Patch News & Industry Insights

5 Best eCommerce Customer Retention Tools in 2022

Written by Amanda Short | Dec 20, 2022 9:02:23 PM

60% of customers don’t return after their first visit. Combined with the fact that existing customers, on average, spend 31% more than new customers, if you don’t work on customer retention, you’re leaving so much money on the table it hurts.

Seeing a massive increase in demand for robust customer retention software solutions, many companies entered the scene with their products—but only a few made a splash and can reliably move the needle for businesses.

Do you want to know their names?

In this article, we’ll rank and review the best eCommerce retention tools based on their features, pricing, customization options, and more.

What Are The Best eCommerce Customer Retention Tools?

TLDR: Here’s a quick rundown of our list of the best eCommerce customer retention tools:

Platform Price Range Pros Cons
Patch Free to access retention data and dashboards with useful insights. Paid plans based on the number of contacts and a full suite of retention and marketing tools. With advanced automation and customer retention tools, Patch covers everything from customer journey mapping to loyalty programs—all combined with the best rates on email and SMS! Patch is built for Shopify and may not be suitable for other platforms.
Growave Starting at $9/mo Growave lets you create fully customizable shoppable galleries using Instagram posts. The Reviews feature needs to be improved to compete with specialized Shopify apps.
Campaign Monitor Starting at $9/mo Get the most out of email marketing campaigns with Campain Monitor’s advanced automations, powerful analytics, and professional templates. The email editor could benefit from adding more customization options for a more professional and modern look.
Heap Starting at $3,600 per year This is one of the few analytics platforms that automatically track the entire customer journey across the web, iOS, and Android. Users have to go through a pretty steep learning curve to use the platform.
Braze Custom pricing Use real-time data to create flexible audience segments with Braze. Enterprise clients find reporting options to be limited.
MoEngage Custom pricing MoEngage offers a proprietary AI engine to accurately optimize your marketing efforts at scale. Customers report a lack of email marketing customization features.

1. Patch

Patch is a customer retention platform with features to help eCommerce stores keep their customers and maximize the value they provide over time. 

The platform is a one-stop shop for eCommerce brands looking to retain their customers, providing a wide range of tools.

From a fully customizable loyalty program and powerful automations to email marketing and SMS/MMS tools, reach your customers in multiple ways to maximize the impact of your campaigns.

With unparalleled hands-on support and comprehensive analytics, Patch is the most well-rounded platform on the list.

Top Features

  • RFM analysis: Dissect your customers based on their buying behavior to improve your targeting and boost your revenue.
  • Customizable loyalty programs: Give away rewards to your customers both for recurring purchases and interacting with your brand, be it joining an email list or opting in to text messaging, even engaging with your brand across social media platforms.
  • Automated customer journeys: Create campaigns and run them automatically. Patch maps out your customer journey to ensure that your email and SMS/MMS messages are delivered at the right time.
  • Conversational two-way texting: Amplify customer engagement by adding a personal touch to outreach campaigns via one-to-one texting.
  • Analytics and reporting: Patch managed to build a powerful analytics and reporting engine to provide data-driven insights for you to fine-tune your customer retention strategy.

Pricing

With Patch’s free 14-day trial, you can get a real pulse on where your business is losing customers with Patch’s advanced retention dashboards and insights.

Once you are ready to get on board, pricing is scaled based on the number of contacts in your database, at just 1 cent per contact. Patch Pro includes unlimited email sends and access to every tool on the platform. Additional rates are added for SMS and MMS campaigns.

2. Growave

Totango’s state-of-the-art software platform helps Shopify stores of all sizes optimize their customer engagement across every stage of the customer journey. From generating reviews to leveraging social media, they offer an end-to-end marketing solution for businesses to maximize the value of their customers.

Growave allows you to fully leverage the power of user-generated content (UGC) to turn your Instagram feeds into shoppable galleries that boost conversion rates. Users report that the reviews feature needs to be improved to compete with specialized Shopify apps such as Loox.

Top Features

  • Wishlist: This feature makes it easy for your visitors to create neat-looking wishlist boards without creating an account for you to reduce cart abandonment and improve your audience targeting strategy.
  • Instagram: Use Growave to create fully customizable shoppable galleries using Instagram posts.
  • One-click login: Streamline your customer registration flows to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to enter your marketing pipeline.

Pricing

The pricing plans start at $9/mo and scale up based on the number of orders processed by Growave.

