You spend so much time every day building your business and interacting with your customer base which is vital to keep your business going. As we know, there is only so much time in the day and we are all looking for ways to save some time and increase our productivity to be more efficient.

Here are 5 tools that we have tested and reviewed for you if you are looking for a better mousetrap to help your business bring in new customers and turn them into loyal repeat customers.

1. Insightly

You gotta know your audience well right? We hear this all the time and read posts about how we should create customer personas etc. and get to know your customers inside and out. To help you with this, you need a good customer relationship management system (CRM). Insightly is that CRM you need.

With Insightly, you can quickly and easily consolidate all your customer information in one place so every member of your sales team, customer service operation and marketing department has the latest info on the people who are interested in your product.

Insightly also makes it easy to personalize communication with customers, an important signal for them that your business cares. Roughly 68 percent of customers leave a product or service because they don’t think that a business cares about them, according to LinkedIn. But by personalizing marketing communications and making it easy to see notes and details about the customer, Insightly helps you connect in a personal way with your customers.

2. Chatra

Most customers like to do a little research before making a purchase. Chatra helps you engage with customers during this research phase in the buying cycle through an innovative live chat experience, fostering a deeper connection and driving more sales.

There are lots of live chat options for your web site in 2018, but Chatra is a cut above the rest when it comes to customer relationship nurturing because it doesn’t feel like a typical live chat box for your site.

What Chatra does that helps so much with customer engagement is that it feels much more like a chat with a friend than a clunky way for a business to streamline customer service and try to push sales. Chatra uses an interface that will feel familiar to anyone who has used FaceBook Messenger or WhatsApp, and it offers some cool features like group chat (for bringing on others in your team when needed) and showing you what the customer is typing in real-time, not after they’ve hit the return button.

3. FreshLime

Businesses focus on acquiring new customers, and equally if not more important is nurturing those customers that are already buying from you. Did you know that acquiring a new customer costs 10x what it takes to keep a current one, according to Harvard Business Review, 2016.

In fact, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

FreshLime is a data marketing platform that helps businesses re-engage customers who have fallen off. The service works by giving businesses helpful insights about customers, including where customers are coming from, when they are buying, and when they should re-engage. The platform shifts the focus from getting new customers to retaining those you already have, making them into loyal repeat business. It does this with ai data-driven analysis that suggests what’s going on for a customer, how to re-engage, and on what platform is best.

4. GetResponse

There is roughly a 90-minute window to convert a website visitor into a paying customer, according to research by SeeWhy. GetResponse helps you act during that critical and narrow window of opportunity, interacting with customers before they forget about your company and jump off to a new site.

How does GetResponse work? During this critical window of time, it automatically generates a follow up email to visitors who sign up or buy something on your site. By putting this automation in place on your site, you can do a quick follow-up, lend some support or offer a suggestion for product use, or just engage with your new customer in a way that you want.

What sets this service apart? This isn’t a one-size-fits-all automated email response, either. You can build highly targeted micro campaigns that trigger based on customer data. So instead of a generic follow up email, you can show your customers that you care by getting highly targeted in what you send after that connection on your site.

5. Woobox

Speaking of customer surveys, every business should have a platform for collecting customer feedback. Customer feedback is not only a form of engagement, but it also helps you track the sentiment of customers and get valuable data on what’s working and what’s not. Woobox is a customer survey platform, but more.

What Woobox does is help you reward customer loyalty by simultaneously increasing engagement and tracking data. It does this by enabling your startup to create giveaways and promotional discounts in exchange for poll responses.

Don’t think that Woobox is only for “How’s My Driving?” type of surveys, either; it also is set up for photo, video and hashtag contests on social media. It helps you collect, curate and display user-generated content from Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and Pinterest, and display approved photos and videos in galleries and allows voting.

Hope this small list helps you move your business forward and grow.