Careful selection of the best customer loyalty tools

By Nathalie Pouillard

Published: 26 October 2024

There are many ways of building customer loyalty, using a variety of channels to reach your target audience where they are most receptive to small gestures.

Whether we're talking about old methods that are still effective or new digital levers, their strategic nature is no longer in question, given that building customer loyalty costs less than acquiring new customers.

But what are these tools for managing customer relations effectively and sustainably? Answers and examples in this article.

See all software Customer relationship management

What is a loyalty tool? Definition

For a company, loyalty consists of creating and maintaining a lasting relationship with its customers. Loyalty tools are the means available to achieve this effectively.

👉 The aim is to maximise profits and brand image, while guaranteeing the company's long-term future and profitability.

Find out how your responsiveness to customers goes a long way to building their loyalty! Freshdesk and Appvizer have put together this free guide to help you:

What are the main loyalty-building tools?

Are you wondering how to build customer loyalty?

To implement your loyalty strategy, (re)discover the BtoB and/or BtoC loyalty tools (or loyalty levers) below

CRM

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the ultimate customer relationship management tool , particularly for tracking customer history and satisfaction. A CRM centralises all your customer information, such as :

contact details and profiles
purchase history and requests
payment methods
sales operations, etc.

Knowing and tracking this information allows you to :

segment your customer base
propose a customised customer path and personalised offers,
automate certain actions, such as sending email campaigns at key times, etc.

🛠 monday.com CRM, for example, offers you a comprehensive, intuitive and easy-to-use CRM solution with advanced loyalty features :

structure your customer data using personalised, visual records;
track the progress of your leads using real-time dashboards;
find customer information quickly thanks to the seamless integration of e-mails, etc.

Sales Cloud is Salesforce's CRM solution, ideal for managing your contacts. Among its many features focused on customer relations :

a global view of all your interactions with your customers, so you can get to know them better;
integration with your various social networks, so you canfind out what your customers think of your products and services;
a chat function, so you can talk directly to your customers and get valuable information about their needs.

🛠 Sellsy is a comprehensive CRM suite designed to manage your entire sales cycle, from prospecting to customer loyalty. Aimed at VSEs and SMEs, it incorporates a host of interesting features to satisfy your customers and optimise your NPS:

fine-tuned contact management, with enriched data to identify your customers' needs and keep a record of their dealings with the company;
marketing tools, to automate the sending of targeted campaigns to your segments (satisfaction surveys, for example);
dashboards and reports to monitor your performance, so you can improve your actions if necessary.

Omnichannel customer experience platforms (CDP)

If you want to offer your customers an unforgettable experience, but don't have the desire (or the budget) to multiply software, turn to the global platforms known by the sweet name of Customer Data Platform (CDP).

What is a CDP? We've got a full article detailing what it is, its benefits, how to use it and how to choose it! To understand the CDP, click here.

💡 What you need to remember, in a very simplified version: it's a comprehensive tool that centralises all your marketing and customer data, grinds it down, and comes out with customer profiles and personalised actions tailored to reach each target. With the help of your human intelligence, of course.

Bloomreach, for example, is the 1st 'sales experience' cloud that brings together all the functions you need to create a unique customer experience, in a single tool. It offers a fully personalised customer journey to promote customer engagement and relieve your teams of their work by :

leveraging your customers' data to create unique experiences across all your digital touchpoints (personalised email campaigns, web personalisation, etc.)
using artificial intelligence and predictive marketing to create quality content, focused on APIs (search intelligence, product recommendations, etc.)
creating reports, detailed statistics and dashboards to monitor your performance.

The newsletter or personalised email

Focus on personalised email

Emailing can be used for a number of purposes, such as to communicate a gift, a promotional code or an exclusive event, as mentioned above.

Personalised (and it's not just a question of putting the first name in the header, but of taking into account the customer's history and recent interactions with the company), it tells the customer that the company is interested in them, their needs, tastes and habits.

Whether it's a welcome email, an anniversary email, a satisfaction survey or an account reactivation email, any occasion is a good one to use your loyalty tools!

Here, Vert Baudet uses humour and a childlike tone to take the temperature and avoid unsubscribing from its newsletter, not without praising its merits.

Focus newsletter

For a company, a newsletter consists of sending a regular email to a list of recipients, also known as "subscribers". Most of the time, these emails are sent on a monthly basis. Their purpose is to inform readers about :

your company's activity and/or news,
your events
your commercial offers
discounts,

It also enables you to promote your content (new article, white paper, interview, etc.). The newsletter is therefore a real communication tool.

👉 According to the McKinsey Institute, it is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter in terms of customer acquisition.

👀 Subscribe to the Appvizer newsletter, at the very bottom of this page, to find out all our tips and the latest trends, and become more efficient in your day-to-day work!

The loyalty card or loyalty programme

The loyalty card is a loyalty tool that stems from the implementation of a loyalty programme. This consists of offering your customer members a range of exclusive services and benefits with the aim of building their loyalty and encouraging them to make purchases.

The system is simple: the more your customers buy, the more their loyalty points increase and the more gifts and rewards they receive. The loyalty card is therefore an optimal and effective way of tracking your customers' purchasing habits.

There are many advantages to a loyalty programme:

a personalised relationship
a smoother shopping experience
tailor-made sales recommendations to encourage purchasing decisions
improved brand image

After-sales service

When we talk about customer satisfaction, we sometimes talk about after-sales service, i.e. the way in which customer service handles complaints and settles disputes by taking account of customer feedback.

👉 High-quality after-sales service is therefore an underestimated driver of customer loyalty.

Catching up with an unhappy customer and taking care of them can help retain them, and even build loyalty.

💡Little post-purchase gestures are also appreciated, such as sending tips on how to use or care for the last product purchased.

Sponsorship

Here, the stakes are twofold: customer loyalty and customer acquisition ! The customer is asked to help find new customers for the company. The sponsor is then rewarded, and sometimes the sponsorees too.

🤓 It can't be said often enough, a satisfied customer is often a loyal one (and in any case becomes your best ambassador).

What are the new loyalty-building tools?

The multi-channel, or even phygital, approach

The customer experience is key to building loyalty. The buying process must be increasingly fluid: click and collect, web to store, these practices enable you to build loyalty with customers who like to combine the two worlds, physical and digital, according to their desires and needs.

Order online, try on in-store, and you've removed all the disincentives to purchase.

👉 If your main competitors have adopted it, go phygital before you lose your customers, who are increasingly volatile and demanding.

Federating and animating a community is essential to building loyalty.

Social networks are essential communication channels for conveying your brand image and paying attention to your customers, particularly when it comes to after-sales service.

You can collect their opinions, respond to them and showcase your ambassadors who speak out. It also encourages their commitment, the ultimate proof of their loyalty and attachment to your brand, and it's there for all to see!

It's also a good place to organise competitions, which are always very popular, and to publicise offers reserved for customers.

Self-care tools

On the web, customers like to be autonomous, but find the information they need easily. How can you keep them informed while ensuring that their digital customer journey runs smoothly? By integrating self-care tools! Set up :

a chatbot on your website
dynamic FAQs
tutorials, etc.

In short, give them answers quickly and offer them a quality of service so that they don't go elsewhere if it's easier. This loyalty tool is ideal for long-term committed customers.

👉 For example, with the BOTNATION.AI chatbot creation solution, you can install a virtual assistant on your website, Facebook page, Instagram or WhatsApp, to nurture the customer relationship right from the first contact with your brand.

You establish a close link with your customers and prospects, creating value while saving time for your customer service, and you design a unique and differentiating experience to engage your users.