How to navigate the sea of customer data tools

What do you need your tools to do?

You can start by asking yourself what job you need a tool to do now. Is it to drive more users to your site? Increase engagement or get your users to activate faster. There is already a clear list of jobs that need to be done by most startups called pirate metrics (AARRR)

Pirate metrics

Pirate metrics are an easy way to help you understand the parts of a customer lifecycle to be optimized by breaking them down. 

Acquisition: sending users to your site from different sources so they can sugn up

Activation: engage with your users early by making them interact with your key features 

Retention: persuading your users to come back and use your product often

Referral: use your customers loyal to your products to get more customers 

Revenue: get your users to convert into paying customers 

All of these areas have a matching tool you can use to boost that part of the funnel. We’ve given some examples of tools that can help with each stage of the cycle below:

Acquisition

Retargeting/advertsing: Google Adwords, Adroll, Twitter, Facebook. 

Conversion optimization: Taplytics, optimizely, VWO

Attribution: Branch, Adjust, Appsflyer

Activation 

Marketing automatiom: Braze, Marketo, Hubspot

Funnel analysis: Amplitude, Indicative, Mixpanel

Heat mapping: Hotjar, Fullstory, LuckyOrange, CrazyEgg

Retention

Marketing automation: Braze, Hubspot, Iterable

Push notification: Urban Airship, Kahuna, Outbound.io

Customer communication: Twilio, Drift, Intercom

NPS, surveys: Qualaroo, Delighted 

Customer success: Uservoice, Freshdesk, Gainsight

Referral 

Referral management: Extole, Talkable. Influitive

Revenue

Ecomerce analytics: Baremetrics 

CRM: Hubspot, Pipedrive 

Some tools appear in several growth stages like ‘marketing automation’ because they provide support for multiple growth functions.

While testing market fit you may be very focused on retention, asking yourself what keeps your users on your site, you need to use a combination of customer feedback and analytics tools. 

Using this framework, you should be able to work your way through ‘jobs to be done’ for your company and the the tools you need to achieve them remember to start small as you may not have all the resources or manpower to handle all the growth areas at the same time.

What you should do is use a few tools with multiple functions to achieve several goals as opposed to try using all the tools at once. 

Adding quantitative and qualitative data tools to your stack

If you need unstructured customer feedback like surveys, heat mapping then qualitative tools are what you need to enable you speak with your customers and understand how your customers use your products. You can use these tools during product development to explore which features customers want to see in your products. Qualitative data always comes in when there isn’t enough users to have a significant quantitative data.

Qualitative tools include:

Surveys/NPS: Promoter, Asknicely, Wootric, WebEngage, Quarloo, Delighted, Satismeter, Uservoice

LiveChat: Olark, Intercom, Userlike, LiveChat, SnapEngage

Heat Mapping: MouseFlow, MouseStats, FullStory, CrazyEgg, LuckyOrange

When you need hard facts on the way customers use your roducts so you can understand some high level trends for product usage qualitative tools are what you need to handle the heavy lifting involved in calculating funnels, cohorts and sums. The following tools can help you get an overview of your customer behavior 

Web analytics: Google analytics 

Behavioral ananlytics: Indicative, Amplitude, Mixpanel

A/B Testing: Visual Website Optimizer, Optimizely.

Some companies use a combination of several tools during product development. When you notice a funnel drop off using a quantitative tool, you can use a qualitative tool to figure out why users are not entering their credit card.

Finding the right tools for you.

Finding the right tools that suit your company’s needs can be a struggle but with the help of the framework we’ve given, you can get an idea of where to begin your search and what to search for. As long as you know what needs to be done to get your growing, finding the tools to get the job done will be quite easy to do.