integrate this data with your CRM, you can create campaigns based on customer behaviour as well as purchasing history, so you can identify those customers who are in danger of lapsing and develop campaigns to keep them.

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2. Customer Advocacy Software

Understanding how loyal and engaged your customers are is a crucial first step toward reducing churn. Armed with this knowledge, you can focus your retention efforts in the right places.

Those highly engaged customers (who share your brand, refer friends and write 5 star reviews) are the ones who are most likely to stick around for the longest and bring the most value to your business. This is where you should target your marketing spend.

Creating and nurturing customer advocates and growing networks of referrals bakes loyalty and trust into your customer base, handing you an inbuilt advantage when it comes to retention.

A tool like Mention Me’s Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform not only acquires new customers through referrals but also provides first-party advocacy insights that can integrate across your martech stack. It allows you to deliver outstanding omnichannel experiences that keep your customers coming back for more.

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3. Marketing Automation

Automation lets you scale your campaigns and, if you’ve got your segmentation right, you’ll still keep that personal touch.

Combining automation tools with insights gained from advocacy data means your campaigns will feel more significant and meaningful for customers, creating a lasting impression that wins them to your brand.

If you integrate marketing automation tools like Emarsys and Klaviyo with Mention Me, you can:

Instantly send new referrals to your automation software, allowing you to immediately add them to marketing campaigns.
Send referral activity data in real-time so your customer’s wider behaviour can be fed into your segmentation strategy, refining it and making it more relevant.
Set up dedicated referral workflows and campaigns that nurture your advocates.
Enrich existing segments and campaigns or make bespoke segments and workflows

Mention Me has three pre-built workflows for Emarsys, allowing you to get up and running with the platform in a matter of minutes.

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4. Loyalty Programs

Software to manage loyalty programs can also play a key role in customer retention. Offering rewards and incentives can be a great way to keep customers coming back, but make sure you’re building genuine brand loyalty, rather than trapping your customers in a loyalty scheme with heavy discounting that harms your margins.

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5. Review Sites and Social Listening Platforms

Review platforms play a vital role in establishing credibility with customers. These sites also serve as effective channels for gauging customer sentiment, providing valuable insights into what you’re doing well and what you could do better to improve retention rates.

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6. Gifting Platforms

Gifting platforms help customer retention by fostering a sense of appreciation, strengthening the relationship between you and your customers. They offer personalised rewards and incentives, which not only enhance the customer experience but also encourage repeat business, nurturing brand loyalty in the long run.

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7. Customer Service

In addition to the insights that first-party data can provide, gleaning information straight from the horse’s mouth is vital. Customer service is an invaluable touchpoint for understanding how your customers feel towards your brand.

What’s more, having a fantastic customer service operation that’s able to quickly resolve issues provides a huge boost to your ability to retain customers.

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Build a Customer-First Retention Strategy

Customer retention isn’t simply about choosing the best tool for the job, it also involves stitching together an array of tools into a single martech stack that works for you and your customers. Collectively, these tools enable you to identify, nurture, and reap the benefits of loyal customer advocates who will boost your retention rates. Whether it's the comprehensive insights from your CRM, the power of a customer advocacy platform like Mention Me, or the personal touch added through gifting platforms, each piece of the puzzle plays a significant role in fortifying your relationship with your customers and fostering loyalty.

Our team at Mention Me is here to help you navigate the intricate world of retention tools, ensuring every penny of your marketing spend works harder. Ready to supercharge your eCommerce brand? Dive in and explore the endless possibilities of customer retention with Mention Me. Request a demo.