8 Effective Tools for Streamlining Customer Lifecycle Management

Customer lifecycle management is tracking and guiding customers through different stages of the sales funnel using a set of metrics and tools.

Broadly, customer lifecycle management helps businesses track and guide their customers in the following four stages:

  1. Reach: When a prospect becomes aware of the business through targeted messaging.
  2. Acquisition: When a prospect becomes a lead and is nurtured with content/offers.
  3. Conversion: When a lead makes a purchase and becomes a customer.
  4. Retention: When a customer buys again and recommends your business to others.

Each stage consists of multiple processes and parameters you need to track to make the sales cycle efficient.

In this article, we’ll cover eight tools that will help you:

  • Manage the process in one or more stages that your customer goes through.
  • Track the relevant parameters to determine the effectiveness of each of those processes.
  • Identify areas of improvement for each of those processes and improve your ROI.
  • Streamline the process of customer lifecycle management.

Let’s dive in.

1. Prospero

There are four key challenges faced while managing proposals:

  • Lack of a consistent approach or process.
  • Access to the right information, verified by experts.
  • Improper resource management in terms of time and human resources.
  • Legally binding verification for both parties.

It is particularly challenging for freelancers, solopreneurs, and budding service-based businesses as they face all four challenges. According to a survey:

  • Only 43% of respondents have a proposal management system.
  • 90% of respondents accepted that content moderation in proposals is important.
  • Companies that use proposal management software are 32% more likely to achieve that.

How Prospero helps:

Prospero comes with ready-made templates that will help you create proposals that can be legally bound via digital signatures within minutes.

You can also track your proposals, send automated reminders to the client, collaborate through multiple channels, and more. Prospero even supports multiple signatures on a single document.

It streamlines customer lifecycle management by tracking your customers in the acquisition stage. Here, they know your business’s offer and terms of service.

Sign up and try Prospero now!

2. vcita

Customers are likelier to stick with a business and keep buying from it if they trust it. 

Research indicates that trust increases purchases by 81%!

Trust builds when businesses forge a personal relationship with their clients and add value to them in every interaction. To gain the trust of their clients to increase the customer lifecycle, businesses need to:

  1. Deliver value to their customers at every touchpoint, even before the sale.
  2. Treat each customer as an individual with unique needs, not like numbers on a screen.
  3. Interact with them as humans rather than sending them machine-generated messages.

To achieve the above three things, small businesses and solopreneurs face the following challenges:

  • Segmenting their prospects and customers based on relevant data to enable personalization and targeted messaging.
  • Keeping the conversation going, despite time limitations and without being too intrusive.
  • Reach clients through the channel they prefer and are comfortable with.

The above three challenges get compounded as CRM tools with the relevant functionalities could be hard on their budgets.

How vcita helps:

vcita offers a CRM tool that lets you segment your audience and send targeted messages to your prospects and clients through SMS and email. You get a variety of easy-to-customize templates you can use to build email drip campaigns in minutes.

See what’s happening with your client relationships at a glance, review transaction and appointment histories, and keep these records synced with your business analytics, service offers, and payment engine.

By helping you personalize your interactions with your clients using data, vcita streamlines customer lifecycle management for your small business.

3. Buffer

Digital marketers reveal that the top two goals they want to achieve through social media marketing are advertising and increasing brand awareness. The same report also states that marketers post on one social media channel 4-6 times weekly.

Posting content on various social media consistently means:

  • Creating content for each of the posts in the format that works best for that platform
  • Maintaining a posting schedule
  • Keeping an eye on analytics to modify your strategy if needed

It can be challenging to manage all of that, especially if you are a freelancer or a small team with limited resources.

How Buffer helps:

Buffer lets you schedule social media posts and generates engagement reports that will tell you how many people you are reaching and how your audience interacts with them.

This will give you information about where your target audience hangs out and what your existing customers like and want.

Buffer, along with the likes of HubSpot, is one of several SalesForce Marketing Cloud competitors and alternatives, and the fact that the focus is on social media campaigns indicates that there is still very much room for more specialized tools to engage customers, not just all-encompassing ones that do everything.