Enterprise-grade features, such as Klaviyo integrations and API access, are unlocked with the plans starting at $99/mo.

3. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is a comprehensive marketing platform that empowers businesses to get the most out of their email marketing campaigns with advanced automations, analytics, and professional templates.

With data-driven segmentation and personalization tools, teams have a centralized, holistic view of their customers, journey, and desired outcomes. Users report that the email editor could benefit from adding more customization options to make the emails look more professional and modern.

Top Features

  • A user-friendly email marketing platform: With numerous templates and an easy-to-use interface, Campaign Monitor is a great option for companies making their first baby steps with email marketing.
  • Transactional emails: Take the customer experience you provide to the next level with transactional emails that cut through the clutter.
  • Personalization and segmentation: Use data insights to connect with your customer base on a deeper level and become their brand of choice.

Pricing

Campaign Monitor offers flexible pricing plans based on the number of contacts in your list.

  • Basic (starting at $9/mo) – This starter plan unlocks the core features of the platform, including branded templates, signup forms, and A/B testing tools.
  • Unlimited (starting at $29/mo) – This advanced pricing plan unlocks time zone sending, a countdown timer to drive a sense of urgency, and unlimited email sends.
  • Premier (starting at $149/mo) – This enterprise plan unlocks advanced segmentation and priority phone support to get help when you need it most.

4. Heap

Heap is an industry-leading digital insights suite that empowers organizations to dissect the customer journey and analyze behavioral data to make data-driven marketing decisions.

Heap is one of the few analytics platforms that automatically track the entire customer journey across the Web, iOS, and Android simultaneously.

The platform makes it possible to uncover hidden points of user friction to streamline your customer journey. However, as a powerful data analytics platform, users have to go through a pretty steep learning curve to get the most out of the platform.

Top Features

  • Heap Illuminate: This module analyzes conversion paths to unearth hidden, high-impact areas of improvement to streamline your user flow.
  • Customer data enrichment: Supplement your existing customer data with Heap to understand your customers better than ever before.
  • Data governance: Heap helps you clean the data you collect from multiple sources so that it’s clean and easy for everyone to use with naming conventions, a single point of access, and custom data governance workflows.

Pricing

Heap offers a free plan that allows you to process up to 10,000 sessions per month to test the waters and understand whether the platform is a good fit for your data needs.

The paid plans start at $3,600 per year for organizations serious about data-driven marketing.

5. Braze

Braze is a customer engagement platform that helps businesses win their mindshare and stay connected with their customers.

Companies can vertically integrate the platform to come up with effective ways to engage with their customers based on the data they collect.

The Braze lab modules help users get up and running in record time. Enterprise clients find reporting options to be limited.

Top Features

  • Global compliance: Braze takes compliance with data regulations extremely seriously with ISO 27001 certification, and regular SOC 2 Type II audits to ensure your data is protected.
  • Data ingestion: Braze offers a wide range of tools for companies to easily import data from various sources and act on it right away.
  • Dynamic segmentation: Use real-time data to create flexible audience segments that adapt as your customers’ behavior changes.

Pricing

Braze doesn’t reveal its pricing structure unless you reach out to them directly, but online reviews reveal that the price tag ranges between $40,000 and $220,000, depending on your unique business needs.

6. MoEngage

MoEngage is a customer engagement platform designed to help businesses win and retain more customers. This solution brings in customer data across multiple platforms to make sure you have the most accurate customer profiles.

MoEngage offers a proprietary AI engine to accurately optimize your marketing efforts at scale. However, customers report a lack of email marketing customization features.

Top Features

  • Affinity segments: Group your customers based on their interests, values, and personality type to deeply understand your audience.
  • Predictions: MoEngage leverages the power of AI to predict which customers are likely to convert or churn for you to maximize those LTV numbers.
  • MoEngage flows: Create custom-tailored, cross-channel customer flows to personalize every step of the way.

Pricing

MoEngage doesn’t make their pricing plans publicly available, so you need to engage with their sales representatives to get a custom quote.

Meet Your eCommerce Customer Retention Solution

As more and more companies realize the value of customer retention, the demand for specialized software solutions similar to those covered above will only increase over time.

While your competition keeps missing out on this opportunity to generate more revenue for their business, you can get an unfair advantage by implementing one of the solutions we covered in this article.

You can spend thousands of dollars trying them out. Or you can simply use Patch and start reaping the benefits right away. Sounds too good to be true? Get in touch with our team today to schedule a free demo.