4. WotNot

A 2022 survey revealed the following about customer service:

  • 39% of customers have less patience as compared to before the pandemic.
  • 43% of customers believe that long hold times are frustrating.
  • 53% of customers have publicly shamed a company for poor customer service.

Poor customer service translates to a bad experience which leads to increased churn and lower retention rates. This means businesses have to provide satisfactory customer service quickly and 24/7.

Freelancers and small businesses will struggle to deliver the same due to limited hands on deck.

How WotNot helps:

With affordable chatbot pricing, WotNot helps you provide automated customer service 24/7 for every aspect of your business. You can create unlimited chatbots for various use cases through conditional triggers.

You can serve your clients in a language and channel of their choice and take over the conversation if you want. It keeps all conversations with your clients in one place, helping you manage the customer lifecycle’s reach, acquisition, and retention phases.

5. Poptin

A report released by NN/g suggests that the average visitor stays on a website for 10-20 seconds. This meant that businesses must relay their value propositions within 10-15 seconds if they want to keep them longer, also known as the 15-second rule.

It can be challenging to comprehensively share your proposition with your visitors within that time frame, especially if they got on your website through a blog post.

How Poptin helps:

Poptin lets you interact with your customers through smart pop ups, embedded forms, and auto-responding messages.

Through these features, you can instantly let your visitors know why they should sign up for a free trial or make a purchase.

Poptin helps you relay your message to your prospects quickly, streamlining your customer lifecycle management.

Sign up for Poptin for free!

6. Hashtag Loyalty

Research reveals the following:

  • A customer is 77% more likely to return to a brand if it has a good loyalty program.
  • 70% of customers will recommend a brand that has a loyalty program.

Having a loyalty program will have your customers returning and bringing in new customers without you spending anything. It involves collecting customers’ behavioral data and sending them targeted messages based on their past interactions with personalized offers.

Setting up a system that does that manually will be time-consuming, which freelancers and small teams find off-putting.

How Hashtag Loyalty helps:

Hashtag Loyalty offers an affordable solution for budding businesses and freelancers to build loyalty programs. It also generates reports that give you actionable insights to help you find and reward your most valuable customers and earn more.

It tracks the success rate and helps identify areas of improvement for the retention stage.

7. Hotjar

Here are some key statistics that will shed some light on the importance of customer feedback:

  • 77% read them before making a purchase in 2021 (up from 60% in 2020).
  • Only 67% will leave a review after a positive experience. That number reduces to 40% if the experience is negative.
  • Customers are prompted to ask for a review 83% of the time, but only 35% comply.

It is becoming more difficult for brands to understand how their customers feel regarding the service they received as customers who had a bad experience churn without giving feedback.

This makes it difficult for businesses to understand the needs and expectations of their customers. Consequently, steps taken to improve their services and/or the on-site experience are a shot in the dark.

How Hotjar helps:

Hotjar enables businesses to deploy survey and feedback forms on their websites to capture feedback in a non-invasive manner. These forms can also be sent via mail, and you can collect NPS scores, ratings, etc.

Hotjar also helps you track users and visitors on your site through website heatmaps. This will help you curate and deliver better web experiences. You can streamline customer lifecycle management by gaining tangible insights into how your customer browses your website and rates your services.

8. Tribe

According to research, branded communities reveal the following:

  • 68% say it earned them more leads.
  • 55% say it increases sales.
  • 66% say it impacts customer retention.

Branded communities have a tremendous impact on increasing the overall customer lifetime value. Budding brands, and even influencers, can get qualitative insights into their audience and customers by building a branded community.

The challenge is that these communities are like social media of their own and require constant moderation and monitoring for the best results. That often means hiring more managers and technical professionals and spending more resources.

How Tribe helps:

Tribe helps you build a customized community for your brand where your visitors, prospects, leads, and customers can have meaningful conversations about you.

Not only does it give you the benefits that we mentioned above, but also it gets them more value. This will help you easily track the various stages a customer goes through.

Summing up

Customer lifecycle management is crucial in measuring a business’s success rate as it tracks customers through reach, acquisition, conversion, and retention.

Through the tools listed above, you can track and guide your customers through each of those phases and find more areas of improvement for your business as a whole.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Create beautiful proposals with Prospero. Impress your clients and win more projects.